"Niel Gow's Lament"

No personal notes.

Niel Gow was a famous 18th century Scottish Fiddler. There is some debate as to whether the "second wife" in the title of the tune is his actual second wife (who he loved dearly, as evidenced by his putting his fiddle away for awhile upon her death) or if it refers to his fiddle, on breaking it... many fiddlers refer to their instrument as their second wife. Per the Fiddler's Companion;

Donal Hickey, in his 1999 book on Sliabh Luachra musicians Stone Mad for Music, writes: "Pádraig (O'Keeffe) {1887-1963} remained single and he used to call the fiddle 'the missus', declaring that it gave no bit of trouble at all. 'Just one stroke across the belly and she purrs', he would say."

Truth be known, however, according to the Fiddler's Companion, it was not composed by Niel Gow anyway;

Under the title "Mr. Macdonald of Staffa's Strathspey," the tune is earliest credited to Daniel McLaren of Edinburgh, a native of Taymouth, Perthshire, who published it in 1794 (unfortunately, little is known of him). Gow and sons published the tune as "Niel Gow's Wife" in their Complete Repository, Book 2 (1802) with composer credits to Niel Gow.

This is corroborated by the observation in wikipedia that;

Niel Gow composed a lot of dance music - according to John Glen (1895) he put his name to 87 tunes, "some of which are excellent" - much of which forms the backstay of Scottish country dance music even today. However it must be said that he was not above pinching good material from other composers to republish under his own name; Glen claims that from the 87, at least a quarter are derived from older tunes or are straight rip-offs from tunes published earlier elsewhere, often under a different title. This being a common practice at the time, it didn't seem to hurt his reputation a whole lot;

One final note, on the spelling of his name - again, from wikipedia;

He himself spelled his name Niel, although others sometimes spell it Neil or even Neal. (To add to the confusion he had a very musical grandson (by Nathaniel) who did spell his name "Neil".)