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Every major event produces songs and stories. The five Jacobite Risings were no different. Some songs were pro-Jacobite; some were Whig (anti-Jacobite); some were outright satires; some recounted the actual historical events; and some were basically spin and fake news. Many of those we now consider to be of the time or "traditional" were actually composed during the Victorian rediscovery of all things Highland in the 1800s, long after the events described. Many were by well-known later poets including Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg, "the Ettrick Shepherd".
Some have become corrupted over the years - for example, the beautiful and haunting lament, The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond, has been bowdlerised into a mawkishly sentimental love-song.
Nonetheless, these songs form a crucial part of Scotland's musical and folk culture, and deserve to be sung and played today. Some will be familiar, either as songs or bagpipe tunes, some less so.
This short book came out of an invitation to sing some of these songs and tell the surrounding tales and histories arising from Scotland during and after the Jacobite era (1688-1746) at various events in 2019, notably Tartan Day South, Tartan Day North Carolina and the Loch Norman Games at Historic Rural Hill, North Carolina.
