Anne Briggs / Sing a Song for You / 1996
Hills of Greenmor
buoyant and communal, turning elegiac, then wryly resigned
This is a traditional hunting ballad told from the perspective of a coursing party chasing a hare across the Northumbrian hills, with an unexpected turn near the end when the hare herself is given a voice to mourn her own death. The song moves from brisk communal excitement to a moment of pathos before settling back into a wry, almost accusatory coda naming the man responsible.
blood sport and pastoral ritual the hunted given voice community and masculine camaraderie mortality framed as everyday custom implicit critique of cruelty
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator who takes part in the hunt speaks for most of the song, but the point of view briefly shifts to the hare herself before returning to the hunters' voice; the narrator seems sympathetic to the hunt yet recounts the hare's death with unusual tenderness, suggesting a speaker who is complicit but not entirely unmoved.
What happens
The song opens with the ritual assembly of hunters and dogs on a winter morning, moves into the chase itself across hills and valleys, arrives at the hare's death in a stubble field, gives the hare a final lament addressed to the land she's leaving, and closes by naming the man who organizes these hunts, implying this is a recurring, almost routine cruelty.
How it's built
The song follows a straightforward ballad structure of four-line stanzas with simple end rhyme, typical of traditional hunting songs meant for communal singing. The pace mirrors the chase: the early verses pile up action and movement, the hare's death is marked by a shift into direct speech, and the final verse steps back to a more detached, moralizing tone, naming names rather than continuing the chase imagery.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song establishes the ritual, almost festive nature of the coursing party: horns, dogs, and townsmen gathering on a winter morning. The tone is unreflective and communal, setting up the hunt as ordinary sport rather than anything requiring justification.'
The chase
“dogs black and yeller”
The description of the chase emphasizes motion, color, and spectacle. The specific naming of dog breeds and colors roots the scene in close observation, the kind of detail that suggests the song comes from people who actually took part in or watched such hunts regularly.
The hare's death
The hare's final run is described with unexpected tenderness, her death noted almost in passing before the song immediately pivots to let her speak. This structural choice withholds the gory, immediate reality of the kill and instead redirects attention to loss and voice.
The hare's lament
“I'll go back to me den”
The hare's closing words don't protest or condemn; they simply register what she will no longer do, listing the hills, the games, and the horn she will never hear again. The restraint of this list, rather than any dramatic accusation, makes the loss feel plain and final.
Closing verse
The song ends by naming a specific man as the instigator of these hunts and noting that he does it habitually, every weekend. This final move reframes the whole song retrospectively: what seemed communal sport is now pinned on one persistent actor, suggesting a quieter critique beneath the surface celebration.
Craft
- personification
- Giving the hare a final spoken lament is the song's central device, converting an animal killed in sport into a sympathetic subject who articulates loss of home and freedom in human terms.
- ballad refrain of place-names
- Repeated invocation of the hills of Greenmore and Kielder anchors the song in a specific, lived landscape, grounding the hunt in local geography rather than abstraction.
- dramatic irony
- The hunters' excitement and the celebratory tone of the chase verses contrast with the knowledge, confirmed later, that the pursuit ends in death, lending the earlier cheerfulness a darker retrospective shading.
- direct address within reported speech
- The hare's dying words speak directly to the horn and the hills, as though addressing her killers and her home simultaneously, intensifying the pathos of the moment.
Reading it
On its surface this is a traditional coursing song celebrating the thrill of the chase, common across British and Irish folk repertoire. But the choice to let the hare speak, and to end by naming the hunt's chief organizer rather than celebrating the kill, suggests the song carries an undercurrent of unease about the sport it describes -- whether that's a deliberate critique embedded by whoever shaped this version, or simply the ballad tradition's habit of extending sympathy to hunted creatures as a stock device. A listener could take it purely as sporting nostalgia, or as a sly comment on cruelty dressed up as tradition; the text supports both readings without clearly resolving them.
Context
This is a traditional song (sometimes catalogued as 'Hares on the Mountain' variants or regional hare-coursing ballads tied to Kielder and Greenmore in Northumberland) rather than an original Anne Briggs composition. Briggs was known for drawing on and transforming traditional source material rather than writing originals, and her singing style -- unaccompanied or sparsely backed, direct and unornamented -- tends to foreground the lyric's narrative and emotional shifts rather than smoothing them into pure entertainment. I don't have reliable specific information about this particular recording's session history or Briggs's own stated intentions behind including it on this album.
Listen for
- the shift in vocal address when the hare's lament begins
- how the pacing of the chase verses contrasts with the stillness of the death scene
- the plainness of the final verse's accusation, delivered without musical escalation
- whether the melody treats the hare's lament differently from the surrounding hunting verses
About Anne Briggs
Anne Patricia Briggs is an English folk singer. Although she travelled widely in the 1960s and early 1970s, appearing at folk clubs and venues in Britain and Ireland, she never aspired to commercial success or to achieve widespread public acknowledgment of her music.
b. 1944 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue