Some more Jacobite music

[regshoe]

I haven't posted any music recs for a while, so have my latest Jacobite fave!

Watch on YouTube

Folk music can be so beautifully direct sometimes—ye're but a pack o' traitor louns, ye'll dae nae guid at a'—and James Malcolm sings this with a great contemptuous straightforwardness.

This is another of the after-the-fact Jacobite songs, written years after the '45. Robert Burns wrote at least some of it—the lyrics in the Jacobite Relics of Scotland include several more verses than the words given on this Burns website and also used in this recording, so perhaps those came from elsewhere.

Also, another small cool Scots-Swedish link—you'll notice the word 'descrive' (not 'describe') used in the third verse, which is more obviously than the standard English related to Swedish 'skriva' (which means 'write'; 'describe' would be 'beskriva', the prefixes evidently still being different).

Comments

[regshoe]

No, I think that is related! The Dictionary of the Swedish Academy relates 'skriva' to Latin 'scribere', which appears to be from 'scriba'. Hmm, it's surprising to see Swedish and Scots more similar to each other than English in a word that's originally from Latin (and apparently had a B originally, so they made the same change to V, which also happened in Anglo-French? More and more complicated...).