Songfacts®:

• This is Ewan MacColl the songwriter at his very best. According to the 2001 publication The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook: Sixty Years Of Songmaking: "Cannily, Cannily" is "a lullaby in the Northumbrian dialect, this beguiling song is sometimes taken for a traditional piece". It was written in the 1950s and is copyright Workers' Music Association, 1960.
• Played with the carpo high up the fretboard, this arpeggiated miniature is in 6/4 time although it can also be rendered in 3/4 time.
• Although MacColl was born at Salford, Lancashire, and never lived in Northumbria, this is a song written from his usual working-class perspective rather than simply a dialect song, but devoid of the inherent nastiness that permeates so many of his political songs. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 3