Explaining old Scot's songs

Subject: Explaining old Scot's songs
From: P. Maxwell
Date: 02 Jun 99 - 02:29 PM

Subject: Explaining old Scot's songs
From: P. Maxwell
Date: 02 Jun 99 - 02:37 PM

Over the years, I have learned lots of the old Scottish songs, especially the one's reworked by Rabbie Burns. However, I can't seem to find any information on how some of the less well known songs came about - who the characters were; when were they first written etc. My personal favourite is one called "The Auld Man's Mares Dead" which was in James Johnson's "Scot's Musical Museum" but I have been unable to find out anything about it's origins.

Can anyone help me in finding a book or somewhere to find information. Thanks.

Subject: RE: Explaining old Scot's songs
From: GN
Date: 02 Jun 99 - 04:18 PM

Song and tune were credited to a Pattie Birnie in an elegy on the latter by Allan Ramsay, 1721, and song and tune have been put as early as 1660. Whether that title represented the song and tune now known by this title seems doubtfull to me, however. The tune is first found in Aird's 'Airs', II, 1782, and the song seems to be first found (without music) in 'The Scots Nightingale', 1779, where the song is attributed to a Mr. Watts (but one attribution in this work is off by about 1 1/2 centuries). Murray on Saltspring can probably add to, or, correct this.

Subject: RE: Explaining old Scot's songs
From: P Maxwell
Date: 03 Jun 99 - 02:00 PM

GM Thanks very much for the interesting information. I shall have to go and read up on all that you said now that I have something to start with. Can you tell me how you get to know all your information? Thanks a lot.

Subject: RE: Explaining old Scot's songs
From:
Date: 03 Jun 99 - 03:57 PM

John Glen's 'Early Scottish Melodies', 1900, for history of the tune and quote from Ramsay's elegy. 1779 song text I found in the book cited, and I haven't found it in any earlier Scots songbook, of which I've seen most. I see in James Dick's 'The Songs of Robert Burns' that Dick cites same earliest text and tune (p. 502), and long ago conncluded the song is not that of Pattie Birnie.

Subject: RE: Explaining old Scot's songs
From: harpgirl
Date: 03 Jun 99 - 10:29 PM

hi bruce...

Subject: RE: Explaining old Scot's songs
From: Murray on Saltspring
Date: 04 Jun 99 - 04:15 AM

GN is right: the 1660 date is from Stenhouse, who provided notes to the songs in the Scots Musical Museum, but has been damned by such musical historians as William Chappell (a notorious English patriot and debunker of Scots origins) as very often misguided, if not (at worst) positively fraudulent. That really means, he is not to be totally trusted for dates & whatnot. So the 1660 date is I think a mere guess. Patie Birnie, fiddler of Kinghorn (in my native shire of Fife) died in 1721 at the age of 86, so was born around 1635. When he wrote the song quoted by Ramsay can only be guessed at. What Ramsay says is:

Your honour's father, dead and gane,
For him he first wad make his mane,
But soon his face cou'd make ye fain,
When he did sough;
O wiltum wiltu, do't again?
And gran'd and leugh.

-- i.e. he could could do you a lament, but as easily sing a song to make you laugh. The song quoted has not been preserved, as far as I know; and this is probably because it was, as the title suggests, bawdy.

Ramsay continues:

This sang he made frae his ain head,
And eke, "The auld man's mare's dead--
The peats and turfs and a's to lead;"
O fy upon her!
A bonny auld thing this indeed,
An't like your honour.

This particular quotation is from the last verse as printed in the Museum.
--A portrait of PB was painted by William Aikman (1682-1731), probably about 1705-1710. It's been well described by Robert Chambers as expressing a combination of "cleverness, drollery, roguery and impudence", or, as Laing has it, "a face full of comic humour and indicative of genius" (Additional Illustrations to SMM, page *461). A small reproduction of it is in George S. Emmerson, "Rantin' Pipe and Tremblin' String" (1971), plate 15, which doesn't show the verse underneath [I've mislaid it, so can't quote it here). -- The minimal info in David Baptie's "Musical Scotland" (1894; repr. NY/Germany 1972) is based on Stenhouse & Laing. What else? Maybe Bruce O. can fill in here. Cheers Murray.