Musical settings of Anne Hunter's poetry: From national song to canzonetta

Anne Hunter (1742-1821) seems to have appeared suddenly on the London scene when she provided Joseph Haydn with texts for his English songs published under the fashionable title of canzonettas. Yet long before Haydn arrived in London, she had already established herself as a writer of lyrics for the Scottish national song movement and of the famed "Death Song" of a Cherokee Indian set to "an original Indian air." Some believe that her poems provided a model for Robert Burns. Her lyrics were also set by Johann Peter Salomon and requested by the propagator and publisher of national song in the British Isles, George Thomson.