Annotation:Mr. Charles Graham’s Welcome Home

Back to Mr. Charles Graham’s Welcome Home

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MR. CHARLES GRAHAM’S WELCOME HOME. AKA and see "Darby the Driver," "Welcome Home (2)." Scottish, Slow Air (6/8 time). A Minor. Standard tuning (fiddle). AAB. Composed by biography:William Gow (1751-1791), eldest son of Perthshire fiddler-composer Niel Gow, and leader of the Edinburgh Assembly Orchestra until his death. A version of the melody was employed by poet Robert Burns for his song “Out over the Forth &c.” in the Scots Musical Museum (vol. V, song 421, p. 434, 1787), although the second part of Gow's tune was too long for the words, so Mr. Clarke (urged on by Burns) truncated it after six bars and squared it off with the two last measures of the first strain. Burns's song begins:

Out over the Forth, I look to the North,
But what is the North and its Highlands to me;
The South nor the East, gie ease to my breast,
The far foreign land, or the wide rolling sea.

The antiquarian Stenhouse gpt Gow's title wrong, recording it as "Charles Gordon's Welcome Home"--there is no "Charles Gordon" tune in the Gow collections, but "Mr. Charles Graham's Welcome Home" appears in the Second Collection (p. 20). Stenhouse's erroneous title has been occasionally repeated, however.

See also the Irish cognates tune family under the title "Darby the Driver" and others.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Gow (Second Collection of Niel Gow’s Reels), 1788; p. 20 (3rd edition).

Recorded sources:

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