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Scruffy Cèilidh Traditional music · sessions · folklore

Slow air (lament) · A major

Hector the Hero

James Scott Skinner's lament for his friend Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald, written in March 1903, is now one of the best-loved slow airs in the Scottish repertoire. It is played slowly and with weight, on fiddle, pipes and whistle alike, and it is usually pitched in A.

Type
Slow air (lament)
Key
A major
Meter
3/4
Origin & travel
Scotland (Monikie, Angus), 1903
Traditions
Scottish · Scottish fiddle

Sheet music session skeleton

Press play and the notes light up as they sound. Chord names above the staff are coloured by their root letter (the same colours as the song sheets). “Standard” and “Richer” are General-MIDI stand-ins hosted elsewhere; “Scruffy” is our own bank rendered from open sample sets (credits at /soundfont/scruffy-v1/CREDITS.md). Tempo slider is the “warp” control in the player.

ABC notation — copy into any ABC tool 
X:4
T:Hector the Hero
C:James Scott Skinner (1903)
R:slow air
M:3/4
L:1/8
Q:1/4=56
K:A
% Setting: https://thesession.org/tunes/1292#setting25242 (The Session, thesession.org; tune #1292, setting 25242, posted by JACKB, 2014-11-27).
% Contains information from The Session (thesession.org), made available under the Open Database License (ODbL).
% Chords: carried unchanged from the thesession setting.
A>B|"A"c3B B>A|"D"f3e e>c|"A"e2 e2 A>B|"Fm"c3B B>A|
"D"f3a f/e/c|"E"B2 B2 A>B|"Fm"c3B B>A|"D"f3e e>f|
"A"e2 e2 A>B|"Fm"c2 a>b a>f|"A"e2 A2 A/B/c|"B"B2 B>A A2|1 "A"A2 A2 A>B|2 "A"A2 A2 A2||
A/c/e|"D"f2 f>a af|"D"a2 ab/a/ g/f/|"A"e2e2 e2|"A"e2 A2 A/c/e|
"Fm"f2 f>e e>f|"Fm"e2 e2 A/B/c|"Bm"B2B2 B2|"E"B2 A2 A/c/e|
"Fm"f2 f>a a>f|"D"a2 ab/a/ g>f|"A"e2 e>A AB|"Fm"c2 a>b a>f|
"A"e2 A2 A/B/c|"E"B2 B>A A2|1 "A"A2 A2 A/c/e|2 "A"A2 A2 A2||

Listen

Recording embed goes here.

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Where it came from, where it went

Composer and date. Composed by James Scott Skinner (1843-1927), the Aberdeenshire fiddler known as the Strathspey King. The Tune Archive (via its ttadev.org mirror) dates it to 27 March 1903, written at Skinner's home in Monikie, and records it as a tribute to Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald, who died that year. It is also found as "Hector MacDonald's Lament".

Source collection and recordings. The earliest printed source listed by the Tune Archive is Skinner's own The Harp and Claymore (1904, p. 152); we have not seen that page ourselves, so treat the citation as secondary. The University of Aberdeen's Skinner discography lists the tune at a recording session on 30 January 1905 and again in late November 1922.

Public domain. Skinner died on 17 March 1927 (Wikipedia: born 5 August 1843; the Tune Archive gives 1843-1927), so the tune is long out of copyright. One reference page (ibiblio's "Air Apparent") gives 1847-1928 as reported in a search summary we did not open; two sources we did read agree on 1843-1927 and we have followed them.

How this setting was made. The notation and chord symbols on this page are The Session's setting 25242 (tune #1292, posted by JACKB in 2014), chosen by a fixed rule (the key shared by most of its 18 settings: A major). Nobody has retyped or edited the notes by hand. The chords are the ones already written into that setting; they have not been checked by ear yet.

Cross-check against other sources (described, not copied). The Fiddlevideo sheet (https://www.fiddlevideo.com/wp-content/uploads/Sheet_Music/Hector%20the%20Hero.pdf) is in A major, in 3/4, two repeated parts each closing with first- and second-time bars, with chord letters above the staff: key, meter and part structure agree with this setting. It is credited as a modern arrangement (Hanneke Cassel and Peter Willis, 2012-2014), not as Skinner's 1903 original, and its repeat signs are not present in The Session setting, which writes the two parts out with ending brackets only, so playback here runs through both endings in order. Our script count gives 32 bar slots (about 16 per part, pickups and ending bars counted separately); a bar-by-bar comparison of melody and chords with the Fiddlevideo sheet has not been done. Points other sources disagree on, left unresolved: The Session files this tune as a waltz (3/4), while the Tune Archive's description reads as 6/8 although its own notation header says 3/4; and its collection list shows the part structure variously as AAB, AA'BB or ABC. The playback tempo (quarter note = 56) is our assumption; no source gives one.

Attribution. Contains information from The Session (thesession.org, https://thesession.org/tunes/1292#setting25242), made available under the Open Database License (ODbL). The tune itself is in the public domain.

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