this is another note concerning this song which i got from amby thomas. it was amby (ambrose) himself who told me the song was to be sung to the air of "mo ruin geal dileas"......when he sang the song to me his version of the melody was close but not the usually sung melody. the man he learned it from (lauchie macneil) was a singer of gaelic songs and i suspect this melody variation is one of ambys creation, not having heard the song or sung the song for a few years before i came and asked him to sing it...... around the same time as i was recording songs with amby (1975-1977 APPROX.) I WAS ALSO VISITING MIKE AND MARY-ANN MACDoUGALL OF ingonish . i asked mike if he knew of the song and sang it to him as amby had sung it to me. mike said he had heard the song being sung but the melody was .....and then he sang me to standard version of mo ruin geal dileas melody, only without words, as he could not remember which gaelic song that melody was to. however !!! and this is where things get really exciting bouys and gulls!!!! i was listening to one of the recordings i made the evening we had this discussion and while mike was singing to me the melody to caledonia as he remembered it, mary-ann (mikes mother and traditional singer of great note) was singing along with him...i guess the stars were just alighned properly or maybe just my lucky night...the only line sung, the only words remembered, were........"and starving souls out on scatterie".....so here we have it..   just to backtrack a little now...when i first visited amby he sang the words starving staves....i did not understand what this was and after going home and transcribing the song i went back and asked him what the lyric meant...he said he didn't know and said he might have remembered it wrong and he wondered if i knew what it might be....i said no i didn't know and suggested (which i never should have done) that maybe it was something else that sounded like staves, like maybe slaves and he said well yes maybe that was what i was.....a few weeks later when i was visiting amby again he asked me if i could record the song again as he was sure that slaves was the right word. so we recorded the song again with the word slaves... i have ever since that day been quite sceptical about this word and feel that amby may have accepted this word because i had suggested it. i felt stave was the proper word for the song and when i sent the lyric to the publisher to be printed i am quite sue i sent stave, mainly because i remember my great disappointment when i got the finished product and there was slave......so as you can imagine i am totally shocked to find this mary-ann lyric version, and i truly hope someone appreciates this discovery as do i......thank you for your time and interest....have a nice day


this note is dedicated to the slaves, the staves and the souls of scatterie