Annotation:Captain Kennedy's Reel

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CAPTAIN KENNEDY'S (REEL). AKA and see "Miss Parker's Reel," "Mr. Robert Kennedy," "Robert Kennedy's Reel." Scottish, Reel or Strathspey. F Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB (Surenne): AAB (Gow, Shears). Barry Shears identifies his strathspey as a "Cape Breton composition from the MacNeil manuscript," referring to the c. 1915 music manuscript collection of Cape Breton piper Captain Angus J. MacNeill of Gillis Point. However, the composition was printed in Scotland by the Gows a century earlier, set as a reel, and even earlier, in 1757, by Edinburgh music publisher Neil Stewart as "Mr. Robert Kennedy." Northumbrian musician William Vickers entered the tune into his large music manuscript collection around 1770 as "Robert Canedeys real" (Robert Kennedy's Reel), and it appears as "Captain Renudy's Reel" in the mid-19th century music manuscript of William Winter, a shoemaker and violin player who lived in West Bagborough in Somerset.

Fiddler-composer Abraham Mackintosh, originally from Aberdeen, published it in 1797 as "Miss Parker's Reel."

Additional notes
Source for notated version : - William Vickers 1770 music manuscript collection [1] (Northumberland) [Seattle]; William Winters (1850, Somerset) [Woolfe].

Printed sources : - Carlin (The Gow Collection), 1986; No. 501. Gow (Complete Repository), Part 2, 1802; p. 29. Saunders (New and Complete Instructor for the Violin), Boston, 1847; No. 36, p. 59. Seattle (Great Northern/William Vickers, Part III), 1987; No. 568 (as "Robert Canedeys real"). Shears (Gathering of the Clans Collection, vol. 1), 1986; p. 43 (pipe strathspey). Surenne (Dance Music of Scotland), 1852; p. 16. Geoff Woolfe (William Winter’s Quantocks Tune Book), 2007; No. 347, p. 122 (from a ms. originally dated 1850).

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