Annotation:High Way to Edinburgh (2) (The)
Tune properties and standard notation
HIGH WAY TO EDINBURGH, THE. AKA and see "[[Bonnie Black Eagle (The)," "Black Eagle (The)," "My Tocher's the Jewel," "Lord Elcho's Favourite." Scottish, Slow Air (4/4 time) and Jig. G Minor (Oswald): E Minor. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. A slow air in James Oswald's Caledonian Pocket Companion (1757) to which is appended a jig ("gigga"). The jig has become detached from the air (even in the 18th century) and is also played alone with the same title (see "High Way to Edinburgh (1)"). The tune appears under the above title in James Aird's Selection of Airs and Marches, First Edition. The Scots poet Robert Burns accused Nathaniel Gow of plagerism of the tune when the latter published a similar melody under his own name called "My Tocher's the Jewel" (which Burns maintains is "notoriously taken from the 'Muckin' of Geordie's Byre'"). Burns himself had used the tune for his own poem "My Tocher's the Jewel," which he contributed to James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum. Cazden (et al, 1982) identifies the melody as a variant of a large tune family, much used for songs and airs over the years, which include the Scottish song "Gilderoy," the Irish "Star of the County Down," Chappell's English "We Be Poor Frozen Out Gardeners" and Cazden's own Catskill Mountain (New York) collected "The Banks of Sweet Dundee." Bayard (1981) notes a resemblance between this tune and "Turkey in the Straw," especially to the second part of the latter, and suggests that in fashioning it the Scots tune may have been borrowed from. John Glen (1891) finds the earliest printing of the tune in Joshua Campbell's 1778 collection (p. 75).
Source for notated version:
Printed sources: Oswald (Caledonian Pocket Companion), vol. 1, 1757, p. 100. Wood (Songs of Scotland), 1848-49.
Recorded sources: