Volume III, song 201, page 209 - 'Tune your Fiddles, &c' -...
Volume III, song 201, page 209 - 'Tune your Fiddles, &c' - Scanned from the 1853 edition of the 'Scots Musical Museum', James Johnson and Robert Burns (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1853)
Verse 1 (to the tune of 'Marquis of Huntly's Reel'): 'Tune your fiddles, tune them sweetly, Play the Marquis Reel discreetly, Here we are a band compleatly Fitted to be joyly. Come my boys, glad and gaucie, Every youngster chuse his lassie, Dance wi' life and be not saucy Shy, nor melancholy.' 'Gaucie' is possibly jolly or stately.
The 'Scots Musical Museum' is the most important of the numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections of Scottish song. When the engraver James Johnson started work on the second volume of his collection in 1787, he enlisted Robert Burns as contributor and editor. Burns enthusiastically collected songs from various sources, often expanding or revising them, whilst including much of his own work. The resulting combination of innovation and antiquarianism gives the work a feel of living tradition.
Burns, in his notes on the 'Museum', had a great deal to say about this particular song and melody. He informs us that the song was written by the Reverend John Skinner, 'nonjurer clergyman at Linshart, near Peterhead', who was also responsible for 'Tullochgorum' (song 289), 'Ewie wi' the crooked horn' (song 293) and 'John o' Badenyond' (song 285) amongst others. The melody, meanwhile, was composed by a Mr Marshall, who was butler to the Duke of Gordon. Burns further writes that 'I have been told by somebody who had it of Marshall himself, that he took the idea of his three most celebrated pieces, The Marquis of Huntley's Reel, His Farewell and Miss Admiral Gordon's Reel, from the old air, The German Lairdie'.
Volume III, song 201, page 209 - 'Tune your Fiddles, &c' - Scanned from the 1853 edition of the 'Scots Musical Museum', James Johnson and Robert Burns (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1853)