Skye Boat Song

The song was published in London in 1884, in a collection called Songs of the North edited by Anne Campbell MacLeod and Harold Boulton. MacLeod had the melody. The story she told is that she was being rowed across Loch Coruisk on the Isle of Skye in the 1870s when the boatmen broke into a Gaelic rowing song, and she wrote down what she remembered of the air. Boulton wrote English words for it about the escape of Charles Edward Stuart to Skye after Culloden in 1746. In later editions MacLeod's name was dropped and the tune was credited as an old Highland rowing measure arranged by Malcolm Lawson.

The Gaelic song behind it is usually given as Cuachag nan Craobh, the cuckoo in the grove, a love song by the poet William Ross from around 1782. The Jacobite story is the song's own invention, a century and more after the event, and the folk music writer Andrew Kuntz has pointed out that it succeeded so well that people soon remembered learning it as children. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a different set of words to the air in the 1880s, and it is Stevenson's words, lightly changed, that open the television series Outlander. The air under both is traditional and free.

The form is a chorus and a verse, and the song is sung chorus first and chorus last, so that is how the page runs. The chorus is in G and climbs to the d. The verse turns to E minor and never climbs past the B. Its lines start on the B, then the A, then the G, each a step lower, and the last one hands back to the chorus on a D.

On a mandolin in G the song sits in first position between the open D course and the d at the fifth fret of the A course, and the G course never sounds. The whole rhythm of the song is in the first bar of each line: a long note, a short one, then a quarter, the lilt of oars. Keep the short note short. The long notes that fill a bar want tremolo, and where the voice holds a note for two bars the page walks down or up into the next line in quarter notes, which gives the right hand something to do while the left hand gets ready.