Wha'll be King but Charlie

[cimorene]

I mentioned the jigs, reels, and country dances in a previous post. This is an engaging little melody (that fits on only two lines of the book!) and the title stuck in my head because lol bonny prince Charlie and also because of the "Wha'll", so I looked it up today and learned:

• It's also (originally? more commonly?) known as "The News from Moidart"



• The tune is an Irish jig called "Tidy Woman", so in the absence of the lyrics, which my songbook did not provide, there's no particular reason to say it even was about Charlie except I presume it was better known in its Jacobite form in 1950s NYC



• The lyrics were written by a Scottish baroness named Caroline Nairn and it was popular from the late 18th century and remained so into the 20th



• The lyrics are in Scots, nobody has seen the need to translate them into regular English in a prominent search result, and the online Scots to English translators don't work. Google translate does not acknowledge Scots, only Scots Gaelic, which this isn't.

Comments

[cimorene]

Ah, thank you! We couldn't make head or tails of the passages about "a the welcomer early" or "an spier ye wha but"! 😅

[krait]

You're welcome! (Welcomer, even!) :D