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Scruffy Cèilidh Traditional music · sessions · folklore

Slow air (lament) · D major

Niel Gow's Lament for the Death of His Second Wife

Written by the Perthshire fiddler Niel Gow after the death of his second wife, Margaret Urquhart, in 1805, this slow 6/8 air is one of the most admired laments in Scottish fiddle music. It is a simple, singing tune, so it rewards a steady bow and a quiet accompaniment.

Type
Slow air (lament)
Key
D major
Meter
6/8
Origin & travel
Scotland (Perthshire), early 1800s
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:5
T:Niel Gow's Lament for the Death of His Second Wife
C:Niel Gow (d. 1807)
R:slow air
M:6/8
L:1/8
Q:3/8=44
K:D
% Setting: https://thesession.org/tunes/1892#setting1892 (The Session, thesession.org; tune #1892, setting 1892, posted by KeepFiddlin', 2003-08-18).
% Contains information from The Session (thesession.org), made available under the Open Database License (ODbL).
% Chords: script-suggested first pass (scripts/setbook/harmonize.py) -- confirm by ear.
|:"Bm"D/B,/|"D"A,>B,D D>ED|EFA B2d|
A>FD E>DE|"Bm"FDB, B,2D/B,/|"D"A,>B,D D>ED|EFA d2c/B/|
A>FD B,2 A,|B,D>D D2:|"A"(3A/B/c/|"D"d>fd ecA|
B/A/B/c/d B/A/G/F/E/D/|E>DE F>ED|"Bm"FDB, B,2 (3A/B/c/|"D"d>fd ecA|
B/A/B/c/d B/A/G/F/E/D/|E>DE FDB,|A,<DD [D2A,2] (3A/B/c/| d>fd ecA|
B/A/B/c/d B/A/G/F/E/D/|F/D/A/F/d/A/ B/A/G/F/E/D/|"Em"FEE E2D/B,/|"D"A,B,D D>ED|
EFA d2c/B/|A>FD B,2A,|B,<DD [D2A,2]||

Listen

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Where it came from, where it went

Composer and date. Composed by Niel Gow (1727-1807; Wikipedia gives 22 March 1727 to 1 March 1807, and the Tune Archive gives 1727-1807), fiddler to the Dukes of Atholl. His second wife, Margaret Urquhart of Perth (married 1768), died in 1805, and the lament is traditionally said to be for her.

Source collection. The Tune Archive (ttadev.org mirror) lists it in the Gows' Fifth Collection of Strathspey Reels (1809), p. 2, and records an alternate title, "Miss Graham's Delight". We have not seen the 1809 page ourselves, so treat the citation as secondary. Given Gow's date of death, the tune is long in the public domain.

How this setting was made. The notation is The Session's setting 1892 (tune #1892, posted by KeepFiddlin' in 2003), chosen by a fixed rule (the key shared by most of its 9 settings: D major). Nobody has retyped or edited the notes by hand. Two caveats: the chord symbols are a script-suggested first pass (one diatonic triad per bar change; it is mostly D with a few Bm, A and Em, and 18 of its 26 bars had a close second choice), so they need checking by ear; and the chord-adding step strips grace notes, so this version leaves out the 19 grace notes the posted setting carries.

Title match. The Session lists this tune as "Niel Gow's Lament For His Second Wife"; the full title used here is one of its recorded alternate names. The Session classes it as a jig; the Tune Archive and Trad Tune Explorer both treat it as a slow air in 6/8, and so do we.

Cross-check against other sources (described, not copied). Trad Tune Explorer (https://www.tradtuneexplorer.com/songs/niel-gows-lament-for-the-death-of-his-second-wife.html) gives D major, 6/8, rhythm "air", two parts, with an A part of 8 bars and a B part of 16 bars; that bar count is our reading of the page's chord layout, not a stated figure, and the page credits Paul Hardy's Tunebook (CC BY-SA 4.0) as its source. Our script count on The Session setting agrees: an 8-bar A part repeated, then a 16-bar B part written out once. The Tune Archive says most of its sources are AAB (one, Perlman, has AABB'), which also agrees. The sources disagree only on the type label (jig versus air). No source gives a tempo; the playback tempo here (dotted quarter = 44) is our assumption.

Attribution. Contains information from The Session (thesession.org, https://thesession.org/tunes/1892#setting1892), made available under the Open Database License (ODbL). The tune itself is in the public domain.

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