Twa Recruiting Sergeants "Dà sàirdseant fhastadh" Scottish-British folklore (SLOWED & REVERBED)

The enlistment in the British armies was voluntary, so in the 1700s and up to the mid 1800s, the recruiting sergeants with a drummer boy often went around the britain countryside. They were able at convincing the already a little tipsy youngsters who were in the inns, to take the infamous “King’s Shilling“.
They took advantage of the disadvantaged, the evicted sharecroppers and reduced to work as daily laborers, those who were without a job and who saw in recruitment the alternative not to starve. The most naive succumbed by the charm of adventure or simply they were too drunk to think clearly!
“Twa recruitin ‘sergeants” is a song coming from Scottish tradiction and is almost a historical document of life in the bothy farms about some poor young boys and their miserable life. The origin of the song dates back to 1700 and was popular again in the 1960s with Jeannie Robertson’s version.
A.L. Lloyd pointed out that Farquhar’s play, ‘The Recruiting Officer’ (1706) helped popularise ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’. The song was often sung during the Napoleonic Wars. It ‘survived for two and a half centuries among folk singers, dwindling all the time, till it seemed to be limited to the Scottish north-east’. Then a variant came back into ‘vigorous circulation in English cities under the title “Two Recruiting Sergeants from the Black Watch” (da Mudcat qui)