Introduction

Summary

For the songs in The Gentle Shepherd, Ramsay specified tunes which he could assume were well-known to his audience already, or which were available to them by other means. Rather than providing music notation along with the text, he merely specified the tunes’ titles, in the manner of many broadside ballads. In his discussion of ‘our Scots tunes’ in the Preface to TTM (3rd edition, 1729) he suggests that ‘[w]hat further adds to the Esteem we have for them, is, their Antiquity, and their being universally known’, but this is not to say that all of the music was necessarily ‘traditional’ or ‘folk’ music in the present-day senses.

Most of the tunes in GS can be broadly classified as airs, but there is one pipe tune [7], at least one tune which was composed for the London theatre [20], and a duet in two sections which appears to have been specially composed for GS itself [11]. Even ‘vocal airs’ is too restrictive a term, as many were equally well-known in instrumental versions, and are technically demanding to sing because of their wide range: in fact, the versions of the tunes published in Scotland remain mostly instrumental in their style and conception until the second half of the eighteenth century. The first edition of GS to be printed with unequivocally vocal music for the songs is the Glasgow edition published by Foulis in 1788, although in the late 1750s Robert Bremner had presented many of the songs with guitar accompaniments for domestic use.

Popular tunes such as those specified by Ramsay were transmitted in many contexts, and the same tune could serve several functions: it could be sung in private and in public, played for the accompaniment of dancing, and it could have civic and military uses by town waits and regimental bands. The most celebrated civic use for a tune included in GS is the reported playing of [5] ‘Why should I be sad on my wedding day’ on the carillon of Edinburgh's St Giles Cathedral on the day that the Treaty of Union came into effect in 1707, an act which underlines how a melody could carry meaning and associations without an accompanying text.