This is a series of posts about the #TradSongTues project, run by various people at the University of Sheffield. Every week I've been recording a song for the theme, sharing it and talking about it. Come and play on Twitter!

For this, I went with The Grinder's Hardship.

I went with The Hare's Lament:

I was originally going to do the Innocent Hare, which I learned from the Young Tradition but then thought that just using them would be cheating. I learned this from John Doyle and Liz Carroll's fantastic album Double Play (which I'd recommend without hesitation to anyone with a passing interest in Irish Music). I tried to work out John's guitar part for it but gave up because he does it in a tuning that's too similar to what I usually work in so I kept making mistakes.

I don't know anything about it, Mainly Norfolk suggests it was published in a selection of Ulster folk songs and that's where Carthy got it and sang it. No idea about John's version. I like it a lot, primarily because it's a really strange take on hunting. It cries out at the injustice of killing a hare, but then says "But go ahead and kill foxes". Is it just a weird bit of progressive (for the time) writing?