FOLK SONGS: THE SKYE BOAT SONG
On hearing the familiar lyrics sing me a song of a lass that is gone, we learn more about the roots of The Skye Boat Song, a common but sentimentalized Scottish folk song.
A large number of songs were written during the Jacobite era (1688-1746) and the subsequent Risings. Some were pro-Jacobite, while others were Whig (anti-Jacobite). Some were blatant satires, while others recounted actual incidents, and still others were clearly spin and false news.
Many of the poems we consider to be ‘traditional' were written long after the events mentioned, during the Victorian rediscovery of all things Highland in the 1800s, or by well-known later poets such as Robert Burns (1759-1796), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), and James Hogg, the great Scottish author, editor, publisher, and song-collector (1770-1835).
These songs, however, are an integral part of Scotland's musical and folk culture, and they deserve to be sung and played today. These will be well-known as songs or bagpipe tunes, while others will be unfamiliar.
The well-known Skye Boat Song, for example, was written at a period when the Jacobites had become unjustly romanticized.
If not actually rewritten, the history of that time period became less closely read. Many were happy to provide ‘authentic' Scottish ballads because ‘ancient' tartans had been developed, Highland tourism was booming, and many were happy to provide ‘authentic' Scottish ballads.
The air was collected in the 1870s by Anne Campbell MacLeod, but the over-sentimentalized lyrics were written by Sir Harold Edwin Boulton (1859-1935), an English baronet who at least had the good sense to serve in the 2nd Cameron Highlanders and marry a Davidson from Dingwall.
The tale is well-known: after the Battle of Culloden, Prince Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) fled to the Outer Hebrides, where he was escorted onto the Isle of Skye as ‘Betty Burke,' Flora MacDonald's serving maid. Flora was an unexpected ally, as her husband and his family were in the Hanoverian army, and her stepfather was chief of the local militia, despite being praised as a Jacobite heroine for the rest of her life.
‘Betty Burke' and Flora sailed from Benbecula to Skye on June 27, 1746, accompanied by a crew of six boatmen and two servants, landing at what is now known as Rudha Phrionnsa (Prince's Point) in Kilmuir. They went overland to Portree after spending the night in a cottage, where the Prince was able to secure passage to the island of Raasay and, from there, back to France. Flora and Prince Charles never met again, but it is said that when she died in 1790, she was buried at Kilmuir wrapped in a sheet that had previously been used by Prince Charles. On January 31, 1788, the Prince died in Rome.
Of course, many of Boulton's lyrics were nonsense – there were no "baffled enemies" standing by the sea, and there was no hope of, and even less appetite for, "Charlie would come again" in Scotland – but the Prince did make a short, secret visit to London in 1750 to be confirmed in the Protestant faith by obtaining Anglican communion.
Robert Louis Stevenson hated Boulton's sentimentality so much that he published his own in 1892. “Sing me a song of a lad who's gone, Tell, might that lad be me?” he revised the first verse. “He sailed on a day, merry of spirit, across the sea to Skye” would be familiar to many as the theme song to the famous Outlander television series.
Comments
Post a Comment