The Skye Boat Song
Harold Boulton's Jacobite boat song from Songs of the North, for 2 to 4 singers: the chorus, the first two verses (the storm, and Flora's watch over the sleeping prince) and the chorus again. The soprano sings the tune, an air taken down from Hebridean boatmen and finished by Anne Campbell Macleod, over Malcolm Lawson's harmony from the book, set for voices. Lively and well accented, as the book asks.
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The first verse
Words: Harold Boulton (Songs of the North, printed by 1888)Tune: Hebridean boatmen's air, four bars added by Anne Campbell Macleod (Songs of the North)
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.
About The Skye Boat Song
The Skye Boat Song sets Harold Boulton's words to an air that, as Songs of the North tells it, is half collected and half composed: "Four bars taken down from Hebridean boatmen, four bars added by A. C. Macleod." The book's footnote places it among Prince Charlie's wanderings "in the winter of 1745-6", escaping "with Flora Macdonald and a few devoted Highland boatmen in a rising storm"; the crossing was in June 1746. The earliest dated printings with the tune that we have seen, in Laura Alexandrine Smith's The Music of the Waters (1888) and J. S. Blackie's Scottish Song (1889), sing "Thunder-clouds rend the air"; we sing "Thunderclaps", as our undated copy of Songs of the North and Boulton's Our National Songs of 1923 do. Our arrangement is read from Songs of the North, in G, on Malcolm Lawson's harmony from the book. This is the chorus and the first two verses, the chorus after each as the book directs, for 2 to 4 singers.
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