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"Miss Sarah Drummond of Perth", also known as “Calum Crubach”,
"The Crippled Lad of the Glen" (in Gaelic "An Gille crubach anns' a Ghleann"),
"Danse Écossaise","Devil Shake the Half-Breed", Gurren’s Castle", "Miss Drummond of
Perth", “Mountain Reel", "Our Highland Cousins" and other titles is a Scottish
strathspey in A Minor. The parts are played AAB.
Composer credit for the tune was claimed by Niel Gow {1727-1807} (in his 1807 Third Collection, second edition), however the tune appears under the full title (i.e. referencing Sarah Drummond) in Malcolm MacDonald's 2nd collection (1789, the volume dedicated to the Earl of Breadalbane). No composer was given credit to MacDonald by Gow. It also appears in John and Andrew Gow’s A Collection of Slow Airs, Strathspeys and Reels (London, c. 1795). Andrew (1760-1803) and younger brother John (1764-1826), sons of Niel, established a publishing business in London in 1788 and were the English distributors for the Gow family musical publications. The melody is also known to Cape Breton fiddlers. The Drummonds were a noble family of Gow’s home county of Perthshire, loyal to the Jacobite cause for which several of the family died or were exiled. Clementina Sarah Drummond (1786-1865) was the only surviving child and heir of James Drummond (d. 1800), the first Lord Perth, and Clementina Elphinstone (d. 1822), Lady Drummond, from whom she inherited an extensive fortune and vast Perthshire estates. It was printed in Glen's The Glen Collection of Scottish Dance Music, vol. 2 (1895), S. Johnson's A Twenty Year Anniversary Collection (2003), MacDonald's A Second Collection of Strathspey Reels (1789) and Banalari's Celtic Encyclopedia (1999). |