June Tunes - 2025
First up is a bouncy traditional Highland strathspey, Munlochy Bridge, notated here in G major - although I’ve seen it chorded with E minors. A simpler chording might be G/G/G/C repeated every 8 bars!
Munlochy is a small village, just north of Inverness, lying at the head of Munlochy Bay, in the Black Isle. (Called ‘Black’ on account of the lack of snow in winter). The melody appears in many pipe collections as well as fiddle volumes, and in fact the first appearance of the "Munlochy Bridge" title attached to the tune was in Queen Victoria's piper William Ross's 1885 collection.
Echoing last month’s presentation on tune variants, by Paul Wells, read more below.
[From the Tunearch annotation]: The melody has been employed for popular songs (in Gaelic and English), along with fiddle and pipe tunes in various iterations. Originally Scottish, it was imported to Maritime Canada. Gaelic words to the melody are given by John Shaw in liner notes to Topic 12TS354, obtained from Cape Breton storyteller Joe Neil MacNeil. Perlman (1996) notes the tune is widely played among fiddlers throughout North-East Kings County, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Christine Martin (2002) prints a song version under the Gaelic title "Gun do dhiùlt am bodach fodar dhomh" (The old man refused me fodder), and the melody is also the vehicle for the puirt a beul songs "Dh'ith na coinna maragan" and "Tha m'inntinn raoir a-nochd 's a-raoir."
A variant is also used for the song "Leith Wynd" or "Come Hap Me with Thy Petticoat." Cape Breton fiddler, composer, publisher and editor (and lighthouse-keeper) Paul Stewart Cranford finds the strathspey "Sir John Malcolm" (in Bremner, Kerr's Fourth Collection) to be a related tune, particularly the first strain of "Sir John Malcolm" which closely resembles the second part of "Munlochy Bridge."
Next are a pair of Northeast strathspeys: Remember that bridges are ‘brigs’ in the Scots dialect, and these tunes aren’t about local jails, or 3-masted sailing ships.
The Brig o’ Potarch in Em is a composition of Aberdeenshire fiddler-composer and Scottish dancing master James Scott Skinner (1843-1927), from his Logie Collection (1888), dedicated to "Miss Lindsay". Potarch is the name of a hamlet and a bridge built in 1812 over the River Dee near Aboyne, Aberdeenshire.
A hostelry dating from the 1740's is still in operation at Potarch, much expanded over the centuries.
When the bridge was repaired in 1830 the workmen left two stones weighing some 775 lbs. behind, employed as counterweights. A local stonemasons son, Donald Dinnie, made his reputation by carrying both stones the length of the bridge and back in 1860, and they have ever since been called the Dinnie Stones, and kept at the hotel. Dinnie garnered international fame as a strongman in the Victorian era.
The Brig o’ Feugh in Gm. was also composed by J. Scott Skinner as a companion tune to the D major reel Brig o' Feugh composed by his mentor and sometimes playing partner, Peter Milne, that rounds out this month’s tunes.
Remember to play a strathspey a day!
