Annotation:Miss Gordon of Gight

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MISS GORDON OF GIGHT. Scottish, Reel. C Minor. Standard tuning (fiddle). AAB. Composed by Biography:Isaac Cooper of Banff (1754? – 1820) around 1783, dedicated to the literary Lord Byron's mother, a Huntly Gordon (The Bog of Gight is the site of Gordon Castle). Cooper was a skilled musician and excellent composer. He advertised himself as a teacher of “The Harpsichord, The Violin, The Violincella, The Psaltery, The Clarionet, The Pipe and Taberer, The German Flute, The Scots Flute, The Fife in the Regimental Stile, The Hautboy, The Irish Organ Pipe…And the Guitar, after a new method of fingering…”

Catharine Gordon, of Gight, Aberdeenshire, was a rich heiress of modest fortune, but “her unattractive looks and awkward figure had kept her without offers of marriage” (Laura Carter Holloway, The Mothers of Great Men and Women, 1883). She met Mad Jack Byron, a widowed Life Guardsman, at the fashionable watering place of Bath, and married him in Scotland in March, 1786. He was obliged to add the name Gordon to his own, in compliance with a condition imposed by will on whoever should become husband of the heiress of Gight. She soon found that Mad Jack was an unprincipled and dissipated husband deeply in debt, and had only married her for her money, which he ran through in just a few short years (save for £3,000 which the guardians of her estate managed to secure).

Catharine led a deeply unhappy life, characterized by bleak moods and violent temper outbursts. “Though she had royal blood in her veins,” writes a Mr. Jeaffreson in a decidedly unflattering sketch,:

...and belonged to the superior branch of the Gordons, it would not have been easy to find a gentlewoman whose person and countenance were less indicative of ancestral purity. A dumpy young woman, with a large waist, florid complexion, and homely features, she would have been mistaken anywhere for a small farmer’s daughter or a petty tradesman’s wife, had it not been for her silks and feathers, the rings on her fingers, and the jewelry about her short, thick neck. At this early time of her career she was not quite so graceless and awkward as Mrs. Cardueis (in Lord Beaconsfield’s Venetia), but it was already manifest that she would be cumbrously corpulent on coming to middle age; and even in her twenty-fifth year she would waddle through drawing-rooms and gardens on the development of her unwieldy person. In the last century it was not uncommon for matrons of ancient lineage to possess little learning and no accomplishments; but Miss Gordon’s education was very much inferior to the education usually accorded to the young gentlewomen of her period. Unable to speak any other language, she spoke her mother tongue with a broad Scotch brogue, and write it in a style that in this politer age would be discreditable to a waiting-woman. Though she was a writer of long epistles, they seldom contained a capital letter or a mark of punctuation to assist the reader in the sometimes arduous task of discovering their precise meaning, and thought she could spell the more simple words correctly, when she was writing in a state of mental placidity, she never used her pen in moments of excitement without committing comical blunders of orthography. To Captain (Mad Jack) Byron, however, the lady’s temper was more grievous than her defects of person, breeding, and culture. It should, however, be remembered by readers who would do her justice, that Mrs. Byron was by no means devoid of the shrewdness and ordinary intelligence of inferior womankind, and was capable of generous impulses to the persons whom, in her frequent fits of uncontrollable fury, she would assail with unfeminine violence, and even with unnatural cruelty. ... [quoted in Holloway, 1883].

This parody (which does not scan to Cooper's reel) was published during the marriage:

MISS GORDON OF GIGHT.
O whare are ye gaen, bonny Miss Gordon?
O whare are ye gaen, sae bonny an' braw?
Ye've married, ye've married wi' Johnny Byron,
To squander the lands o' Gight awa'.
This youth is a rake, frae England he's come;
The Scots dinna ken his extraction ava;
He keeps up his misses, his landlord he duns,
That's fast drawen' the lands o' Gight awa'.
O whare are ye gaen, &c.
The shooten' o' guns, an' rattlin' o' drums,
The bugle in woods, the pipes i' the ha',
The beagles a howlin', the hounds a growlin';
These soundings will soon gar Gight gang awa'.

Catharine died in 1811, far outliving her husband, who died in Valenciennes, France, in 1791. 

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Barnes (English Country Dance Tunes, vol. 2), 2005; p. 37 (appears as “Easter Morn”, the title of a 1994 dance by Erna Lynn Bogue set to the tune). Cooper (Thirty New Strathspey Reels For The Violin or Harpsichord), 1783. Glen (The Glen Collection of Scottish Dance Music), vol. 2, 1895; p. 34. Hunter (The Fiddle Music of Scotland), 1988; No. 277. Martin (Taigh na Teud), 1990; p. 17.

Recorded sources: Culburnie CUL 113D, Alasdair Fraser & Tony MacManus – “Return to Kintail” (1999).

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