Annotation:An the Kirk Wad Let Me Be
AN THE KIRK WAD LET ME BE. AKA and see "If the Kirk Would Let Me Be", "Kirk wad let me be." Scottish, Air (9/8 time). D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). The air appears in full in the Guthrie MS. of the late seventeenth century, and in Magdalen Cockburn's Music-book compiled between the 1660's and 1680's. Guthrie, a covenanting minister who was beheaded in 1661, was probably no friend to dance music, and Alburger (1983) speculates that some wag sewed the music MS. pages into one of his books of sermons.
The air was a vehicle for a song in Allan Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany (1724) entitled "Slighted Nansy"[1], and the melody was printed in Alexander Stuart's Musick for Allan Ramsay’s Collection of Scots Songs (c. 1724). Ramsay again employed the tune in his pastoral opera The Gentle Shepherd (1725), where it is sung by Patie (Song 16) and begins:
Duty and part of reason
Plead strong on the parent's side,
Which love superior calls treason;
The strongest must be obey'd:
For now tho' I'm one of the gentry,
My constancy falsehood repels;
For change on my heart has no entry,
Still there my dear Peggy excels.
The melody also appears in the Gillespie Manuscript of Perth (1768, p. 99).
