Annotation:Cock a Bendie (2)

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COCK A BENDIE. AKA – "Cockabendie." AKA and see "Cawdor Fair," "Hawthorne Tree of Cawdor." Scottish, Country Dance Tune (4/4), Strathspey or March. A Minor (Milne): E Minor (Ross). Standard tuning (fiddle). AAB. Cocakabendie seems to have various meanings in Scotland: A cockabendie or a cockie-dandy is Scots for a small, lively person, although it may also have had a bawdy meaning, as John Mactaggart in his Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia (1824) declines to explain the term, saying: "I dare hardly, for the sake of modesty, explain this term; when such is seen to be the case, readers may make a rough guess what it is." Cockabendie is also a Scottish game, and it refers to large pine cones. The melody appears by Scottish dancing master and musician David Young in both his Drummond Castle Manuscript (1734) and his Bodleian Manuscript (p. 32, residing in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England). The latter MS is inscribed "A Collection of the Newest Country Dances Performed in Scotland written at Edinburgh by D.A. Young, W.M. 1740." The melody also appears in Middleton's Selection [Milne, 1882] and, set as a march, in Ross's Collection of Pipe Music (1869, No. 103, p. 98).

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Milne (Middleton's Selection of Strathspeys, Reels, &c. for the Violin), c. 1882; p. 4 (as "Cock o' Bendy"). William Ross (Ross's Collection of Pipe Music), 1869; No. 103, p. 98.

Recorded sources:




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