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See [Soul Music].
MUSIC OF DESPAIR AND OF HOPE
On the occasion of the funeral service of King Edward VII, William Maxwell, in the Record and Mail, of Glasgow, writes as follows concerning the pipes and song:
No music can express the abandonment of grief like the pipes, for none is so individual. Its notes are the tradition of centuries of wild freedom, and are bound by no ordinary system. No music is so personal, for the pipes are the retainers of the clans.
They, too, wear the tartan, and voice the feelings of their clan—its joy and grief, its triumph and despair; and none is more national, for it embodies the soul of a people, its strength and its passions.
They are famous ballads to which the music of sorrow has been wedded. For there are two national ballads known as “The Flowers of the Forest,” and both are written by women. The first version was written by Jane Elliot, of Minto, and bewails at Flodden Field—
I’ve heard the lilting at our ewe milking,
Lasses a-lilting before the dawn of day;
But now they are moaning on ilka green loaning,