Month: January 2026

Belated Happy Burns Night! Here is a tune from Scotland called the White Cockade. It doesn’t follow the predictable pattern of some of the tunes we learned, so we sang through the A part (verse) using the Robbie Burns poem The Jolly Beggar’s John Highwayman:

A Highland lad my love was born,
The Lalland laws he held in scorn;
But he still was faithfu’ to his clan,
My gallant, braw John Highlandman.

Sing hey my braw John Highlandman!
Sing ho my braw John Highlandman!
There’s not a lad in a’ the lan’
Was match for my John Highlandman.  etc etc
https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/the_jolly_beggars_john_highlandman/

Here are the Jacobite words, famously recorded in the 1970s by The Corries:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Scottish_Song/The_White_Cockade

We also tried some upper and lower cuts (ornaments) and tried a slightly different set of chords,

Here is our tune from the end of the Autumn term, Wolves a-Howlin’, aka Poor Little Darling. It’s a tune that’s spread widely among Deep South and MidWestern fiddlers, with a various versions of the tune present in various different places. I’ve chucked an E chord in here and there for variety but you can here in the first video that the chords are fairly stable and unchanging – this is not uncommon in Old Time and Bluegrass music.

Here’s another version of the tune on mandolin – you can here where it’s the same and where it’s different. Many thanks to David for sending these videos over, both are excellent finds!