Annotation:My Lady's Goon Has Gairs Upon It

Back to My Lady's Goon Has Gairs Upon It

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MY LADY'S GOON HAS GAIRS ON'T. Scottish, Strathspey. C Major (Cole): F Major (Howe). Standard tuning (fiddle). AB. Goon=gown. A goonie is a nightie. Gairs means pleats, as in pleated sleeves, which were sometimes accented with a different material or color than the dress. However, gair was also used to indicate grassy strains, which gives the title a ribald meaning. The tune appears in Niel Gow's collection, and at one time had words set to it. The Glasgow-published British Minstrel, and Musical and Literary Miscellany (1843) printed this tune along with "Howlet and the Weazel (The)", and opined:

They both attained no very honourable notoriety from their old blackguard names, and the blackguard songs united with them. Dare we hope that the improved taste, and more perfect and pure education which prevails in our age, will be able to banish from all memories the rubbish which has almost incurably contaminated the popular mind, and which blurs the exquisite beauty of our old lyrical remains.

The song was printed in James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (1803, No. 554), under the title "My Lord a-Hunting," reworked from a song old at the time. The version in the Museum goes:

CHO:
My lady's gown, there's gairs upon 't,
And gowden flowers sae rare upon 't;
But Jenny's jimps and jirkinet,
My lork thinks meikle mair upon 't.

My lord a-hunting he is gane,
But hounds or hawks wi' him are nane;
By Colin's cottage lies his game,
If Colin's Jenny be at hame.

The Irish "Murphy's Reel (3)" has some melodic similarities in the first several bars.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: The British Minstrel, 1843; p. 108. Cole (1000 Fiddle Tunes), 1940; p. 123. Howe (1000 Jigs and Reels), c. 1867; p. 149. Johnson (Scots Musical Museum), 1803. Manson (Hamilton's Universal Tune Book), 1844; p. 13. Ryan's Mammoth Collection, 1883; p. 162.

Recorded sources:

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