I couldn’t find a nice anniversary for yesterday, but I certainly have one for today, 28th December.
Journo, music critic, and Scottish song compiler George Farquhar Graham (1789-1867) was the editor of John Muir Wood’s long-lived song collection, Songs of Scotland, first published in 1848. As such, he featured heavily in my Our Ancient National Airs. But the book enjoyed an afterlife as one of Bayley and Ferguson’s handsome reprints – The Popular Songs and Melodies of Scotland – thus getting a mention in A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity, too.
Where’s all this going? Well, today is Graham’s 236th birthday – ‘Many happy returns, Sir!’
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 