The Keel Row

A keel was a flat bottomed boat that carried coal down the Tyne and the Wear to the colliers waiting at the river mouths. Newcastle antiquarians claimed the song for Northumberland, pointing to a local manuscript of 1774 and to Joseph Ritson's Northumberland Garland of 1793, but Frank Kidson found the tune already printed in Edinburgh around 1770.

In Scotland it carried a Jacobite song, and in the 19th century it was called the best known of all Northumbrian songs. Fiddlers play it as a reel, a polka and a march.