The idea that Cape Breton music is some sort of purely oral survival from 1800 is flatly refuted by what happened to poor Simon Fraser. Having pumped most of his assets into a print run of his collection of Highland music, he shipped it to Canada to sell to the immigrants of Cape Breton - only to find he'd been beaten to it by a plagiarized edition that sold in such numbers nobody wanted the original. Something like 2000 copies.

With that many copies in circulation of a fairly complicated and obscure book, there must have been far more of el-cheapo productions like Aird (or else people simply wouldn't have had the background to read Fraser's notation). So many that there is *no way* any Cape Breton fiddler could have had a repertoire that was not significantly affected by print - original books, manuscript notebooks derived from books, or tunes learned second-hand from somebody who got them off paper. Remember that this was the most productive period of tune composition in Scotland's history - thousands of *new* tunes were emerging, and the way they were getting into circulation was on paper.

Kate Dunlay and David Greenberg's book traces the origin of most of the tunes they found in the Cape Breton repertoire. They had mostly been modified to fit the local idiom, but they had been modified from identifiable versions in Scottish print sources.

Today we think of reading music as some sort of advanced accomplishment compared with reading text. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there were people writing or copying music manuscripts reasonably well who could barely write their own names and never spelt a tune title the same way twice. It wasn't an elite skill.