Annotation:On Ettrick Banks

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ON ETTRICK BANKS. Scottish, Air (4/4 time). D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. The Ettrick is a river in Selkirkshire, and flows northeast for thirty miles (during which it receives the Yarrow) before it empties into the Tweed near Melrose. Tait's Edinburgh Magazine printed an article on "Scottish Rivers--The Tweed" (vol. 14, 1887, p. 506), which mentions the Ettrick, and remarked:

The Ettrick rises, as we are told, from among a few rushes, between Loch-fell and Capel-fell, on the south side of a range of hills, which may be called "the back-bone of the country," at a point two miles above Potburn, which is said to be the highest situated farm-house above the sea in the south of Scotland. Mr. Staddart tells us that "Ettrick abounds in nice trout, weighing, on the average, a quarter of a pound, but I have killed them occasionally, below Thirlestane, upwards of a pound, and recollect seeing one taken there nearly three times that weight. From the burns which empty themselves in the upper districts, I have known my friend John Wilson, Jun., of Elbray, to capture, with the worm, twelve dozen in the course of an forenoon. Sea-trout, both the whitling and the bull species, ascend the Ettrick in November, sometimes in great numbers--as many as three score have been slaughtered, by means of the leister, in one night, out of a single pool. The true salmon killed on an occasion of this sort are compartively few.

"On Ettrick Banks" is air by an unknown composer appears in Allan Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany of 1724, and it was inserted into the Orpheus Caledonius (1725) with the same stanzas that later appeared in Johnson's Scots Musical Museum. Ramsay's lyric begins:

On Ettrick banks, in a summer night,
At glowming when the sheep drave hame,
I met my lassie braw and tight,
While wading, barefoot, a' her lane:
My heart grew light, I ran, I flang
My arms about her lily-neck,
And kiss'd and clapp'd her there fou lang;
My words they were na mony, feck.

Robert Burns reworked the old song for his own "On Ettrick Banks," which he sent to Mrs. Stewart of Stair.

On Ettrick banks on a summer's night,
At gloaming when the sheep drove hame,
I met my lassie bra' and tight
Cam' wading barefoot, a' her lane.
My heart grew light, I ran, I flang
My arms about her lily neck,
And kiss'd and clap'd her there fu' lang
My words there were na' mony feck.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Graham (Songs of Scotland), 1887; pp. 102-03. Neil (The Scots Fiddle), 1991; No. 39, p. 50.

Recorded sources:

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