Here’s the video of The Bonny Pit Laddie, a song/tune from Northumbria, printed in the 1882 Northumbrian Minstrelsy, with earlier versions printed elsewhere in 1812 and 1770.
Click here for the dots in PDF form.
In the version I know, each line is sung twice, meaning that you’ll get through the tune twice, but in others I’ve found the second and fourth lines are follow one another making up one B section:
The bonnie pit laddie, the canny pit laddie, the bonnie pit laddie for me, oh (x 2)
He sits in a hole as black as the coal and brings the bright silver for me, oh (x 2)
The bonnie pit laddie, the canny pit laddie, the bonnie pit laddie for me, oh (x 2)
He sits on his cracket & hews in his jacket & brings the bright silver for me, oh (x 2)
The pit in question would have been a coal mine, and the ‘bright silver’ refers to money earned. For those of you in education, or for anyone who wants to know more about mining songs, there is a great digital info pack available from the EFDSS website here.