Scarborough Fair

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Remember me to the one who lives there,
She once was a true love of mine.

Tell him the love that i have still burns,
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
And that the heart in silence still yearns
She once was a true love of mine.

Are you going to Scarborough fair?
Are you going to scarborough fair?


Lyrics submitted by blueraspberry

Scarborough Fair Lyrics as written by Carly Simon

Lyrics © EMI Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.

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Scarborough Fair song meanings
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    General Comment

    "Scarborough Fair" was a traditional English fair, and is a traditional English ballad.

    The song tells the tale of a young man, who tells the listener to ask his former lover to perform for him a series of impossible tasks, such as making him a shirt without a seam and then washing it in a dry well, adding that if she completes these tasks he will take her back. Often the song is sung as a duet, with the woman then giving her lover a series of equally impossible tasks, promising to give him his seamless shirt once he has finished.

    As the versions of the ballad known under the title "Scarborough Fair" are usually limited to the exchange of these impossible tasks, many suggestions concerning the plot have been proposed, including the hypothesis that it is a song about the Plague. The lyrics of "Scarborough Fair" appear to have something in common from an obscure Scottish ballad, The Elfin Knight (Child Ballad #2),[1] which has been traced at least as far back as 1670 and may well be earlier. In this ballad, an elf threatens to abduct a young woman to be his lover unless she can perform an impossible task ("For thou must shape a sark to me / Without any cut or heme, quoth he"); she responds with a list of tasks that he must first perform ("I have an aiker of good ley-land / Which lyeth low by yon sea-strand").

    The melody is very typical of the middle English period.

    p2000on February 20, 2011   Link

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