Annotation:Morag's Wedding

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MORAG'S WEDDING. AKA and see "Roger's Farewell," "Sir Alexander Don's (2)." Canadian, Scottish; Strathspey. Canada, Cape Breton. A Mixolydian. Standard tuning (fiddle). Dunlay and Greenberg believe the tune may have been a pipe strathspey as they find it it Barry Shears' Cape Breton Collection of Bagpipe Music, taken from the Angus J. MacNeil MS, a manuscript of pipe tunes from around 1900 found in Cape Breton. The ancestral tune is the air to the song "'Si Morag a rinn a' bhanais (Morag had a wedding), which is also used as a strathspey and schottische. The title Dunlay & Greenberg employed comes from sheet music written by (Old-World) Scottish fiddler Angus Grant for the Boston Scottish Fiddle Club. The tune is cognate with both "Roger's Farewell" and "Sir Alexander Don's (2)," the names of the strathspey printed respectively by James Aird (Glasgow) and Joshua Campbell/the Gows (Edinburgh). See also the cognate first strain of William Marshall's "Grant Lodge."

Source for notated version: Donald MacLellan, learned from his father, Ronald MacLellan [Dunaly & Greenberg].

Printed sources: Dunlay & Greenberg (Traditional Celtic Violin Music of Cape Breton), 1996; p. 34.

Recorded sources: Lochshore Records, Tannas - "Rù-Rà" (1995). Rounder Records, Donald MacLellan - "The Dusky Meadow" (2003).

See also listing at:
Alan Snyder's Cape Breton Fiddle Recordings [1]

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