Delkiow Sivy

rdf:langString Delkiow Sivy

rdf:langString Delkiow Sivy ("Strawberry Leaves" in Cornish (Kernewek)) is a Cornish folk song. A young maiden is on her way to pick strawberry leaves which, so the song alleges, make young girls pretty. She meets a travelling tailor, who seeks to seduce her. "Who will clothe the child?" asks the young man. "Ah, but his father will be a tailor," the maiden concludes. The repeated refrain "fair face and yellow hair" probably alludes to the traditional view of female beauty. The original 'Late' Cornish version of "Delyow Syvy" can be found in both Inglis Gundry's 1966 Canow Kernow: Songs and Dances from Cornwall and in Peter Kennedy's 1997 Folksongs of Britain and Ireland. It has been suggested that the song is a Cornish version of the song "Sweet Nightingale". In her 2011 book Celtic Myth and Religion, Paice MacLeod claims that there are no surviving traditional Cornish songs and that the song was borrowed from England and sung in Cornish. A Kernewek Kemmyn version titled "Delyo Syvy" appears, however, on the 1975 Sentinel Records album Starry-Gazey Pie, by Cornish folk singer Brenda Wootton, with accompaniment by Robert Bartlett. The sleeve notes claim that the song is "the only living remnant" of the Cornish language and that it "has never been translated into English".