Open downloadable pdf file: Lamorna
Lamorna as sung by Oll an Gwella, 2017
The lyrics to Lamorna started life as a Broadside called “Down to Pomona”. Pomona was a nineteenth Century Zoological park in Manchester with a notoriously expensive admission fee intended to discourage working class people, thus the twist in the last verse. It is thought that it was provided with a tune and a Cornish twist in the early 1900s by Charles Lee a novelist specialising in stories about Cornwall. He stayed in small Cornish village communities for long periods when researching his books and was a recognised expert in Cornish dialect. Certainly it was a well-established part of the Cornish singing repertoire by the 1960s and the popular Cornish singer, Brenda Wootton, introduced it to a wider audience when she included it on a number of her albums. A Cornish version, translated by Ken George, was included in the Hengan project in 1983. The version given here is that sung by “Oll An Gwella” at teh Lowender Peran Celtic festival, November 2017 and has been transcribed into the Standard Written Form of Cornish.
See
Merv Davey, Hengan, (Redruth, Dyllansow Truran, , 1983)
Kanow Tavern, Cornish Pub Songs, An Daras Folk Arts Project, 2007
Hilary Coleman & Sally Burley, Shout Kernow: Celebrating Cornwall’s Pub Songs, (London, Francis Boutle, 2015)