Saturday 26 November 2011
Tune of the Day: Duncan Gray
Traditional Scottish reel and slow march
This tune is a Scottish reel, which is generally not played as fast as the traditional Irish reel. Duncan Gray was a carter in Glasgow during the early 18th century, and is supposed to have composed the tune; the story goes that the tune was written down from his whistling by a Glasgow musician, and later appeared in James Oswald's The Caledonian Pocket Companion, published in 1751. Fiddler David Johnson, however, thinks that the tune may have originally been an English march in trumpet style. In 1798 Robert Burns added words to the tune, and the song has been popular in Scotland for a long while. Burns called it “that kind of light-horse gallop of an old air which precludes sentiment. The ludicrous is the leading feature.”