Annotation:Mill o' Tiftie's Annie
X:1 T:Mill o' Tiftie's Annie N:”Old” N:Christie was a dancing master, fiddler N:and composer from Cuminestown, Aberdeenshire. N:'Mill o' Tifty's Annie' dates from the end of the late seventeenth century and is found N:among the ballads collected by and made famous by Harvard Professor Francis N:James Child, in the nineteenth century. M:3/4 L:1/8 R:Air B:Christie - Collection of Strathspeys, Reels, Hornpipes, B:Waltzes &c. (Edinburgh, 1820, p. 20) Z:AK/Fiddler’s Companion K:D B|A<F {F}TD2D2|A>F A2 {A}(GF)|~G>AB2 (d>B)|{B}(A>F) E3F| A<F {F}TE2D2|E>F {F}A3B|d<f {f}e2 (f>e)|(d>B) A2z|| A|B<d e2 T(f>e)|d>B A2 {A}(GF)|~G>A B2 (d>B)|{B}(A>F) E3F| A<F {F}E2 D2|E>F A2 (A>B)|d<f {f}e2 (f>e)|{c}(d>B) A2 z||
MILL O' TIFTIE'S ANNIE. Scottish, Air (3/4 time). D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AB. A ballad air that was included by biography:William Christie (1778-1849) in his 1820 collection. Christie was a postman, dancing master, song collector and fiddler-composer from Cuminestown, Aberdeenshire. "Mill o' Tifties Annie" is was an old and popular Aberdeenshire ballad in Christie's day (so marked in his collection), which "relates to one Agnes (Annie) Smith whose repaired gravestone may still be seen in Fyvie churchyard, where the date of her death is given as 19 January 1673. The ballad has frequently been reported in Scotland from the middle of the 18th century on, with most 19th and 20th century texts being so standardised as to suggest a great dependency on frequent printings in chapbooks. Indeed, Peter Buchan, the over-maligned Aberdeenshire collector and publisher of the beginning of the 19th century, claims to have sold 30,000 copies of a chapbook version of the ballad. As it appears in chapbook and modern printings the ballad is rather long, extending to some 50 plus stanzas"[1]. Singer Lucy Stwewart's 1960 recorded version begins:
In the Mill o' Tifty lived a man,
In the neighbourhood of Fyvie,
He had a lovely daughter fair,
Whose name was bonnie Annie.
Lord Fyvie had a trumpeter
Whose name was Andrew Lammie
Who had the art to gain the heart
Of Mill o' Tifty's Annie.
As is often the case, the words to the ballad were set to various airs, and Christie's tune is but one of several to which it is sung.
- ↑ notes fromLucy Stewart (Fetterangus, Aberdeenshire), Folkways LP, "Traditional Singer from Aberdeenshire, Scotland, vol. 1 -- Child Ballads", 1960.