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"The Devil In The Kitchen", also known as "The De’il In The Kitchen","Calum Crubach",
"Devil Shake the Half-Breed", "Gurren’s Castle", "Mountain Reel",
"Our Highland Cousins", "The Prince of Wales Jig", "The Titanic Highland",
"Yorkshire Bite" is a Scottish, Shetland, Canadian and Irish (Pipe) reel, fling or
strathspey in A Mixolydian. The parts are played AAB (Hunter), AA’B (Skinner/Harp),
AABB (Martin), AABBA’A’BB (Perlman), AABCCD (Skinner/Violinist).
It was composed (according to J. Scott Skinner) as a pipe tune by William Ross, the Queen’s Piper. The melody was arranged (and popularized) by J. Scott Skinner (1843-1927) and appears as a two-part tune in his Harp and Claymore collection (1904). Skinner later expanded the melody to four parts (variations) in his Scottish Violinist; in Harp and Claymore he directs that the tune be played an octave lower the second time through. In pipe collections the tune set as a strathspey is usually attributed to one John MacPherson and once to a Donald McPhedran (in his own collection). The late Donegal fiddler Danny O’Donnell (1910-2001) recorded a version on his album entitled generically as "Highland Fling". It was printed in Hunter's The Fiddle Music of Scotland (1988), Martin's Ceol na Fidhle, vol. 1, (1991), Martin's Traditional Scottish Fiddling (2002), Perlman's The Fiddle Music of Prince Edward Island (1996), Skinner's Harp and Claymore (1903/4), Skinner's The Scottish Violinist, Banalari's Celtic Encyclopedia (1999). It was recorded by Brenda Stubbert on In Jig Time! (1995), Alasdair Fraser & Jody Stecher on The Driven Bow (1988), Alasdair Fraser & Tony McManus on Return to Kintail (1999), Eileen Ivers and Natalie MacMaster (1994), Dan Joe MacInnis on The Cape Breton Fiddle of... (1962), Joe Cormier on Scottish Violin Music from Cape Breton Island (1974), Natalie MacMaster on No Boundaries (1996), Bill Lameyon on From Cape Breton to Boston and Back: Classic House Sessions of Traditional Cape Breton Music 1956-1977 (2000), Jerry Holland on Parlor Music (2005). |