January’s Tunes -- Randy Miller Workshop

The ¾ time tune Dr. Mackay’s Farewell to Creagorry is also known as Dark Island and Dr.McInnes’s Farewell to South Uist.  A pipe lament, usually attributed to Hebrides accordion player Iain McLachlan (1927-1995), who composed it in honor of a local physician. 

The BBC used it as the theme tune for the 1963 espionage series The Dark Island (go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW51tUG8PRs  to watch) and became so popular that the name stuck. Creagorry is a hamlet in Benbecula at the north end of the causeway to South Uist. The SRS/SMC versions 2.9, 13.15, and 33.14 are notated with two sharps, (E dorian and D major), which fits the pipes. It is commonly played with one sharp i(A dorian and G major),as in Randy’s setting. 

The Iron Lady

Repeal the Poll Tax, a reel in A major was composed by Scottish fiddler Sandy Mathers, a member of a variety of bands who also plays different instruments. It was titled in response to the Margaret Thatcher-era Poll Tax. Introduced in Scotland in 1989 and England and Wales a year later, the tax was a flat-rate per capita Community Charge, a fixed amount levied by local authorities. It was met with widespread and vociferous popular protests and was replaced by John Major in 1992 with a property tax.

Jenny Geddes stool

The Stool of Repentance is a classic old Scottish jig (6/8 time) in A Major. The curious title comes from Scottish Presbyterian church history and has to do with a survival of old Roman Catholic tradition. Several authorities report that in the Old Scottish Kirk transgressors, particularly adulterers and those who had committed moral offenses, were often given the penance in church of sitting themselves for one or two weeks before the entire congregation on the cutty stool or the ‘stool of repentance.’ The Scots national poet Robert Burns was one of its more notable victims. His famous satirical verse "Holy Willie's Prayer," about a godly hypocrite, was inspired perhaps by his own experience of being made in 1784 to sit before the congregation on the famous stool. This was in consequence of his dalliance with Elizabeth Paton, by whom he fathered an illegitimate child. The upbeat nature perhaps is that it may be in protest celebrating Jenny Geddes who threw her stool at the minister of St Giles Kirk in Edinburgh to reject the new Common Prayer Book introduced by Charles I in 1637. The story goes on that the riot that ensued led to the rise of the Covenanters and eventually, the Civil War in England.

All the information above was gathered from the internet by me, and any inaccuracies are not my fault!!

Have fun with the music.

— Alan Wilson