I just heard a Scots song, rendered by Silly Wizard, that referred to Donald McGillavry.
Was he a figure from history? What did he do? Wiki availeth not, prithee.
http://askville.amazon.com/SimilarQuestions.do?req=Celtic-music-lovers-Donald-McGillavry-real-person
Can anybody tell me more of this Hogg person?
Why would he fake a ballad?
Here’s the lyrics from a group called Empty Hats.
They play a lot of RenFaires. We have 3 of their CDs. We love them.
I presume that’s the same guy.
Edit: I don’t know why he’d fake a ballad - presumably because he had marketing to do, and it sounds better to call a song “traditional” than to say “this is a song I wrote last Tuesday” - especially if one is writing about politically sensitive topics.
I’m not even sure you could call it faking. There were plenty of now traditional Scots and Irish ballads written long after the events they described. Alot of these songs became popular intially as broadsides and then latterly their origins became a bit misty. This process happens rather quickly. For example the song “Fields of Athenry” was written in the 1970’s. There are many people who think this is a more traditional song than that. With relation to a “Donald McGillavry” I would guess that the name serves the purpose of being easy to rhyme!
Good points. I’ve lost count of the number of people who think “Flower of Scotland” (appalling dirge that it is) is a traditional song. It was written by The Corries in the 1960s.