Meaning/Origin of song "Loch Lomond"

[Mark Taintor]

I'm looking for information regarding the origin and meaning of the song
"Loch Lomond". I don't understand the "... I'll tak the low road and I'll
be in Scotland afore ye." line especially. If there's a web site to help
me understand this as well as other Scots songs I'd love to know about it.

Thanks very much.

Mark
Chanhassen, MN USA

---------------------------------------------------------
Cyberdog ---A Product of Apple Computer, Inc.
---------------------------------------------------------

[bogus address]

"Mark Taintor" <mwt...@ties.k12.mn.us> writes:
> I'm looking for information regarding the origin and meaning of the
> song "Loch Lomond". I don't understand the "... I'll tak the low road
> and I'll be in Scotland afore ye." line especially. If there's a web
> site to help me understand this as well as other Scots songs I'd love
> to know about it.

I am going to put a file about this on my website sometime in the next
few weeks, as it generates a quite astonishing volume of bullshit that
frequently pops up on Internet forums and needs stamped on.

The song owes its present popularity to the 19th century songwriter
Lady John Scott (Alicia Spottiswoode). She collected it from an oral
source in Edinburgh, but the boy who sang it to her had learned it
from a printed broadside by Sanderson, an Edinburgh printer/songwriter
who created an extraordinary number of mediocre ballads, this being
about the only one to catch on. He wrote it some time around 1830,
modelling it on a late-18th-century love song, which in at least some
versions was too sexually explicit to print at the time. The "high
road"/"low road" phrase is his addition, and he doesn't seem to have
meant anything in particular by it beyond the literal meaning. There
is nothing in older Scottish culture that associates any significance
to the phrase. Several other of Sanderson's songs are characterized
by absolute, cast-iron, copper-bottomed, bottled-in-bond gobbledygook
which couldn't have made one bit more sense when they were printed.

Anything you read about the song having either Jacobite or supernatural
connotations is sentimentalizing twaddle. I don't know exactly when all
that stuff started to be associated with it but I would guess early this
century. Lady Scott was not above doing a bit of hyper-romanticizing
herself, but I don't think she did in this instance.

I don't believe there's even one web site that's any help with *accurate*
documentation about the more popular Scots songs (while misinformation
about popular songs and precise details about stuff nobody sings any more
are both quite easy to come by). Good print sources:

- G.F. Graham: The Popular Songs and Melodies of Scotland
- The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection (8 very expensive volumes)
- Ewan McColl: Songs and Ballads of Scotland (small but good for
what it does cover)

Nobody sings "Loch Lomond" in Scotland any more except to tourists. My
favourite anecdote about it was from the Edinburgh tourist board a few
years ago, in one of their "what the punters came up with this year"
press releases: an American tourist came off the train at Waverley and
went up to the taxi rank:

Tourist: Say, do you know Loch Lomond?
Taxi driver: Sure! (faraway look while calculating the
out-of-town fare for a 70-mile trip...)
Tourist: Could you sing it for me, then?
Taxi driver: %!&%$@??!!

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http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html food intolerance data and recipes,
freeware logic fonts for the Macintosh, and Scots traditional music resources

[John Allan]

Scottish folklore has it that if a native of Scotland dies outside of his
country, his spirit is transported back to Scotland by the faerie people via
"the low road".
The song dates back to the retuning Jacobite army in 1746, two of whom were
captured in Carlisle in the north of England and sentenced to death. One of
the prisoners subsequently escaped and made his way back to Scotland, still
alive but without his friend who was executed.
The surviving prisoner therefore took "the high road" back to Scotland while
the other being executed, was transported back by the faerie people via "the
low road". and so reached Scotland "afore" (before) his friend.

I hope this clears up this little mystery

John.

Mark Taintor <mwt...@ties.k12.mn.us> wrote in message
news:B3C7E3F...@206.131.125.84...

> I'm looking for information regarding the origin and meaning of the song
> "Loch Lomond". I don't understand the "... I'll tak the low road and I'll
> be in Scotland afore ye." line especially. If there's a web site to help
> me understand this as well as other Scots songs I'd love to know about it.
>

[John Wild]

In article <37a2...@eeyore.callnetuk.com>, John Allan
<john...@callnetuk.com> writes

>The song dates back to the retuning Jacobite army in 1746

And it still needs retuning today. Perhaps someone will return to tackle
this problem.

--
John Wild
International Concertina Association
Treasurer/Membership Secretary

For email delete not.this.bit.

[John Wild]

In article <48...@purr.demon.co.uk>, bogus address
<bo...@purr.demon.co.uk> writes

>The song owes its present popularity to the 19th century songwriter
>Lady John Scott (Alicia Spottiswoode).

Surely its present popularity, by which I mean with the younger
generation of the 1980's and 1990's, is due to its adoption by the band
Runrig, with Donny Munro singing the lead and involving the whole
audience in the chorus ?

[bogus address]

"John Allan" <john...@callnetuk.com> writes:
> Scottish folklore has it that if a native of Scotland dies outside
> of his country, his spirit is transported back to Scotland by the
> faerie people via "the low road".

No it doesn't. Other people's folklore about Scottish folklore does
have it that way, of course.

> The song dates back to the retuning Jacobite army in 1746,

Funny there was no trace of it for another 80 years, then. (And even
odder that it should date back to the time of the army's retreat; no
song from the Jacobite side is known to date from the period of the
campaign itself, be it in either English, Scots or Gaelic).

> two of whom were captured in Carlisle in the north of England and
> sentenced to death.

So few soldiers of the Jacobite army were sentenced to death that you
should be able to find their names. Who were they?

> One of the prisoners subsequently escaped and made his way back to
> Scotland, still alive but without his friend who was executed. The
> surviving prisoner therefore took "the high road" back to Scotland
> while the other being executed, was transported back by the faerie
> people via "the low road". and so reached Scotland "afore" (before)
> his friend.

Yeah, right.

This is precisely the ever-more-elaborated urban legend I was talking
about. You probably got it word for word off one of the American web
sites devoted to such fantasies.

[Marjorie Clarke]

bogus address wrote in message <48...@purr.demon.co.uk>...

>
>"John Allan" <john...@callnetuk.com> writes:
>> Scottish folklore has it that if a native of Scotland dies outside
>> of his country, his spirit is transported back to Scotland by the
>> faerie people via "the low road".

>No it doesn't. Other people's folklore about Scottish folklore does
>have it that way, of course.

>details snipped

>This is precisely the ever-more-elaborated urban legend I was talking
>about. You probably got it word for word off one of the American web
>sites devoted to such fantasies.

It may well be a relatively modern myth, but it goes back a lot further than
the Internet. I have seen it in A Book of Scotland. This is a Collins
National Anthology (my edition 1950, but first published 1933) first
compiled by H.L. Findlay. It's one of those sentimental collections of
poems, prose, historical extracts etc about Scotland, and it gives a
shortened version of the high/low road story, prefaced with "There is an
old Celtic belief that...." (Interesting that this vague use of the term
Celtic goes back that far).

Hardly a scholarly publication or attribution, I know, and it certainly
doesn't make it true, but it does show this story has been around for at
least 60 or 70 years.

Anyway, how long does a story have to be around before it becomes folklore?

Marjorie Clarke

[Tony Nightingale]

I have only just come accross this thread but as far as I know Lock
Lomond was originally a poem smugled out of carlisle jail from a
Jacobite who was waiting to be hung for fighting against the English
crown.

Or perhaps you know diferent??

Tony (Tweet tweet)

--
Tony Nightingale, FOLK's WAGON on Fenland Radio, Poacher FM,
Purr-fect FM, Don Valley FM. Snail mail 42 Spilsby Road,
Horncastle, Lincs, England, LN9 6AW. 02507 522482 (days)
01507 527835 (late nights) 0378 274535 (mobile)

[Ed. Harris]

In article <hiEvqQAI...@johnwild.demon.co.uk>,

John Wild <i...@johnwild.demon.not.this.bit.co.uk> wrote:
> In article <48...@purr.demon.co.uk>, bogus address
> <bo...@purr.demon.co.uk> writes

> >The song owes its present popularity to the 19th century songwriter
> >Lady John Scott (Alicia Spottiswoode).

> Surely its present popularity, by which I mean with the younger
> generation of the 1980's and 1990's, is due to its adoption by the band
> Runrig, with Donny Munro singing the lead and involving the whole
> audience in the chorus ?

Certainly its popularity (or otherwise) in my generation (50's) is due to
its use in school music lessons along with My Grandfather's Clock et al.

--
--
Ed. CBR600 - MAG #101065
==

[akeegan...@gmail.com]

On Friday, July 30, 1999 at 12:00:00 AM UTC-7, Mark Taintor wrote:
> I'm looking for information regarding the origin and meaning of the song
> "Loch Lomond". I don't understand the "... I'll tak the low road and I'll
> be in Scotland afore ye." line especially. If there's a web site to help
> me understand this as well as other Scots songs I'd love to know about it.
>
> Thanks very much.
>
> Mark
> Chanhassen, MN USA
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Cyberdog ---A Product of Apple Computer, Inc.
> ---------------------------------------------------------

My grandmother (born 1862 Dundee, Scotland) sang this song to me when I was around 3 years old. She told me that when the soldier was dying, he knew his soul would return to Scotland quickly and his friend would have to walk. Nothing about "faeries." Scots used songs to memorialize things that were forbidden or could be called treasonous by the English overlords. This one may well have been alluding to the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden 1746 and the internment of survivors (prisoners) at Carlisle.

[Sam]

+1

[Dave Royal]

akeegan...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, July 30, 1999 at 12:00:00 AM UTC-7, Mark Taintor wrote:
>> I'm looking for information regarding the origin and meaning of the song
>> "Loch Lomond". I don't understand the "... I'll tak the low road and I'll
>> be in Scotland afore ye." line especially. If there's a web site to help
>> me understand this as well as other Scots songs I'd love to know about it.
>>
>> Thanks very much.
>>
>> Mark
>> Chanhassen, MN USA
>>
>

> My grandmother (born 1862 Dundee, Scotland) sang this song to me when I was around 3 years old. She told me that when the soldier was dying, he knew his soul would return to Scotland quickly and his friend would have to walk. Nothing about "faeries." Scots used songs to memorialize things that were forbidden or could be called treasonous by the English overlords. This one may well have been alluding to the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden 1746 and the internment of survivors (prisoners) at Carlisle.

There are several mudcat threads on the origins of Loch Lomand, e.g.
<https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=9274>
(also from 1999!)
--
(Remove numerics from email address)