Annotation:Highland Dress and Armour

Back to Highland Dress and Armour

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HIGHLAND DRESS AND ARMOUR (Cuir a nall am feileadh-beag 's an t-armachd). Scottish, Strathspey. C Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABCCD (Athole, Fraser): AABB'CCDD' (Kerr). This tune "celebrates the restoration of the Highland dress and armour, after having been proscribed for a number of years as a badge of disloyalty. Let that period by contrasted with the present, when almost every little boy in the kingdom delights to wear the bonnet as a national badge of honour; and let this air commemorate the glorious change" (Fraser). John Glen (1891) finds the earliest printing of a tune called "Highland Dress" in Neil Stewart's 1761 collection (p. 61).

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Fraser (The Airs and Melodies Peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland and the Isles), 1816/1874; No. 127, pp. 50-51. Kerr (Merry Melodies, vol. 3); No. 121, p. 15. Laybourn (Köhler’s Violin Repository, Book 2), 1881-1885; p. 172. Stewart-Robertson (The Athole Collection), 1884; p. 74.

Recorded sources:

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