Annotation:Miss Garden of Troop’s Strathspey
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MISS GARDEN OF TROOP’S STRATHSPEY. Scottish, Strathspey. F Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AAB. One of many melodies for the Garden family composed by biography:Robert Petrie (1767-1830), a native of Kirkmichael, Perthshire, who was employed as a gardener at Troup House. He was an excellent fiddler and had a reputation as a profligate and non conformist, but is reputed to have won either a 'silver bow' or a cup (depending on the story) at a competition at Edinburgh in 1822. There is no evidence that the prize ever appeared in Kirkmichael, however. Petrie composed many tunes and published four collections in his lifetime. Troup House was a mansion in Gamrie parish, Banffshire, near the coast, built along an Adam design in 1763. The tune appears in Petrie’s A Fourth Collection of Strathspeys, Reels, Jiggs and Country Dances (Edinburgh, 1805). When a fashion for Scottish dancing hit London at the turn of the 18th century, “Lady Garden of Troop’s Strathspey” was one of the tunes danced to, as we see in this excerpt from a London paper called The Star (06/01/1799), which reported on a recent ball at Oatlands Palace, Surrey, England. The title is a bit mangled:
At the fete given by Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of York, at Oatlands on the 30th of May (1799), the dances were as follows: 1. Ramah Droog. 2. Miss Murray of Auchtertyre. 3. The Tartan Plaidie. 4. Lady Harriet Hope’s Reel. And lastly, the enchanting tune of Miss Gordon [Garden] of Troupe’s Strathspey was called for by Princess Augusta, and danced twice over by all the fet. Between the second and third dance, Their Majesties desiring to see the Highland Reel in all its purity, it was danced by the Marquis of Huntley and the Lady Georgiana Gordon, Colonel Erskine and Lady Charlotte Durham, with all the elastic motion, hereditary character, and boundless variety of the Scottish dance.
See also "Miss Garden of Troop’s Reel."
Source for notated version:
Printed sources: S. Johnson (A Twenty Year Anniversary Collection), 2003; p. 21. Petrie (Fourth Collection of Strathspey, Reels, Jiggs, and Country Dances), 1805; p. 6.
Recorded sources: