Annotation:Duchess of Buccleugh (2)

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 DUCHESS OF BUCCLEUGH [2]. Scottish, (Slow) Strathspey. A Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB (Carlin): AAB (Gow, Skye). Credited sometimes to Nathaniel Gow (Carlin), but actually composed by his father, Niel Gow, according to Keith Norman MacDonald (Skye Collection). Curiously, there is no attribution to either Gow in their First Collection (1784), even though numerous other tunes bear one or the other of their names. The melody is composed around a double-tonic and uses modulatory chromatic notes which do not belong to the mode. The tune was named in honor of Lady Elizabeth Montagu (1743-1827), daughter of Sir George Montagu, 1st Duke of Montague, and Lady Mary Montagu. In 1767 Elizabeth became the wife of Sir Henry Scott (1746-1812), the 3rd Duke of Buccleugh, with whom she had seven children (although her first born, George, lived only a couple of months). They resided at Dalkeith House in Midlothian. Sir Walter Scott, friends of the Duke and Duchess, said of her, "she was a woman of unbounded beneficence to, and even beyond, the extent of her princely fortune. She had a masculine courage, and great firmness in enduring affliction, which pressed on her with continued and successive blows in her later years." Thomas Gainsborough painted her portrait.  Source for notated version:  Printed sources: Carlin (The Gow Collection), 1986; No. 38. Gow (First Collection of Niel Gow's Reels), 1784 (revised 1801); p. 20. MacDonald (The Skye Collection), 1887; p. 17.  Recorded sources:

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