I’ve seen The Battlefield Band live a few times. Bagpipes in the right setting can be fun. My favorite cover they do is Bad Moon Rising.
Oh, thanks! Ignorance fought.
Here’s a great piping without any of the usual’s.
nitpick: Loch Lomond. “You’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road…” or “O ye’ll tak’ the high road, and I’ll tak’ the low road…” One of my favorite Scottish songs (although it’s one of the very few I know, so it’s not like I’m choosing from a large pool.)
I’m trying to remember why I know this song so well. Was it ever featured on cartoons? I lived and worked in Scotland for a few months, but I knew the song before that (and I honestly don’t think I even heard it once while living there.) As an American, where’s the most likely place I heard it? And obviously I must have heard it more than once to remember the lyrics from the chorus.
I’m an American, and the only two songs I associate with the bagpipes are “Scotland the Brave,” and “Celebration,” by Kool and the Gang.
Judy Collins (again) recorded a version of it that got a lot of radio play in the 70s. If you were a kid in the 70s, you probably sang it in preschool in circle time, or sang it in music class in elementary school, depending on just how old you were when the Collins version was a big hit (exactly what year that was, I don’t know; we had a “Best of Judy Collins” that had it by about 1978 or so, and that’s the best I can do).
Also, I think Burl Ives used to sing it on his children’s albums. He was a hugely popular folksinger, and all-round performer, who did voices on some if the Rankin & Bass Christmas specials, and had a #1 hit in the 1940s with “Blue-tail Fly.”
A Scottish Soldier:
I love a good stirring bagpipe tune. “The Barren Rocks of Aden” and the “Black Bear/Highland Laddie” medley by the Black Watch are favourites. When the Royal Scots Dragoons recording of Amazing Grace came out, I was in heaven especially when the whole band comes in on the second stanza. I can’t have been the only one, considering how popular it became. But yeah, it’s been done to death now. I haven’t listened to it in years.
I was at a funeral just this afternoon, as it happens, for a woman of Scottish descent. Her nephew, in full Highlands gear, played both “Amazing Grace” and “Danny Boy.”
I’ve known for 40 years that Emily Dickinson’s poetry could be easily sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas”. I’m not a musician. Would you say “The Yellow Rose of Texas”
is in ‘Ballad Meter’?
Back when I used to teach AP European History, the kids would always joke that the answer to any musical question on one of my quizzes would be either “Scotland the Brave” or “Rule Britannia.” And if there were bagpipes it was the former.
The best bagpipe song is the theme from Star Wars.
How about the cantina music on bagpipes?