Issue 1786: Duplicate?

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Well, I have both recordings here where both tunes in question appear: “Peggy’s Love” (Various recordings) and “Set of Strathspeys” by Terpsichore. Hard to compare such different orchestrations, but I’d say that the lead tune in Peggy’s love is none of the first 3 tunes in the Terpsichore recording (tune #4 is tune #1 again).

Just to add to the confusion, when I made a search I found https://sites.scran.ac.uk/jmhenderson/web/collection/fiddles/mbiogs1.htm#robert which says a William Marshall tune Miss Farquharson of Invercauld was previously called Lady Louisa Gordon. So if the tunes sound different, maybe the composer is wrongly attributed? However John Chambers TuneFinder has a Lady Louisa Gordon’s Reel which is attributed to Marshall. This is the point in investigating tunes at which I usually want to think about something else…

I checked the tune on the Terpsichore album and it is definitely identical to “Lady Louisa Gordon’s Strathspey” in my Highland Music Trust edition of The Mackintosh Collections (it’s on page 67). See also https://tunearch.org/wiki/Lady_Louisa_Gordon%27s_Strathspey .

William Marshall worked for the Duke of Gordon (who at the time was the same person as the Marquis of Huntly, just in case you’re wondering – the Marquesses of Huntly also became the Dukes of Gordon in 1684, until the dukedom went away again in 1836 after the death of the 5th duke) for almost his entire career, so it is a reasonable first guess that any tune dedicated to a member of the Gordon family might have been composed by him. OTOH, the way composers would get their collections published in the 18th century was essentially via crowdfunding – they would dedicate as many tunes as possible to the wives and daughters of rich nobles and other wealthy men, who would then hopefully be sufficiently flattered to contribute towards seeing these tunes in print. Robert M would certainly not want to leave such a potentially lucrative source as the Duke of Gordon untapped – Gordon had five daughters to dispose of and four of them had tunes dedicated to them by Mackintosh (the third daughter, Lady Susan, even got two).

The Lady Louisa Gordon in question here was presumably the fourth daughter of Alexander, the 4th Duke of Gordon (Marshall’s employer, 1743–1827). Lady Louisa (1776–1850) married Charles Cornwallis, the 2nd Marquess Cornwallis, in 1795. Alexander and his wife, Jane (née Maxwell), Lady Louisa’s mother, were not the most faithful and devoted of spouses, and according to The Complete Peerage, when Cornwallis expressed doubt on whether Lady Louisa was appropriate wife material because of the insanity that was supposed to be running in the Gordon family, the Duchess assured him that “there was not a drop of Gordon blood in Louisa”. “Her” tune appears in Mackintosh’s Sixty-Eight New Reels Strathspeys and Quicksteps of 1793.

Some further information: The “Lady Louisa Gordon’s Strathspey” recorded for the dance, Peggy's Love (RSCDS book 8), by, e.g., Gonnella & Rankine, Stan Hamilton, Duncan & Strutt, the Pinewoods 2010 musicians, appears in Marshall’s 1845 collection as Miss Farquharson of Invercauld. The Society calls this tune Little Peggy's Love and adds a note in Book 8 saying “Published as Lady Louisa Gordon’s Strathspey in 1781”. In a nutshell, this is a Wm. Marshall tune and not to be confused with the Robt. Mackintosh tune of the same name. (In 1781, Lady Louisa would have been 5 years old.) The “Lady Louisa Gordon’s Strathspey” played as the fourth tune on the John Renton recording for Glasgow Flourish, though, is the one by Mackintosh.

William Marshall was a very prolific composer but less than eager to actually publish his tunes. After the publication of 49 of his own tunes in 1781 (presumably including Miss Farquharson, at that point still called Lady Louisa Gordon’s Strathspey), nothing much happened until 1822, when Alexander Robertson of Edinburgh published most of Marshall’s œuvre, and the title page of that collection contains a long note explaining how Marshall was having this collection printed mostly because other people were ripping off his tunes and publishing them under different titles, often passing them off as their own work. Robertson published a second (posthumous) collection of Marshall’s works in 1845, at which point Lady Louisa Gordon, then the Marchioness of Cornwallis, would have been an elderly lady, so that perhaps explained why the tune was deemed free to be repurposed in favour of Miss Farquharson. (To be fair, the 1822 collection has a tune called The Marchioness of Cornwallis’ Strathspey, so Louisa didn’t end up tuneless in the end.)

What we have now is considerable chaos between “Lady Louisa Gordon’s Strathspey” by Robert Mackintosh and the tune by Marshall variously known as “Lady Louisa Gordon’s Strathspey”, “Miss Farquharson of Invercauld”, and “Little Peggy’s Love” and occurring separately in the database under all three titles. Where the third title comes in is anyone’s guess (thank you RSCDS for your, as usual, diligent work on attributions). My approach to sorting this out would be to unify the entries for the second tune under “Miss Farquharson of Invercauld” (because that is the most recent name of the dance in Marshall’s actual collections, hence arguably most official), to add “Little Peggy’s Love” as an alias, and to change the “Peggy’s Love” recordings mentioned above to say “Miss Farquharson of Invercauld (as ‘Lady Louisa Gordon’s Strathspey’)”, linked to the unified entry. Then we want to go through the recordings of “Little Peggy’s Love” and change these to say “Miss Farquharson of Invercauld (as ‘Little Peggy’s Love’)” in order to fix this for good.