The Skye Boat Song

"The Skye Boat Song" is a Scottish folk song, which can also be played as a waltz, recalling the escape of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) from Uist to the Isle of Skye after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. "Come O'er the Stream Charlie" is a Scottish song whose theme is the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Written well after the events it commemorates, it is not a genuine Jacobite song, as is the case with many others now considered in the "classic canon of Jacobite songs," most of which were songs "composed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but were passed off as contemporary products of the Jacobite risings."

Content

The song tells how Charles escaped in a small boat, with the aid of Flora MacDonald, disguised as a serving maid. The song is a traditional expression of Jacobitism and its story has also entered Scotland as a national legend.

Origin

The lyrics were written by Sir Harold Boulton, 2nd Baronet, to an air collected by Annie MacLeod (Lady Wilson) in the 1870s. The song was first published in Songs of the North by Boulton and MacLeod, London, 1884, a book that went into at least fourteen editions. In later editions MacLeod's name was dropped and the ascription "Old Highland rowing measure arranged by Malcolm Lawson" was substituted. It was quickly taken up by other compilers, such as Laura Alexandrine Smith's Music of the Waters (published 1888).

According to Andrew Kuntz, a collector of folk music lore, MacLeod was on a trip to the isle of Skye and was being rowed over Loch Coruisk (Coire Uisg, the "Cauldron of Waters") when the rowers broke into a Gaelic rowing song "Cuachag nan Craobh" ("The Cuckoo in the Grove"). Miss MacLeod set down what she remembered of the air, with the intention of using it later in a book she was to co-author with Boulton, who later added the section with the Jacobite associations." As a piece of modern romantic literature with traditional links it succeeded perhaps too well, for soon people began "remembering" they had learned the song in their childhood, and that the words were 'old Gaelic lines'," Andrew Kuntz has observed.

The song was not in any older books of Scottish songs, though it is in most miscellanies like The Fireside Book of Folk Songs. It is often sung as a lullaby, in a slow rocking 6/8 time. In addition to being extremely popular in its day, and becoming a standard among Scottish folk and dance musicians, it has become more widely known in the modern mainstream popular music genre. Among the modern renditions which became well known were Glen Ingram's Australian pop rendition in the late 1960s where it became a big hit in that country, Roger Whittaker's duet version with Des O'Connor released in 1986, which combined O'Connor's vocals with Whittaker's whistling version, which was part of his repertoire since at least the mid-1970s. Calum Kennedy also included a version on Songs of Scotland and Ireland (Beltona 1971). The cellist Julian Lloyd Webber recorded an instrumental version of the song on the album Encore! / Travels With My Cello Volume 2.

Traditional renditions of the melody put it in the Mixolydian mode while contemporary singers often finish on the fourth note of the scale abruptly transforming the song into the more familiar Ionian mode (Major scale).

Lyrics

Chorus:

Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
Onward! the sailors cry;
Carry the lad that's born to be King
Over the sea to Skye.

Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar,
Thunderclaps rend the air;
Baffled, our foes stand by the shore,
Follow they will not dare.

Chorus

Though the waves leap, soft shall ye sleep,
Ocean's a royal bed.
Rocked in the deep, Flora will keep
Watch by your weary head.

Chorus

Many's the lad fought on that day,
Well the Claymore could wield,
When the night came, silently lay
Dead in Culloden's field.

Chorus

Burned are their homes, exile and death
Scatter the loyal men;
Yet ere the sword cool in the sheath
Charlie will come again.

Alternative lyrics

These are the lyrics, based on a lyric for the melody written by Robert Louis Stevenson and performed by Scottish folk group The McCalmans, amongst others:

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
Say could that lad be I.
Merry of soul, he sailed on a day,
Over the sea to Skye.

Mull was astern, Rùm to the port,
Eigg on the starboard bow.
Glory of youth glowed in his soul,
Where is that glory now?

Speed bonny boat like a bird on a wing,
Onward the sailors cry.
Carry the lad that's born to be king,
Over the sea to Skye.

External links

• Pop Archives: Covers of "The Skye Boat Song"
• "The Skye Boat Song",by Robert Louis Stevenson, published in the collection "Songs of Travel and Other Verses" at Project Gutenberg