The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #174511   Message #4231831
Posted By: GUEST,Jim McLean
21-Nov-25 - 03:08 AM
Thread Name: Silver Tassie original melody
Subject: RE: Silver Tassie original melody
Thanks, Mick, I have Dick’s books. Archie Anderson is 1979, I spoke with Sheena Wellington who told me she got the tune from her dad although it’s note for note of the tune printed in MacColl’s collection of 1953.
I have emailedMark-Anthony Turnage who’s listed as Composer for the opera Silver Tassie commissioned by the ENO. He uses MacColl’s version. I don’t think MacColl composed the tune as I found a field recording of a Scottish East cost singer George Inglis Fraser in 1959. He was born in the late 1880s, died 1965, so I think he would have been too old to have learned it from MacColl’s book. Either Sean O’Casey wrote it himself or it’s a corrupt version shaped by oral transmission. Either way it’s not Burns’ intended melody.