Maxwell Duplicate person entry?

Object: Ray McKay & Joseph Maxwell (Person)
Submitter: Eric Ferguson (EricFerguson)
Assigned to: Viktor Lehmann
Priority: Normal
Disposition: Fixed
Description: Looking around on SCDDB I saw two composers with one tune each: Mackay/Maxwell http://my.strathspey.org/dd/person/2248/ Mckay/Maxwell http://my.strathspey.org/dd/person/3152/

The names of their two tunes also look like spelling aliases: “Old Scotch Mother Mine” and “Auld Scots Mither Mine”. A Google search shows a few hunded hits for each spelling.

Neither page has any other information.

Can someone with access to original data check if these entries need to be merged (and which aliases to keep)

Previous Actions

Date Feb. 8, 2018, 12:38 a.m.
User Eric Ferguson (EricFerguson)

New issue submitted

Date Dec. 16, 2022, 10:20 p.m.
User Viktor Lehmann (tone2tone)

To the authors first: “MacKay” is the misspelled version here in our database, “Old Scotch Mother Mine” is listed for “MacKay/Maxwell”. Yet, sources say the authors are Ray McKay and Joseph (Joe) Maxwell. So, first of all, I merged the persons, deleted the misspelled one, and changed the entry to their full names, adding two separate person entries to properly name the “group members”. Sources for the names: http://www.rampantscotland.com/songs/blsongs_scotchmother.htm https://soc.culture.scottish.narkive.com/xuOCv0Hb/song Now to the tune names: the tune is the same all the way through. Maxwell’s discography is listed on discogs. If you click through all his works for the different spellings, they are all written by “McKay and Maxwell”, and they seem to have been very open about renaming it, with “o”, “of”, “mither”, “mother”, the first version even without “Mine”. The 1956 version “Old Scoth Mother” seems to be the first. I renamee it to that master name and then added all the aliases. The other tune name was deleted.

Date Dec. 16, 2022, 10:37 p.m.
User Viktor Lehmann (tone2tone)

Assigned changed to »tone2tone« (previously »None«)
Disposition changed to »Fixed« (previously »New«)

Date Dec. 18, 2022, 1:26 a.m.
User Anselm Lingnau (anselm)

Remember that “Mac” vs “Mc” can be quite fluid at times (to the point where the rules stipulate that “Mc” should be considered the same as “Mac” for sorting purposes, so “McIntosh” comes after “MacInnes” but before “MacIntyre”¹). So especially in older documents, expect “MacFoobar”, “McFoobar”, and even ”M’Foobar” to be used interchangeably.

Unfortunately our sorting mechanisms aren’t that smart (yet anyway).