Issue 3231: Lord Lovat

New issue submitted

Assigned changed to “tone2tone” (previously “None”)
Disposition changed to “Needs help” (previously “New”)

Nope, I beg to differ. The tune “Lord Lovat”
https://tunearch.org/wiki/Lord_Lovat
looks nothing like “Lord Lovat’s lament”
https://tunearch.org/wiki/Lord_Lovat%27s_Lament
I don’t have the recordings - I would rather presume that Bobby MacLeod plays “Lord Lovat’s Lament” and the tune name is not correct (on the cover/inlay or wherever) and has been shortened to a wrong tune name, whilst the tune “Lord Lament” still exists as a separate entity.
Could someone check? The recording in question is “Gay Gordons” from the album “Bobby’s Kind of Music”, most likely the third tune of the set.

First of all, as a matter of general policy, if you notice something strange with a specific recording of a tune, it is a lot better to submit an issue on the recording rather than the tune because it helps us zero in on the (purported) problem. It’s not critical in this case because there is only one recording associated with the tune, but there are tunes with literally dozens of recordings, and that would make it more difficult for us to figure out which recording we’re talking about. Just saying.

Secondly, we can agree that, at least according to tunearch.org, there are two different tunes called “Lord Lovat” and “Lord Lovat’s Lament”, respectively. “Lord Lovat’s Lament” is the more popular of the two by some margin, but even so this precludes simply removing the “Lord Lovat” database entry even if the associated recording turns out to be a mislabelled recording of “Lord Lovat’s Lament”, because the “Lord Lovat” tune might show up on another recording at some point.

Again according to tunearch.org, the “Lord Lovat” tune is a strathspey marked “Slow”, which makes it somewhat unlikely to turn up in a set for the Gay Gordons, so chances are that the tune on the recording is really “Lord Lovat’s Lament”, which as a march-type tune should work reasonably well for the GG (it’s not one I personally would pick but hey, who am I to disagree with Bobby MacLeod?).

I don’t have the recording in question to hand, but knowing Finlay as a connoisseur of Scottish dance music, I’m prepared to take him at his word that, in the recording in question, we should replace the link to the “Lord Lovat” tune with a link to “Lord Lovat’s Lament” and “Lord Lovat” as an alias for that tune on that recording. We can leave the “Lord Lovat” tune in the database on the off-chance, add the tunearch.org URL to the entry and perhaps put in a note in “Extra Info” that it is not “Lord Lovat’s Lament”. Viktor, can you do the honours?

Disposition changed to “Fixed” (previously “Needs help”)

Of course I can! :-) Thanks for the guidance. I changed the tune on the recording, and applied the newly added alias there. I then commented on BOTH tunes to state that they are not identical, with a reference link to tunearch for each tune individually. Hope that helps!