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Coming Home

Contributors
Date 27 July 1955
Track ID 11811
Part 1

Track Information

Original Track ID

SA1955.129.A10

Original Tape ID

SA1955.129

Summary

In this song, the singer has returned to Strathairly after a long time abroad, and remarks how "the dawn rose grey on Strathairly" in his youth; now he wanders there "slow and sad". None of the shearers he knew before now recognise him, and the lass he courted is now a fisher-wife.

George Baillie first heard the song as a schoolboy around fifty years ago from an old schoolteacher called Winchester. The singer Robert Wilson [1907-1964] once sang the song at a ceilidh in Glasgow, and introduced the song as one that the audience were unlikely to know. Frank Gunn promptly shouted out that he had heard George Baillie [the present contributor] sing it thirty years before.

Item Notes

3 verses of 6 lines. Composed by Dinah Maria Craik (née Mulock) (20 April 1826 - 12 October 1887) and published under the title 'Coming Home'. This performance does not include Craik's fourth verse, beginning, "O the land is fine, fine."

Strathairly lies to the east of Largo in Fife, on the boundary of Largo and Newburn parishes.

See:
'Thirty Years: Poems Old and New' (D. M. Craik, 1880) pp. 228-229

Recording Location

County - Sutherland

Item Location

County - Fife

Parish - Largo

Village/Place - Strathairly

Language

Scots

Collection

SoSS

Source Type

Reel to reel

Audio Quality

Good