Flowers of Edinburgh

The earliest print is in John Walsh's Caledonian Country Dances, published in London around 1737, under a title with one flower in it: The Flower of Edinburgh. A few years later the composer and cellist James Oswald printed the melody as a song, My Love's Bonny When She Smiles on Me, and later still put it in his Caledonian Pocket Companion as The Flower of Edinburgh. Nathaniel Gow credited Oswald with writing it. The plural title had settled in by 1787, when the tune appeared in the Scots Musical Museum.

Nobody agrees on what the flowers were. A flower of a town was usually a woman, which fits the singular title. Gow wrote in 1817 that the flowers were the town's magistrates. The story told most often now is that they were the contents of chamber pots, emptied from the windows of the old town into the street below. That one is folklore, and it has lasted because it is a good story.

The tune crossed the Atlantic early. Giles Gibbs copied it into his fife book in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1777, and Clement Weeks of Greenland, New Hampshire put it in his dance collection in 1783. George Knauff printed it in Baltimore in 1839 as Old Virginia Reel. It has been a contra dance tune in New England, a fiddle tune in Pennsylvania, Missouri and Cape Breton, and it is called at bluegrass jams in G under the name it has carried for nearly three hundred years.

On a mandolin the two strains sit in two places. The low strain starts on the open D course and stays on the D and A courses, and the bar to slow down is the fourth, A, F sharp, d, F sharp, which rocks between the fourth fret of the D course and the fifth of the A. The high strain climbs onto the E course and asks for the one stretch in the tune, the b at the seventh fret, in its first bar. The E minor bar that follows is the sound of the tune: a held B, then three e's on the open E course.