Three new songs/Sweet Sally Gray

For other versions of this work, see Sweet Sally Gray.

Sweet Sally Gray.

O David I’ll you a secret if you will keep it close in you breast
I would not for Eisdon parish, it came to the ears of the rest.
I lay you bet or a wager, a groat to your twopence I’ll lay,
You cannot guess who I’m in love, if you keep off sweet Sally Gray.

There’s many comes in to the nation, but few with my Sally can match,
There’s many comes to her a wooing, and O but it makes right vex’d.
For Sally sits spinning, and singing of her Jamie all the whole day,
And I myself keep by the hay stack, and fain would would see sweet Sally Gray.

She’s sixteen last ⟨Candlmas⟩ Monday, and I am the very same age,
And O for a kiss of my Sally, I’d freely give half a year’s wage.
When I look to the bonny black mountain, and o’er the hills far away,
There’s not such a place in the nation, for there lives sweet Sally Gray.

If you’d been at the kirk tha last Sunday, you would not have minded the text,
She sat beside Tam in the louing, and O but I was e’en right vex’d,
As they were a walking in the green meadow, I said here is a wet day,
I would have spoke, but how could I, when thinking of sweet Sally Gray.

I went down to Tom in the louing, to hear all his cracks and his jokes.
And there was a man telling fortunes, and I must be like other folks,
With chalk, and a pair of bellows, two letter s wrote in my way.
S stands for Sall all the world over, and nothing but G stands for Gray

You talk of your Glasgow lassies, in their targets and ribbons and lace,
Foul fa’ them for pale looking creatures, there’s nae a bit red in their face.
But Sally’s skin’s like alabaster, her cheeks like roses in May,
O man I could stand here for ever, talking about sweet Sally Gray.

Were I some great duke or rich lord, or some parliament of renown,
I would hire a coach and fix horses, and gallop the country all round:
But fortune has plac’d me much lower, which makes me with sorrow to say,
That I surely will die in despair, if I don't get sweet Sally Gray.