Loch Lomond

The earliest printing anyone has found is sheet music from Paterson and Sons in Edinburgh in 1840, under the title Bonnie Loch Loman and credited only to a lady. The lady is usually named as Lady John Scott, a songwriter who collected tunes, and the account that goes with her is that she wrote it down after hearing it sung in the streets of Edinburgh. Later printings sometimes made her the composer, which she was not.

The story most people are told is that the song is the farewell of a Jacobite prisoner after the rising of 1745, condemned to die, whose spirit will reach Scotland ahead of the living friend who walks home. That reading draws on an old Celtic belief that the soul of a soldier who died far away traveled home by a road of its own. It is a good story, and nothing in the early printings says it is the song's own. The tune has cousins older than the words, and scholars have pointed to a dance tune in John Playford's Dancing Master of 1651.

The chorus is sung to the same eight bars as the verse, so the whole tune is eight bars sung twice, and a player who knows one half knows both. Each half climbs to the high e in its fourth bar, comes back to it twice more, and settles on a long A before landing on G, and the long notes are where a singer breathes.

On a mandolin in G the song sits in first position between the open D course and the open E course, and never needs the G course. It is almost all quarter notes and pairs of eighths, which makes it a good first air. The held e and d in the fourth bar and the long A at the end of each half want a steady tremolo, and in the chorus the fourth bar walks down and back up to the d while the voice would be holding.