A certain doper seems conspicuously absent from this thread! If only we had someone from a Northern climate who happened to also be a Piper!
The one, the only, the legend that is…
I’m an American, and Scotland the Brave has always been “the bagpipe song” as far as I was concerned.
Same here. If you asked me, name a song played on the bagpipes, that would be my number one answer. If you asked me, name another, it’d be “Amazing Grace.” And then, I’m out of bagpipe song names.
My mother was a piper and her group was kept quite busy performing Amazing Grace at funerals. Usually a lone piper was used, sometimes 2 or 3. She also played a lot of weddings. It was very common to have pipes at a Scots or Irish wedding.
Other well known songs pipers get asked to play include “Danny Boy”, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” (that’s fairly common if pipes are used at a non-Christian LEO funeral), “Irish Washerwoman”, “Auld Lang Syne”, “Flowers of the Forest” (used at military funerals), and lots of miscellaneous bits of Scots and Irish folk music which use the same scale available to pipes.
Interesting factoid: One of the reasons you so seldom see pipes played in a group with other more traditional instruments is that you can only really tell what key you are playing in when you get to the end of the piece you are playing and construct your final chord. Very much a Scots instrument - quite contrary. 
The 2nd movement of Brahms’ Deutches Requiem also maps rather nicely to House of the Rising Sun. Or, better yet, vice versa.
There is… a house… in New… Orleans…
My wife once had the privilege of having “Happy Birthday” played on the pipes for her on her birthday
- by a naked man (except for the pipes) on a beach in Jamaica.
Well… back when the spouse and I played the pipes I’d say 9 out of 10 requests was for Amazing Grace. I’m sure there’s no connection…:rolleyes:
Yep - It’s an American thing. Amazing Grace is known elsewhere but not as played to death.
[nitpick]The uilleann pipes are bagpipes. But the highland variety is an eff of a lot easier to carry down the street in a parade, or in a funeral procession.[/nitpick]
They don’t play a pentatonic scale (although they can); it’s a sort of out-of-tune Mixolydian. It has nine notes from a “G” to the “A” an ninth above.
(In quotes because the G is really more like an A-flat and the A is more like a B-flat, except they’re also not really those either. But they’re called G and A.)
BOOM! Lcve it 
those of you hating on the pipes,
what in blue blazes is wrong with you people?!?!
The Bagpipes are awesome, they can weep, sing, rock and roll, rhythm the blues right out of the heck!, sigh…
Martha, we went wrong somewhere back there, kids these days, there’s just something not right about them
Amazing Grace was (perhaps unwittingly) was written just for the Pipes. However, I too have grown weary of hearing it.
Marches now, well now there ya have something. I love me some military marches played on the pipes.
Unfortunately the wife is also tragically unenlightened and so my listening enjoyment of the bagpipes is sharply curtailed.
The bagpipes I heard today played a bunch of songs I recognized, including “The Bonny Lass of Fyvie-O”, all four armed forces themes, “God Bless America”, and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, and I think “The Minstrel Boy” might have been in there too, but no “Amazing Grace”. And the last time I saw a link to YouTube labeled “Awesome bagpipe performance”, or something to that effect, it was AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck”.
And on the topic of ballad meter, for the longest time I had “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” stuck in my head… to the tune of “Stairway to Heaven”.
I like the bagpipes, but playing “Amazing Grace” on them has become a huge cliche over the past 20 years or so. I have to admit I roll my eyes when I hear it nowadays.
What do you throw a drowning bagpipes player?
His bagpipes.
I never thought Amazing Grace was especially appropriate for a funeral. I assumed it was chosen because its the most likely hymn non-church goers have heard of. And the link to the pipes was formed by the recording mentioned in #4. I’m not sure I ever heard them together before that record.
I’m going to do this. I can’t stand “Amazing Grace” and it’s torture on bagpipes.
But I do like Bagpipes. My fave is the theme from the Magnificent Seven. There are several versions but give this one a try.
That’s Scotland the Brave, with a little Loch Loman thrown in. Magnificent Seven is a movie, right?
Correct you are svd678.
The youth group at the church I went to while I was in high school used to sing that all the time. My suggestion that we sing “House of the Rising Sun” to the tune of “Amazing Grace” was met with laughter.
My favourite combinarion is singing “The Marines’ Hymn” to “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” 
I went to a concert by the Black Watch pipes & drums* when they toured the US with the Royal Marines band in 1976. One of the songs they played was “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” And I used to have a tape by some US police department pipe band playing the theme from Dallas.
- The only group I’ve been to more than one concert of.