Saturday 23 November 2019

The Songs of Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne



*The Flower of Strathearn*

Carolina loved to sing and dance, and studied music from the great fiddler Niel Gow – she composed and improved on Scots folk ballads. She expressed the feelings of people of highlands about Charles Edward Stuart.

Carolina Oliphant’s BEST KNOWN SONGS -
Will ye no come back again
We a hundred pipers an ‘a, an ‘a, 
Charlie is my Darling
The hand O the Leal

Carolina Oliphant is second only to Robert Burns in importance in our Scots culture. Born in 1766, in an ancient Jacobite noble family. Their lands were confiscated after the 45, they stayed at the royal court france for 19 years and later returned to Cask house.

At 39 she married and moved to Edina, where she wrote 87 songs for the Scots Minstrel Collection by RA Smith – she signed herself BB. No one knew of her writing. She moved ot Kingston Ireland and then travelled with her son on the continent. She died in 1845 and after her sister published her songs – in the book Lay of Strathearn .
  
The White Rose of Cask: the Life and Songs of Carolina Oliphant by Freeland Barbour. Barbour is a key figure in Scots Trad music – musician, radio and record producer and composer. 
https://www.amazon.com/White-Rose-Gask-Carolina-Oliphant/


Carolina wrote more on a romantic past –
Wheras Burns was more forward looking, with optimism for a better future. 


 PS
Our Bard Robert Burns. Did Burns die of exhaustion? (as Hamish Macpherson and others claim). 
Certainly reading his biography I wonder at his exertions – particularly with supporting his young family at Ellisland and Dumfries, by travelling long distance on horseback for the Excise work, the farm work, and his passion of collecting reworking and composing Scots song.