Annotation:Cuddie's Wedding

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CUDDIE'S WEDDING. Scottish, Reel (cut time). A Minor. Standard tuning (fiddle). AAB. Tunes with the title "Cuddy's Wedding" were entered into the 1770 music manuscript collection of Northumbrian musician William Vickers (p. 35) and Westmoreland musician T. Cowper, but they are different melodies. Reference to "Cuddie's Wedding" is made in Ewan Clark's epic The Rustic: A Poem in Four Cantos (1805) in Canto III, p. 65:

And now an off'ring to the bride is made,
Seated beneath the poplar's spreading shade,
The fiddler at her back, in speaking thrum,
'Come all to Cuddy's wedding, come, come come come!
A pewter dish is plac'd upon her knee,
And the half-crowns dance round it merrily.
All now th ebridal off'ring have bestow'd
And the bridge bends beneath her silver load.

A note in the volume explains, " 'Come all to Cuddy's Wedding'. This is the tune invariably played at a bidden wedding, whilst the company are presenting their gifts to the bride." A very similar scene is depicted in verse in another long poem, "The Bridewain" (in John Stagg's The Cumbrian Minstrel, vol. 1, 1821), set in Cumbrian dialect:

Now the weddiners are at th' far end,
And a' thro' ither cruning,
The fiddlers they're at wark i' th' laith,
And thrang their fiddles tuning;
Tom Trammel, Tommy Baster, nay,
Full half a schore they've led it,
And they're a' rozling up their bows
To stryke up "Cuddy's Wedding"
Wi' glee this day.

The bryde now, on a coppy stule
Sits down, i'th' fauld a' with'ring,
With pewter dibler on her lap,
On which her tochers gath'ring,
The folk like peas in a kale-pot,
Are one thro' tother mingling,
And crowns and half-crowns thick as hail
Are in the dibler jingling,
Reeght fast that day.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Robert Ross (Choice Collection of Scots Reels or Country Dances & Strathspeys), Edinburgh, 1780; p. 6.

Recorded sources:

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