Annotation:Lady Doll Sinclair
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LADY DOLL SINCLAIR. AKA and see "King of France (The)," "Lady Doll St. Clair's Reel," "Matt Molloy's (3)," "Matt Peoples' (1)," "Miss Henny MacKenzie," "Miss Hetty McKenzie." Scottish, Reel. A Mixolydian. Standard tuning (fiddle). AAB. John Glen (1891) finds the earliest appearance of the tune in print in Robert Bremner's 1757 collection (p. 1). However, it earlier appeared in a 1750 volume by London music publisher John Johnson under the title "Lady Doll St. Clair's Reel."
The tune appears in James Oswald's Caledonian Pocket Companion (vol. 8, 1760, p. 26) as "King of France (The)/King of France He Run a Race (The)", described in The Songs of Robert Burns as "an unintelligible Jacobite song". Burns used the melody for his song "Amang the trees, where humming bees," which was probably written as a compliment to the famed Dunkeld, Perthshire, fiddler-composer Niel Gow, whom Burns had visited in 1787, as it extolled the virtues of pibroch, strathspeys and reels instead of the Italian fashion. Burns may have based his verse on an earlier song: See Annotation:King of France (The) for more.
Irish versions of the reel can be found as "Matt Molloy's (3)" and "Matt Peoples' (1) [1]." See also related untitled Irish reels in Breathnach CRÉ II (No. 237) and CRÉ III (No. 121), and an untitled Highland in the Feldman & O'Doherty's Northern Fiddler (1979, p. 82b).
Source for notated version:
Printed sources: Bremner (Scots Reels), 1757; p. 1. Bulmer & Sharpley (Music from Ireland, vol. 4), 1976; 19. Henderson (Flowers of Scottish Melody), 1935. Hunter (Fiddle Music of Scotland), 1988; No. 242. Laybourn (Köhler’s Violin Repository, Book 2), 1881-1885; p. 190.
Recorded sources: Temple TP034, The Battlefield Band - "Home Ground" (1989).