Annotation:Put up Your Dagger Jaime

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PUT UP YOUR DAGGER JAIME. Scottish, Air (4/4 time). C Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB. From the Blaikie MS, 1692 (appears as "Put up they dagor Jennie"), however, the earliest known setting is by Giles Farnaby in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, c. 1620. Words that fit the tune can be found in a satire called Vox Borealis, or the Northern Discoverie, from 1641. Emmerson (1972) finds the tune mentioned in Baskervill's The Elizabethan Jig, which quotes a satirical pamphlet of 1641 in which has the Governor of Edinburgh Castle keeping a fool and a fiddler to entertain his household during drinking:

Put up thy Dagger Jamie,
and all things shall be mended,
Bishops shall fa.., no not at all
When the Parliament is ended,
Then the Foole he flirts out his folly
and whilst the Fidler playes he sings:
Which never was intended,
but only for to flam thee;
We have gotten the game,
wee'll keep the same,
Put up thy Dagger Jamie.

The air was thought (by Stenhouse) to be the ancestor of the reel "My Love is But a Lassie Yet" AKA "Miss Farquharson's Reel," printed by Robert Bremner in 1757.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Alburger (Scottish Fiddlers and Their Music), 1983; Ex. 5, p. 19.

Recorded sources:




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