Coming Home
Track Information
Original Track ID
SA1955.129.A10
Original Tape ID
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
Genre
Collection
Source Type
Reel to reel
Audio Quality
Good