This issue I present three beautiful
old laments, which, although they’re from different genres of traditional
music, all have interesting backgrounds that make them all the more
poignant.
Renowned Scottish fiddler-composer James Scott Skinner
(1847-1928) wrote at least two pieces of music in honor of Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald (1857 - 1903), one of the most famous
latter Victorian-era British military figures and a much admired figure in
Scotland. MacDonald was born on
Scotland’s Black Isle, the son of a poor crofter. He was a draper’s assistant
until he ran away at the age of eighteen and enlisted in the 92nd
Gordon Highlanders. Coming up through the ranks, he served as a colour-sergeant
for most of the Second Afghan War until he was given a battlefield commission
as 2nd Lieutenant toward the end of those hostilities. MacDonald was then transferred to South
Africa, where was mentioned in dispatches in the 1st Boer War.
During the battle of Majuba Hill he was taken prisoner by the Boers after
having lost nearly all his men, fighting on until he was overpowered. By the
mid-1890’s MacDonald had served for over a decade in the Sudan, taking part in
several battles, winning awards for bravery and service, and rising steadily in
rank (no easy task for a man of humble beginnings, not to mention one who began
his military career as an enlisted man). In 1898 when his commander-in-chief,
Horatio Kitchener, ordered an advance against the Dervish tribesmen in
Khartoum, MacDonald was a general officer in command of a battalion of a black
Sudanese and Egyptian soldiers, some of whom he had trained himself. Nearing
Omdurman in the Sudan, Kitchener unwittingly exposed his flanks to the entire
Dervish army, and was only saved from disaster by the quick-thinking and brave
MacDonald, and the steadiness of his native troops. MacDonald swung his men by
companies in an arc as the Dervishes charged and by skilful manoeuvring held
his ground, saving Kitchener and the rest of the army from certain doom. It was a near thing. When the fight was over
MacDonald’s troops had an average of only two rounds left per man, but thanks
to the ‘ranker’ in command of native troops, Kitchener won the Battle of Omdurman
and received a Lordship.
MacDonald
subsequently served as the Aide de Camp to Queen Victoria and as a Major
General with the Highland Brigade in South Africa during the Boer War at the
end of the 19th century. In
1901 he was knighted and the next year was stationed as Major General commanding
British forces in Ceylon. However, in 1903 he was accused of being a practising
homosexual. He returned to London to
defend himself, but was ordered back to Ceylon to face charges there. The crofter’s son started back and got as
far as Paris when to took his own life in a hotel room; able to happily endure
physical peril, but not disgrace. Although the charge of homosexuality may
possibly have been true, it was popularly believed by all levels of society in
Scotland at the time that MacDonald had been framed by the English military
establishment. Soon after the incident King Edward VII made his first visit to
Scotland and found the atmosphere there decidedly chilly. Composer James Scott Skinner himself was incensed.
A handwritten note on his original manuscript for the tune reads: “Play in the Kirk on Sunday
& get the Minister to announce as this is a national Calamity - my eyes are
full - B & F will publish at once - & include maybe in H&C -
'.” B & F refers to his music publishers,
Bayley and Ferguson, while H&C is his famous Harp and Claymore collection, published in 1904.
Skinner was just in time to get his lament into the
collection. The piece is a true lament,
although sometimes (unfortunately, I think) played as a waltz, and is based on
a poem by Thomas MacWilliam. Although
the words scan to Skinner’s melody, it has, to my knowledge, not been recorded
as a song. Rather, it has proved popular as a slow air in modern times,
recorded by Irish fiddler Tommy Peoples, the Bothy Band (“1975”), the late
Johnny Cunningham, Dougie MacDonald, and others. MacWilliam’s lyric begins:
Lament him, ye mountains of
Ross-shire;
Your tears be the dew and
the rain;
Ye forests and straths, let
the sobbing winds
Unburden your grief and
pain.
Lament him, ye warm-hearted
clansmen,
And mourn for a kinsman so
true
The pride of the Highlands,
the valiant MacDonald
Will never come back to you.
O, wail for the mighty in
battle,
Loud lift ye the Coronach
strain;
For Hector, the Hero, of
deathless fame,
Will never come back again.
Queen
of the Earth and Child of the Skies
The melody was recorded by West Virginia fiddler Edden
Hammons (1874-1955) for visiting folklore professor Louis Watson Chappell in
1947. Hammons was a member of a family
of back-woodsmen, who, in addition to being adept at living off the land (their
pursuits included poaching and moonshining), were also musically talented.
Edden learned to play on a home-made gourd fiddle and, still a boy, acquired a
manufactured instrument as a gift from a musician. He became an accomplished
fiddler, and according to local lore, did little else. His first marriage
failed because of this, but his second, to a more compatible (and tolerant)
spouse, lasted over fifty years.
“Queen of the Earth and Child of the Skies” is one of the
few slower, crosstuned and slightly ‘crooked’ pieces of the 51 that Hammons
recorded for Chappell, over three recording sessions. Alan Jabbour (in his 1984
notes to the Edden Hammons Collection,
vol. 1) identifies the melody as a piece called “The Blackbird,” one of the
most famous and enduring airs in the British Isles. Several versions were
collected in south-western Pennsylvania, but with the generally agreed upon
function was that the tune was a “dead march,” i.e. one to be played at
funerals. The Irish versions of the
“Blackbird” are Jacobite in nature whose lyrics indicate loyalty to the cause
of the Stewarts, and Bayard says the song, referencing Bonnie Prince Charlie,
was still being sung in south-western Pennsylvania in the early 1930’s.
Although most Pennsylvania fiddlers seemed to know the melody by the
“Blackbird” title, other titles existed: Bayard himself heard it called the
“Lady’s Lamentation” by an Indiana County (Pa.) fifer in 1951—the title of the
original broadside printed in London in 1651.
How
it came to be known by Hammons, and how it acquired the title he knew it by, is
a mystery. The line “Queen of the Earth
and Child of the Skies,” however, is known to be from American shape-note
singing (popularized so recently in the film “Cold Mountain”). It is similar to a line from a shape-note hymn called “Star of Columbia”
(also called simply “Columbia”), found in the Social Harp (1855) and other hymnodies, which begins:
Columbia! Columbia! to glory
arise,
The queen of the world and
the child of the skies;
Thy genius commands thee
with raptures behold,
While ages on ages thy
splendors unfold:
Thy reign is the last and
the noblest of time,
Most fruitful thy soil, most
inviting thy clime;
Let crimes of the east ne're
encrimson they name,
Be freedom and science and
virtue thy fame.
Words are credited to
“Dr. Dwight” and music to “Miss M.T. Durham” (although the melody employed is a
traditional fiddle tune called “Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine”). Timothy Dwight
(1752-1817) was one of the “Hartford Wits,” a group of Connecticut men
associated with literary work during and after the American Revolution. Dwight
would go on to become president of Yale College, but he was a young man when he
wrote his lyric “Columbia” in 1778, when he was a chaplain in for George
Washington’s Continental Army. Dwight’s song suggests that America would be the seat of God's kingdom and
Americans its saints, and it was popular for a long time. So popular, in fact
that some of the lines were incorporated into another shape-note hymn,
“Murillo’s Lesson,” which can be found in the 1844 Sacred Harp and the 1848 Sacred Melodeon. It begins:
As down a lone
valley with cedars
o'erspread,
From war's dread
confusion I pensively strayed,
The gloom from the face of fair
heaven retired,
The winds hushed
their murmurs, the thunders expired.
Perfumes as of Eden flowed
sweetly along,
A voice as of angels
enchantingly sung,
Columbia, Columbia
to glory arise,
The queen of the world
and the child of the skies.
Later generations of
the Hammons family played the tune somewhat differently, with Burl Hammons calling
the piece “Old Man in the Woods” (which is also the name of an edible mushroom
in the eastern US pinelands, one of the names for a Green Man or
Jack-in-the-Woods, and the Native American term for a black bear). Sherman
Hammons called it “Star of Bethlehem,” echoing the shape-note origins of the
older title.
Amhrán na Leabhar
(The Song of the Books)
The song to this air was written by
Tomás Rua Ó Súilleabháin (1785-1848), a poet and musician from Iveragh (Uibh
Ráitheach) or Derrynane, County Kerry.
Irish musicologist Brendan Breathnach, writing in the periodical An Piobaire in 1983, identifies Ó
Suilleabhain as a not only a poet, buy also a schoolteacher, fiddler and
dancing master. Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin (in A
Pocket History of Irish Traditional Music, 1998) gives that Tomas Rua
worked as a hedge schoolmaster on the Iveragh peninsula in West Kerry, and “was
one of the first poets to extol the greatness of (Irish politician) Daniel
O’Connell, whom he saw as an heir to the Jacobite cause.” He had been
acting-schoolmaster at Caherdaniel and was forced to transfer to Portmagee when
another schoolmaster was appointed to the permanent position. As he was leaving
he placed his belongings, including a treasured library of leather-bound books,
for transport on a boat going from the harbour at Derrynane to Goleen (Goilin,
Valentia Harbor), while he himself travelled by road. The boat struck a rock
and capsized, and all cargo was lost, tragically along with the priceless
collection of books. Coincidentally, on
that same night Ó Súilleabháin’s
clothing was accidentally burnt while he was sleeping, delaying his journey the
next day until a tailor could be found to make a new suit for him. When he
arrived at his destination and learned of the loss of his literary treasures,
he was struck down ill, and on his recovery he was prompted to seek solace in
song, composing “Amhrán na Leabhar.” Tomas Ó Canainn’s translation of the Irish
Gaelic lyric begins:
By Valentia harbour I happened once
Near sweet Goleen Dairbhre
Where ships set sail for the ocean deep.
Soon all had the sorrowful story then
Of the sturdy craft, lost at Owen Finn,
Sad was my heart
for the ship that failed;
Better this land
had it survived the gale.
The melody has been very
popular as a slow air with pipers (especially after Seamus Ennis recorded it),
and is also known by the titles "Cuan Bhéal Inse," and “Valentia
Harbor” or “Valentia Lament,” the latter titles referencing the harbour of
Valentia, County Kerry. Both 3/4 and
4/4 time versions exist, although as with “Hector the Hero,” this tune deserves
not to be reduced to a waltz.
X:1
T:Hector the Hero
C:James Scott Skinner
M:3/4
L:1/4
K:A
A,|{B,}C>>B,A,|{E}F>>EC|{D}E3|~E2A,|{A,B,}C>>B,A,|{E}F>>EC|\
{A,}B,3|~B,2A,/<B,/|{B,}C>>B,A,|{E}F>>EC|{D}E2A,|{A,}[A,2A2]{AB}A/F/|\
E<<A,{B,}C|{D}B,2=G,/<A,/|A,3|~A,2||A|{AB}c>>BA|{A}f>>ec|e3|e2A|\
{AB}c>>BA|{A}f>>ec|{A}B3|~B2A/<B/|c>>BA|{A}f>>ec|{c}e2A|\
{ABcdefg}a2{ab}af|e<<A{B}c|{Bd}[E2B2]{Bd}[E/B/][E/A/]|[E3A3]|\
[E2A2]c/<[c/e/]||[d2f2][~df]|[c2a2]g/<f/|[A3e3]|[A2e2]c/<[c/e/]|\
[d2f2]{fg}e/<c/|e<<AB/<c/|[E3B3]|[E2B2]c/<[c/e/]|[d2f2]f/{gfef}>g/|\
[c2a2]a/{bag}>f/|e<<AB|c<<a{ab}a/f/|e<<AB/<c/|\
{Bd}[E2B2]{Bd}[E/B/][D/A/]|[E3A3]|[E2A2]|]
X:1
T:Amhrán Na Leabhar (The Song of the Books)
M:4/4
L:1/8
Z:transcribed by Paul de Grae
K:Edor
B2|E2 EF G2 A2|Be (e4 e)f|e3 d B3 A|Bc d4 e2|
E3 F G3 F|GA B3 B2 A|G2 (E4 E)D|(E4 E)z B2|
E3 F G2 A2|Be (4 4e)e3 d B3 A|Bc (d4 d)z |
E2 EF G3 F|GA B3 B2 A|G2 F E4 D|(E4 E)z e2|
e2 ed e3 d|ef g4 f2|e3 d B3 A|(B4 B)z Bc|
d2 dc d3 c|dd e4 ed|B3 A G3
A|(B4 B)z B2|
E2 EF G2 A2|Be e4 ef|e3 d B3 A|Bc (d4 d)e|
E2 EF G3 F|GA B4 BA|G2 F E4 D|E6 ||