Origin: Scotland the Brave

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: Lighter
Date: 15 Sep 15 - 07:16 PM

Relevant?

Concert Program, Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (Feb. 15, 1826) [from database Nineteenth Century Collections Online]:

"Part III, A GRAND MISCELLANEOUS ACT To commence with the celebrated overture to ZAUBERFLOTE. - (Mozart)

"Song, Miss PATON - 'Bonny brave Scotland.'"

The bill for May 13, 1826, elaborates the description of Miss Paton's number to "Scotch Song...'Bonny brave Scotland.'"

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: GUEST
Date: 15 Sep 15 - 07:42 PM

Lighter There is a 19th century print of 'Bonny Brave Scotland' lyric here.   Ballads on line.

http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/static/images/sheets/25000/22960.gif

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Sep 15 - 02:53 PM

I've got a temporary subscription to Find My Past. It has the newspaper index and pages.   I have found a reference to "Scotland the Brave" AS THE FORMAL TITLE of Hyslop's 'song'. ... "Following stirring and patriotic song".   It then has Hyslop's words claimed to be a fresh work under the STB name - when the were in fact published decades earlier in 1821 by the Scots magazine under the completely different title.   This is in the Dumfries and Galloway Standard of 9th November 1859.

From the early 1860's - 1880's (before the known printed editions) there are then numerous entries for a music theater song of the name 'Scotland The Brave', and a military band tune which is stated to be a march - and associated with a number of regiments.

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: Lighter
Date: 16 Sep 15 - 05:09 PM

Very interesting. Elsewhere I read that "Bonny Brave Scotland" was sung to the outstanding tune by Niel Gow to which James Hogg set the words of "Cam Ye by Athol?"

The melody is called "Lady Ann Carnegie's Favorite" :

http://abcnotation.com/tunePage?a=tunearch.org/wiki/Lady_Ann_Carnegie%27s_Favorite.no-ext/0001

So there's no real relationship to "Scotland the Brave."

The early mentions of the tune "Scotland the Brave" all relate to military bands as far back as the 1860s. The composition of the melody may well have been inspired by the words of Hyslop's poem and by Haliday's "O'Donnell Abu."

If it was composed in the 1860s by a regimental bandmaster (say, in the 92d Gordon Highlanders, Charles R. Martin's regiment) it might well have escaped notice in print for many years and its composer might have remained anonymous.

And the song performed by Miss Hunter in the '70s may plausibly be explained as Hyslop's words wedded to an arrangement of the same march.

Without a manuscript notation of the 1870s or earlier (preferably with the date and the name of the composer), the details of the origin of "Scotland the Brave" - beyond its apparent inspiration in the words of Hyslop's "Scottish National Melody" are likely to remain permanently elusive.

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: Lighter
Date: 16 Sep 15 - 05:21 PM

Guest, our posts crossed. Congratulations on your investment and your crucial 1859 discovery, as well as further references.

It would be perverse to doubt that the stage song "STB" was based on Hyslop's lyric and sung to more or less the modern marching tune.

The evidence reinforces my suggestion that the tune appeared in the '60s - though 1859 is just as likely. (It could be earlier, of course, but the evidence seems not to be there.)

Now who was the genius behind the tune?

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: Jack Campin
Date: 16 Sep 15 - 06:31 PM

Hyslop's words are a very bad fit to the modern StB tune. If somebody was trying to write a new tune for them (why? they're crap) they'd have used a different metrical scheme.

Hanley described how he came to write StB and the occasion of its first performance, but I don't recall him saying anything at all about the tune.

The earliest copy of a tune called Scotland the Brave for the pipes that I can find in Pekaar's index was from:

Piping For Boys, J. Percy Sturrock; Stirling: Eneas Mackay, 43 Murray Place; 1909 (Cannon 340)

which would have been the source for the Boys Brigade manuscript I read in the NLS. Pekaar doesn't do dates very well, though.

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Sep 15 - 06:48 PM

Lighter, you and I are the only ones enjoying the challenge!   My last contribution. We know that it was also called 'Brave Scotland' and is in the Gesto collection 1891-5.

I have also found that in 1891-2 'Brave Scotland March' was published in Book 4, 3rd edition of Captain S. Fraser's collection put out in Inverness. So does this mean it appeared in an earlier edition - or was it added then?

The 1859 use of the title 'Scotland the Brave' on the front page of the newspaper, is the first time the phrase appears as a title in a musical context in any British Newspaper (so far scanned). This could though be any tune called 'Scotland the Brave' as annoyingly we have no full proof. We do know that there is a military march of that name. That's probably as far as we can go!

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: Jack Campin
Date: 16 Sep 15 - 07:11 PM

Captain Simon Fraser died in 1852, and as far as I know the only edition of his collection that he had anything to do with was published in 1816 (it bankrupted him). Anybody republishing it in the 1890s with their own additions would not have been referring to any older source for the new stuff. They probably just got it from Keith Norman Macdonald.

"Brave Scotland" is in F in the Gesto Collection. It's in C a bit later in two of Logan's collections (Highland Music and the Inverness Collection). The key variation suggests it didn't come from the pipe band repertoire - if it had, it would have stayed in A/D within the 9-notes-from-G, 2-sharps scale. The pipe tunes recycled for the fiddle by Kerr and Mozart Allan, or the known ones recycled by Logan himself, weren't messed around like that.

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Sep 15 - 08:02 PM

Sorry Jack I thought you were Lighter!!! That's fantastic research.   It's you and Lighter who have done all this work and disprove some of the stuff that's floating on the Internet.   In the advert It has Inverness Collection and a long spiel below the Captain S. Fraser and doesn't split the two it's all on one advert. Maybe I'm mixing The Inverness Collection books with Fraser's? Is it in various parts? The advert is a bit confusing and runs together. I have the 1878 edition of the Fraser book (free PDF) and the 1816 one (free PDF) and it's not in either. I'll check the ad. again. The 1859 newspaper printing is definite for the Hyslop 'Scotland the Brave' and the first newspaper mention of the title (so far) - but we'll never know the tune!

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Sep 15 - 08:11 PM

JUST CHECKED AND THE ADVERT MADE ME MAKE A MISTAKE. IT IS IN THE INVERNESS COLLECTION, NOT SIMON FRASER'S THE PUBLISHERS DIDN'T SPLIT THE ADVERTHEADING VERY WELL.

SO CAPTAIN S. FRASERS COLLECTION DOES NOT INCLUDE BRAVE SCOTLAND MARCH. It's in the INVERNESS COLLECTION BOOK 4 3rd Edition.

If only we could upload images life would be much easier!   Thanks for helping me unravel this mystery a bit Jack, and Lighter.

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: Lighter
Date: 17 Sep 15 - 02:23 PM

Sung slowly and dramatically enough, I think Hyslop's words do scan the melody reasonably well - at least as well as they do "Roderick Vich McAlpine" - assuming Hyslop was thinking of Sanderson's "Hail to the Chief."

While Guest is right that we don't know for sure what words or melody was used for "Scotland the Brave" on the stage, his discovery of an 1859 newspaper printing of "Scottish National Melody" under the new title of "Scotland the Brave" - added to the fact that the apparently new melody fits the words well enough (especially the internal rhymes that are emphasized by the high part of the tune)- makes it far more likely than not that Hyslop's lyrics were sung to a recognizable version of the familiar tune. Otherwise we'd have to conjecture additional tunes and perhaps additional lyrics, even though there's no evidence they existed.

To push the analysis just a little further: the "STB" march may be a military adaptation of a more leisurely melodic style. Think of various pop songs played by marching bands today.

Jack's observation about the key change from Logan to Macdonald is valuable. The two editors seem to have learned the tune independently. Hence the disparate titles of "Brave Scotland" and "Scotland for Ever." (The latter phrase, of course, is also in Hyslop's song. It is said to have been the battle-cry of the Scots Greys at Waterloo in 1815.)

It is significant that Macdonald specifically calls it a "trumpet march" rather than a pipe march.

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Aug 21 - 07:08 PM

nicked from the older O'Donnell Abú

like a lot of things a$$umed scottish
Kilt tartan - invention of Germanic so called royals - not long after dividing and slaughtering real Scots at Culloden.

Whiskey recorded much earlier & invented in Ireland.

Pipes as above though perhaps invention is of the world, but oldest pipes found are in ireland!

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: Megan L
Date: 17 Aug 21 - 04:21 AM

Guest at least try to get facts correct Many who fought in the British army at Culloden were lowland Scots. There were reasons for the hatred Glasgow had to petition the King to recompense the tradesmen of the city who were forced to make shoes coats and other items for the rebel army amid threats.

quote from Electric Scotland since I am away from my books
"Prince Charles Edward Stewart reviewed the Jacobite army at Glasgow Green. The city of Glasgow was coerced into supplying the Jacobites with goods including twelve thousand shirts, six thousand coats and six thousand pairs of hose."

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: GUEST
Date: 17 Aug 21 - 07:07 AM

Let's all have a go now at what the Irish have nicked & claimed as theirs over the years

Subject: RE: Origin: Scotland the Brave
From: Allan Conn
Date: 17 Aug 21 - 12:14 PM

It was not only Lowland Scots who fought on the gvt side. Many Highland Scots did too. It was the last kick of civil conflict that had been going on in Scotland since the late 1630s.