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Braes of Mellinish was "Google has failed me"
Herbold.Bruce
May 26, 2006, 12:43 a.m. (Message 45380)
well a little more web surfing has revealed that the person that Tom Mungall found with a last name of Mellinish is actually marked with a question in the record about whether the name might have actually been "Mellinick." In any case the "Mellinish/Mellinick" is cited as an Englishman, which is a bit exasperating for a question of Scottish heritage. He is also surely not the American plasterer that I found in the records of Ohio yesterday, unless he was a very old plasterer. Further web-surfing found that there was an Irish town called "Mount Mellinick." A "mount" might be a very grandiose 'brae' but it seems an odd thing for a Scottish tune and dance to commemerate an obscure Irish town. Now does the Kentigern/Braes of Mellinish jig tune bear any relationship to the Gow tune Major Graham that the RSCDS used for the dance? Musicians?? And why is there no record in Dance Data of the use of any tune under the names Kentigern Jig or The Braes of Mellinish? I guess I'd best get back to doing the work I'm paid for. Bruce Herbold San Francisco Branch
On Thu, 25 May 2006 15:43:03 -0700 xxxxxxx.xxxxx@xxxxxxx.xxx.xxx wrote: > Now does the Kentigern/Braes of Mellinish jig tune bear any relationship > to the Gow tune Major Graham that the RSCDS used for the dance? > Musicians?? And why is there no record in Dance Data of the use of any > tune under the names Kentigern Jig or The Braes of Mellinish? 1) Not that I can tell! 2) Because it hasn't been used as a name tune or secondary tune in any recording for SCD indexed in Dance Data? It's a 4-part pipe jig which wouldn't be the best of candidates for our dances but I'm pretty sure I've played it in a set for something... Worse than not finding it in Dance Data, there's no information on that tune in any of my faithful internet tune resources, which almost always turn up something... Does anyone have the Gore Index available to check for a source? I submit that the title "Kentigern Jig" (aka Kentigern's Jig) is a red herring here; it appears that the jig is called that because the band Kentigern recorded "The Braes of Mellinish" on their 1979 album and it somehow became associated with them (this happens a lot in the aural folk music tradition). I still wonder about the strathspey/jig connection. Did the Society collect a dance that they decided would work better as a strathspey than a jig, then come up with a nice old strathspey tune to fit it? Just conjecture. -Steve -- Steve Wyrick - Concord, California
