Folk Songs

50 folk nursery rhymes and traditional songs for children — ballads, sea shanties, Irish and Scottish airs, recorded with live acoustic instruments.

50 songs

About This Collection

The folk tradition is at the heart of the Nursery Rhymes Collections. Many of the songs recorded over those five years at Comfy Towers Studios have their roots in the British, Irish, and Scottish folk traditions — songs that were carried from generation to generation long before they were ever written down.

This collection gathers fifty songs in folk arrangements: ballads, sea shanties, Scottish and Irish airs, country songs, and work songs that still carry the feeling of the world they came from. "Skye Boat Song" conjures the winds off the Western Isles. "Oh Danny Boy" is as heartfelt as it was when Harold Weatherly wrote it in 1910. "Waltzing Matilda" takes you to the Australian outback; "A Windmill in Old Amsterdam" to a gentler, more distant age.

The arrangements here favour acoustic instruments — fiddle, acoustic guitar, mandolin, flute — and the kind of warm, natural sound that suits songs which have always belonged to ordinary people rather than concert halls. Folk music at its finest does not need dressing up. These recordings let the songs speak for themselves.