Annie was Agnes Smith, Nannie being among her people an affectionate form for Agnes. There is reason to believe that she may have been daughter of a William Smith who is known to have been a brother or near kinsman of the laird of Inveramsay, a person of some local consequence.[[134]] An inscription on her gravestone makes Agnes Smith to have died January 19, 1673.[[135]]
“Some years subsequent to the melancholy fate of poor Tifty’s Nanny,” says Jamieson, II, 387, citing the current tradition of Fyvie, “her sad story being mentioned and the ballad sung in a company in Edinburgh when [Andrew Lammie] was present, he remained silent and motionless, till he was discovered by a groan suddenly bursting from him and several of the buttons flying from his waistcoat.” The peasants of Fyvie, Jamieson continues, “borrowed this striking characteristic of excessive grief” neither from the Laocoön group nor from Shakspere’s King Lear, but from nature. The anecdote, and the comment too, is apt to be repeated by editors of ‘Andrew Lammie.’ That “affecting image of overpowering grief,” as Chambers calls it, the flying off of the buttons (or the bursting of a waistcoat), we have had several times already, though in no ballad (or version) of much note: see II, 118, D 17, 186, C 15, 308, 4; IV, 101, I 15, 185, 11. It must be owned to be a stroke that does not well bear iteration. Mrs. Littlewit in ‘Bartholomew Fair’ has a tedious life with her Puritan, she says: “he breaks his buttons and cracks seams at every saying he sobs out.” Ben Jonson has taken out one of the best things in our tragedy and put it into his comedy.
The air to which this ballad was usually sung, Jamieson informs us, was “of that class which in Teviotdale they term a northern drawl; and a Perthshire set of it, but two notes lower than it is commonly sung, is to be found in Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum [No. 175, p. 183], to the song ‘How long and dreary is the night.’”
C b is translated by Wolff, Hausschatz, p. 199, Halle der Völker, I, 65.
A
Jamieson’s Popular Ballads, I, 126; “taken down by Dr Leyden from the recitation of a young lady, Miss Robson, of Edinburgh, who learned it in Teviotdale.”
1
‘At Fyvie’s yetts there grows a flower,
It grows baith braid and bonny;