‘Repugnant to Modern Feelings of Propriety’? The Most Beautiful Scottish Song

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’ve started listening to another Audible book, but it’ll take a while for me to finish it. To take a break from listening, I sidled over to the piano and played a one-eyed rendition of my favourite song.

Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament (Baloo, my Boy)

My Song Gems (Scots), edited by James Wood and Learmont Drysdale (London: Vincent Music Co., 1908), is a nice big score that sits comfortably on the piano stand. This song is arranged by Finlay Dun, a Victorian arranger. As I squinted at the words, they didn’t look like what I remembered hearing sung from Cedric Thorpe Davie and George McVicar’s The Oxford Scottish Song Book (1969). What was going on? I suspected Davie and McVicar had taken their words from George Farquhar Graham and James Wood’s mid-Victorian Songs of Scotland. ‘You’ll see’, I told my bemused son. ‘The words will have been too smutty for Victorian ears, so Graham and Wood changed them.’

Davie used their words – which were perfectly acceptable for a collection intended both for classroom and adult use – but his musical setting is updated.

A Deserted Mother and Child

Graham and Wood’s collection revealed in the footnotes that it was an old ballad collected by Bishop Percy. However, Graham said that …

The Old Ballad, though poetically meritorious, is so coarse in most of its stanzas as to be repugnant to modern feelings of propriety. We have, therefore, adopted only the first stanza of it, the additional stanzas here given having been written by a friend of the Publisher.

Songs of Scotland (Edinburgh: Wood & Co., 1850), Vol.2, pp.30-31

Percy’s original version is in the National Library of Scotland’s Digital Gallery (Reliques of Ancient Poetry, 1767). Today, the lyrics are inoffensive!

And here’s the Cedric Thorpe Davie setting using Graham and Wood’s sanitized words:-

Kathleen McKellar Ferguson sings the Oxford Scottish Song Book version, divinely, here on YouTube

The Song Gems (Scots) version is in modern English and the text has been partially rewritten again –  it falls halfway between the original and the sanitized words! And the musical arrangement? Straight from Graham and Wood’s collection.

Percy, verse 3: Smile not as thy father did, to cozen maids, nay God forbid / Bot yett I feire, thou wilt gae neire Thy fatheris hart, and face to beire.

Wood and Drysdale, verse 2: Smile not as thy father did, to cozen maids, may God forbid / For in thine eye his look I see, The tempting look that ruin’d me …

Olde English or modern, take your pick!

As for Graham and Wood, or Thorpe and McVicar? Not a ruinous smile to be be seen! The lady may have been deserted, but no hint that she had first been seduced!

At last, I’ve seen it! In Waltz Time …

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

One of my favourite Mozart Allan songbooks has an intriguing history. I have contributed a chapter discussing it, in a print and tourism collection, and I’ve dealt with it in slightly less depth in my own monograph. (Neither is published yet, but hopefully the essay collection will appear later this year.)

The songbook has a photo of a Glasgow entertainer, and the words (so I thought) of his recent song – but not the music. That, it says, is available from Mozart Allan. I have been itching to see this entertainer’s song, but it entailed a trip to the National Library of Scotland.

Today – at last! – I saw it. Two sides of music, that’s all. The words in the song-sheet are more extensive than what appeared in the songbook. It’s just a typical music-hall waltz, but I’ll tell you something …

They encapsulate much of what I’ve been writing about, so I’m ecstatic to have seen it. I’m not able to share the images (though I think this snippet is probably ok!) – but I’ll certainly be talking about it when I give one of my guest lectures at St Andrews!

Again and again, I sit down to write about music, and end up going into hyperfocus about words. It must just be the way my mind works!