Annotation:My Nanny O
X:1 T:My Nanny O M:C L:1/8 R:Air B:Alexander Stuart - Musick for Allan Ramsey's Collection of Scots Songs (1724) Z:AK/Fiddler's Companion K:Dmin FG|A2D2 A3G|F2 ED D2 CD|F3G ABcA|d2 GA G2 FG| A3f cAGF|G2A2 f3e|d3c AcGA|d2 DE D2|| AB|c3d cdcA|f2 c>d c2 fe|d3e fefg|agfe defg| a2A2 BAGF|G2A2 f3e|d3c AcGA|d2 D>E D2||
MY NANNY-O. AKA and see "Nanny O," "When Bidden to the Wake." Scottish, Slow Air or Country Dance (2/4 time). E Minor (Knowles, McGibbon, O'Farrell, Oswald): D Minor (Howe). Standard tuning (fiddle). AB (Howe): AABB (Knowles, McGibbon, O'Farrell): AABBCCDD (Oswald): AABBCCDDEEFF. The tune is from a 17th-century slow air to which Allan Ramsay wrote new words in 1718 for his Tea Table Miscellany, the music to which was published by Alexander Stuart in 1724 in his Musick for Allan Ramsey's Collection of Scots Songs. Fleischman and Ó Súilleabháin[1] trace the melody to the Scottish Skene Manuscript (c. 1715-1717). It also appears early in print in William Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonius (1725). 19th century musicologist William Chappell (Popular Music of the Olden Times, 1859) laid claim an English provenance for the melody from its mention in the Roxburghe Collection where 'a pleasant new tune, or Nanny O' is the indicated vehicle for a song called "The Scotch Wooing of Willy and Nanny," the locale of which Chappell says is in southern part of Northumberland[2]. It has a burden that goes:
It is Nanny, Nanny, Nanny O,
The love I bear to Nanny O,
All the world shall never know
The love I bear to Nanny O.
George Farquhar Graham and John Glen believed the tune to be thoroughly Scottish (with Glen heaping scorn upon Chappell's claim of an English provenance). In the McFarlane manuscript version, variations were set as an air-jig suite by William Forbes of Disblair (c. 1662–1740). Forbes lived on an estate in Aberdeenshire, according to Johnson (1984), and took up composing late in life after being rendered almost penniless "through paying extravagant sums of aliment to his ex-wife." Though he was somewhat isolated from mainstream contact as a composer, he mixed Scottish and Italian ideas in the same pieces; modern musicologist David Johnson sees him as "quirky" but "original".
"My Nanny-O" proved to be a popular and durable melody throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries. The melody was heard in the ballad operas The Country-Wedding (1729) and The Disappointed Gallant, or Buckram in Armour (1738). "Nanny O" later appeared in James Oswald's Caledonian Pocket Companion (London, 1760) and was also printed in the McLean collection of 1772. Oswald again used part of the melody for the beginning theme of his 'Snowdrop' sonata. Under the title "When Bidden to the Wake" it was printed by Benjamin Carr in Evening Amusement (1796, p. 20). The Scots Musical Museum of 1789 gives it under the incomplete title "While for Some Pawn Their...", and the song was performed on the London stage in William Shield and Mrs. Brooke's play Rosina, in 1783, where it was called "A Fair Scots Tune." The melody also appears in musicians manuscripts: in America, in the Shattuck Manuscript of 1801 as "Mananio" (obviously a condensation of the title "My Nanny-O"), and in the Commonplace Manuscript of 1797 as "When Night Her Sable Curtain Drew, or Sorrows of Werter."
