Annotation:Duchess of Richmond (2)

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DUCHESS OF RICHMOND [2], THE. Scottish, Reel. E Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AAB. Composed by Alexander Walker in honor of the Duchess of Richmond. The former dowager Duchess of Richmond (born Lady Charlotte Gordon in 1768) died in 1844 when Walker was aged 24, so the reel was more likely dedicated to Lady Caroline (daughter of Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey and Lady Caroline Villiers), who married Charles Gordon-Lennox, the 5th Duke of Richmond, in 1819. The couple had five sons and five daughters. Widowed some six years before Walker published his collection, Lady Caroline died in 1874, at the age of 77.

biography:Alexander Walker was born in Rhynie, Strathbogie, Aberdeenshire in 1819, and was an inventor (of surveying instruments, for example), agriculturalist, fiddler and composer of works collected in a volume published in Aberdeen in 1866. He was employed as a gardener for Sir Charles Forbes at Castle Newe, who was also his patron. While in Scotland he took a wife, Jean (11 years his junior), and at age 40 became father of a daughter, Maggie, followed by three sons (Charles, Alexander and George—Charles perhaps named after Sir Charles Forbes). Walker knew a young J. Scott Skinner, who was employed as a dancing master for the tenantry of the Queen’s residence at Balmoral, and co-wrote a tune with him. Walker himself played in bands for entertainments given by the Royal Family [Allan Thomas, A New Most Excellent Dancing Master, 1992 ].

After the American Civil War, probably around 1870, Walker emigrated to the United States, and settled near Williamstown, Massachusetts, where family (parents) had previously settled, and established a prosperous farm of his own. He and Jean had a daughter in America, Jeosie, born in New York in 1872. In the 1880 census for Williamstown his occupation is listed as a “surveyor and gardener,” while Jean “kept house” and “farmed”. Alexander also continued to compose music (according to Paul Cranford, who has found evidence he mailed compositions home to Aberdeenshire) although his American output is now lost. He is recorded as having helped survey areas of Williamstown in 1892 (at age 73), where it was noted that he was “a Scotch surveyor of some attainments and reputation”, and he lived to see the 20th century. This passage (from Arthur Latham Perry's Origins in Williamstown: A History, 1894, p. 28 ) is thought to refer to him:

...but the Berlin road goes past pretty good farms, and the last one (the old toll-gate farm) became noted for its productiveness under the ownership of Alexander Walker and his family, canny Scotch people from Aberdeenshire; the parents married there Aug. 6, 1856. Mr. Walker could handle the fiddle bow and the surveyor's instruments with about equal facility; but as the lines fell to him in this country in prosy times and non-piping localities, the Scotch reels and strathspeys, of which he was a master and even a successful composer and publisher, slumbered for the most part on the bridge of his fiddles, of which he invented and perhaps patented a prized improvement. Nevertheless, his residence at the head of the gorge, where the Fosters had lived for three generations, threw a sort of halo of music and good cheer up and down the valley, and proved to many persons a kind of subtle attraction not only for the Pass by Mount Hopkins beyond it.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Walker (A Collection of Strathspeys, Reels, Marches, &c.), 1866; No. 112, p. 39.

Recorded sources:

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