Makaris: Allan Ramsay: The Gentle Shepherd

Allan Ramsay (c.1684–1758) was born in Leadhills, Scotland, in the agricultural and mining region of Lanarkshire. He apprenticed to a wigmaker as a teenager in Edinburgh, where he eventually started his own periwig business. Ramsay developed passions for both literature and politics, and in 1712 he co-founded the Easy Club, a bachelor’s club for literati by day and a secret society of Scottish nationalists by night. Members spurned English courtly fads, and they praised Scotland as both a modern and commercially viable agricultural region, and a utopia for poets with sophisticated manners. They donned pseudonyms to hide their true identities, and they shared patriotic and often anti-British Union poetry, much of which Ramsay wrote.

Ramsay established a reputation for defending distinctive traditions such as local dancing and the wearing of Scottish plaid, and he wrote ballads against the strictures of the Presbyterian church. He was an outspoken proponent of the Scots vernacular, encouraging his patrons and colleagues—many of whom were aristocrats and required to take elocution lessons for better English—to keep their native dialects. Ramsay soon achieved renown for several publications of poetry, particularly The Tea-Table Miscellany (1723). This collection contained a large number of older Scots poems which Ramsay edited or reproduced, as well as some original poems freshly composed by Ramsay and others. Several of these appeared without attribution a few years later in the first printed collection of Scottish song, William Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonius (1726). Ramsay responded in the preface to a subsequent edition of Tea-Table Miscellany:

From this and the following Volume Mr. Thomson (who is allowed by all, to be a good Teacher and Singer of Scots Songs) cull’d his Orpheus Caledonius … for the Use of Persons of the highest Quality in Britain, and dedicated to her Royal Highness, now her Majesty our most gracious Queen. This is by the by I thought proper to intimate, and do my self that Justice which the Publisher neglected; since he ought to have acquainted his Illustrious List of Subscribers, that the most of the Songs were mine, the Music abstracted.

Ramsay might have been secretly pleased with Thomson’s plagiarism, because much of this poetry used Scots titles and was peppered with Scots vocabulary. Thomson’s publications in London therefore resulted in Ramsay’s vernacular being distributed far further than might have been possible solely through Ramsay’s own widening circle in Edinburgh; Orpheus Caledonius helped introduce Scots throughout English society. Ramsay described his beloved dialect:

… These are no Defects in our’s, the Pronunciation is liquid and sonorous, and much fuller than the English, of which we are Masters, by being taught it in our Schools, and daily reading it; which being added to all our own native Words, of eminent Significancy, makes our Tongue by far the completest. … The Scotticisms, which perhaps may offend some over-nice Ear, give new Life and Grace to the Poetry, and become their Place as well as the Doric Dialect of Theocritus, so much admired by the best Judges.

By equating Scots to a language of Classical antiquity, Ramsay aimed to gentrify a tongue which English speakers often considered rude and uncivilized. He additionally invoked Italian pastorals set within the Arcadian Golden Age as his literary models, in a letter dated April 8, 1724, which would include his first mention of The Gentle Shepherd: “I am this vacation going through with a dramatic pastoral, which I design to carry the length of 5 acts … and if I succeed according to my plan, I hope to cope with the authors of Pastor Fido and Aminta.” Yet instead of placing his own characters within an idealized ancient Greece, Ramsay chose a utopian local setting: the Scottish countryside just after the Restoration of the Monarchy. Writing at a time of simmering resentment a decade after the first Jacobite rising, Ramsay’s social themes—ennobled peasants and an honorable lord returning from exile after restoring Stuart sovereignty—must have seemed particularly idyllic.

In this context, Ramsay began work on The Gentle Shepherd. He drew upon his previously published pastoral poems, “Patie and Roger” (1721), “Jenny and Meggy” (1723), and “Patie and Pegie: A Sang” (1721), and he developed a larger story, adding several subplots, more characters, and a few additional songs. He completed his final draft on April 29th, 1725, at precisely 11:00pm (as written in the top corner of the manuscript). The completed work was advertised that June in The Caledonian Mercury for the price of one shilling: “Just Published, and Sold by Allan Ramsay, at his shop South-side of the Crosswell, The GENTLE SHEPHERD: A Scots Pastoral Comedy.”

The Gentle Shepherd of 1725 included four songs. The first, “Peggy, now the King’s come” was sung to the tune “Carle an the King come,” which has seventeenth century origins but had perhaps not achieved widespread recognition by the 1720s. The following two songs—“Patie and Pegie” (first line: “By the delicious Warmness of thy Mouth”) and “Jocky said to Jenny”—had no known previously composed tunes attached to them. Ramsay soon published the music to each of these in Music for Allan Ramsay’s Collection of Scots Songs (c.1726), arranged by his friend Alexander Stuart, an Edinburgh violinist, who likely composed original melodies for the two poems which had no extant music. In contrast, the final song “My Patie is a Lover gay” was sung to the tune “Corn Riggs are bonny,” an extremely popular melody with variants dating back more than half a century.

A significant development occurred in London in 1728: Ramsay’s acquaintance, the poet and dramatist John Gay, published The Beggar’s Opera, which is widely considered to be the first ballad opera. Gay’s libretto satirized Italian opera, and Johann Christoph Pepusch set Gay’s original text to pre-composed music, including a number of Scottish songs. Beggar’s Opera quickly became one of the most popular theatrical works in the history of the London stage. By using tunes that everyone in London could hum along to, Gay and Pepusch captured an audience starved for both fresh entertainment and familiarity.

Ramsay’s response to the success of Beggar’s Opera was to significantly rewrite Gentle Shepherd, adding eighteen more songs (all set to popular music of that era) to replace some spoken text. He printed his new edition in 1729. This more operatic version of Gentle Shepherd—and its various revisions and adaptations (only some of them authorized)—achieved tremendous success throughout the eighteenth century, seeing over a hundred reprintings and numerous revivals in both Edinburgh and London, before falling into relative obscurity.

Makaris’s present recording should also be considered an adaptation—as must any modern performance of The Gentle Shepherd—because no score survives from Ramsay’s lifetime. Rather than providing any music for his performers or readers, Ramsay simply wrote in the libretto the name of the melody to which his text should be sung, trusting his singers and instrumentalists to know what were at that time familiar tunes. The earliest edition of Gentle Shepherd to contain any music notation was published by John Robertson shortly after Ramsay’s death in 1758, but this included only melodies and no harmonies, in arrangements that were not syllabized to match the text. The first true score accompanied a popular 1781 adaptation, for which English composer Thomas Linley added an overture and replaced several of Ramsay’s chosen songs with his own original work. (Even in the tunes Linley retained, his Classical-era alterations whitewashed many of the Scotticisms Ramsay perhaps would have most desired his audience to appreciate.) Finally, in 1788, nearly six decades after Gentle Shepherd’s premiere, Andrew Foulis printed a score—a simple melody over bass—which included most (though not all) of the tunes Ramsay named in the libretto.

While we can therefore surmise how some performances of Gentle Shepherd might have sounded by the 1780s, performers and audiences interested in hearing the songs Ramsay intended in 1729 must contend with a significant complication as a result of his having provided no music. As in many oral-aural music traditions, consistency of title and melody is a problem in early sources of Scots songs. Sang VIII, “Mucking of Geordy’s Byer,” serves here as a microcosm of the convoluted issues that can result. Its earliest extant version appears in Mrs. Crockat’s Music Book (1709) under the title “The Three good Fellows,” a name which was used for a completely different tune by many of the Scottish composer/arrangers of our other songs. In Orpheus Caledonius, Thomson’s title for our Sang VIII melody was “My Dady’s a Delver of Dikes”; this was the first line of the second verse of the poem “Slighted Nansy” in Tea-Table Miscellany (which Ramsay wrote should be sung to the tune of “Kirk wad let me be,” Gentle Shepherd’s Sang XVI). A number of Scottish publications eventually provided variants on the title “Mucking of Geordy’s Byer” for the Sang VIII melody, but not until the 1740s. And by the early nineteenth century, the title “Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre” had been assigned to a brand new tune—a jig which is still performed today and known by at least eight alternate unrelated names—and our Sang VIII melody was more commonly called “Tam Glen” (after receiving fresh text from Robert Burns).

With no definitive edition to use for this first recording of Gentle Shepherd, we had to create our own. Kivie Cahn-Lipman scoured available scores from Ramsay’s lifetime and the decades that followed—adapting and redacting different arrangements of each song to include both vocal and instrumental music—and then Makaris collectively orchestrated them. Locating all extant versions of each song within contemporaneous sources might have been a Sisyphean task, were it not for the extraordinary musicological research of David McGuinness and a team of scholars, published within a recent critical edition of Gentle Shepherd by Edinburgh University Press.

Our specific choices were guided primarily by a sense of fun. When offered multiple plausible options for any tune in the opera, we generally picked the most idiosyncratic, choosing harmonic surprises over what many in Ramsay’s own time (and our own) might have considered good taste. Thus we used the Lydian mode throughout “How can I be sad on my Wedding-Day” (as found in our Oswald source and at least one other), and the hexatonic Mixolydian in “Cald Kale in Aberdeen” (called “castocks in Strathbogie - bagpipe humour” in George Skene’s Music Book of 1717), and we cadenced only on the submediant and subdominant in “O’er Bogie” (redacted from two different settings from Orpheus Caledonius). Our orchestrations include a number of traditional instruments Ramsay might have appreciated—bagpipes, stock-and-horn, and various flageolets—as well as several instruments more common to the parlor, such as the harpsichord and theorbo.

Two distinct compositional styles and performance practices of Scots song were competing during the 1720s and the decades which followed. A traditional Scots air might have been performed unaccompanied, or perhaps joined by the simplest bass line lightly played on a single instrument. By contrast, the “Scots drawing room style” incorporated the latest in Italian musical trends—at that time in vogue in London—with flashy ornaments and far more complex accompaniments and harmonies. One might have assumed that Ramsay would have preferred the former, but in a poem dedicated to the Edinburgh Musick Club (later formalized into the Edinburgh Musical Society), he demonstrated clear esteem for both, as well as for Highland music (which in the cities had long been considered barbaric and fissured from Lowland song). He seemed to even approve of the merging of these disparate musical idioms, which ultimately became our approach with regard to both arrangements and performance practice:

… [You] shew that Musick may have as good Fate

In Albion’s Glens, as Umbria’s green Retreat:

And with Correlli’s soft Italian Song

Mix Cowdon Knows, and Winter Nights are long.

Nor should the Martial Pibrough be despis’d,

Own’d and refine’d by you, these shall the more be priz’d. …

Ramsay was likely familiar with nearly all of the composers and arrangements whose versions of these songs served as our sources. He would have been personally acquainted with Francesco Barsanti (an Italian emigree to London, who spent eight years in Scotland working as a “Master” for the Edinburgh Musical Society), William McGibbon (concertmaster of the Musical Society’s orchestra throughout most of Ramsay’s time in Edinburgh, and a fine composer), Adam Craig and Charles McLean (Society orchestra members in the 1730s who each published instrumental collections of Scottish song arrangements), and Robert Bremner (who achieved great success as a composer and music publisher in Edinburgh during Ramsay’s twilight years). Ramsay was probably the author of a touching farewell epistle in The Scots Magazine when James Oswald departed Edinburgh in 1741 for what would be a storied musical career in London. He might also have known Scottish-born William Thomson (who revised Orpheus Caledonius in 1733, adding further songs while simplifying many of the fancier Italianate elements of the original 1726 publication), and the Edinburgh-based David Young (who collected his Scottish airs “for the use of Walter McFarlan of that ilk”). Ramsay likely never met Francesco Geminiani, another Italian in London and then one of the most famous musicians in Europe, but he would have known Geminiani’s compositions and style. History is uncertain regarding details of the composer Alexander Munro—who converted a number of Scots songs into sonatas of instrumental dance music and had them published in Paris in 1732—but research suggests he might have been an anatomy professor based in Edinburgh beginning in 1720, in which case he and Ramsay likely shared circles.

We also selected a few favorite musical moments from composers who explored these Scottish songs several decades after Ramsay’s death, such as Franz Joseph Haydn’s arrangements for the London publisher William Napier, and music by his Scottish contemporaries Francis Peacock and Robert Mackintosh, and the Edinburgh-based Italian Pietro Urbani. We additionally incorporated the chorus of “Corn Riggs” which concluded Thomas Linley’s original music to The Gentle Shepherd, thus adding a grand finale to an opera that otherwise would have ended with only a single voice.

Our other insertions—aside from a brief verse Ramsay never penned, which was a later addition to Sang VII—are instrumental. We included “symphonies” in many of the songs as introductions and codas, in keeping with eighteenth-century performance practice. In lieu of Ramsay’s spoken dialogue which would have come between the songs in a staged performance, we also added several standalone instrumental tunes which were popular in Ramsay’s day. We particularly wanted to feature a work by Lorenzo Bocchi, who introduced the cello to Scotland and Ireland, set a poem by Ramsay in an original cantata, and was possibly Ramsay’s musical consultant on The Gentle Shepherd. His “Irish weding improved with different divisions after an Italian maner” is representative of the virtuosity called for in many sets of variations from this era.

Before concluding, we wish to connect several earlier points into an important argument: Ramsay’s 1725 first version of The Gentle Shepherd included sung words set to his own lyric poetry; he used Gentle Shepherd as a vehicle for one of Scotland’s native airs by including a newly texted version of the well-circulated melody “Corn Riggs” (as well as the previously composed but lesser known “Carle an the King come”); and the play’s completion and publication in 1725 preceded that of Beggar’s Opera by several years. Taken as a whole, this makes Gentle Shepherd not only the first Scottish opera, but the earliest ballad opera. We have found only one scholarly work (from 1922) which suggests that through Ramsay, English ballad opera practices might have been ignited out of a Scottish musical tradition, and not the other way around. Yet if we define a ballad opera as New Grove Dictionary of Music does: “A distinctively English form in which spoken dialogue alternates with songs set to traditional or popular melodies and sung by the actors themselves,” then even Gentle Shepherd’s first edition of 1725 falls into that category. That said, Beggar’s Opera was the first of the two ballad operas to be performed; there is no suggestion of a Gentle Shepherd premiere until January 27, 1729, at Taylors-Hall in Edinburgh. In any case, John Gay must certainly have been inspired by Ramsay’s work, as he incorporated into Beggar's Opera (and its sequel Polly) nine Scots songs straight from Alexander Stuart’s and William Thomson’s music publications.

Throughout his career, Allan Ramsay endeavored to promote and elevate Scottish identity through his adoption of the Scots vernacular and his use of Lowland native airs. In recording the complete music to his opera for the first time, Makaris hopes that our arrangements of the diverse musical styles and influences of the Gentle Shepherd songs will present a window into the discovery of further forgotten repertory from early eighteenth-century Scotland. Makaris is thrilled to resurrect this pioneering work for the tricentennial anniversary of its first edition, and we hope our enthusiasm and love for this music will be shared by our listeners.

Engineered, produced, and mastered by Ryan Streber, Oktaven Audio
Edited by Kivie Cahn-Lipman, Ryan Streber and Owen Mulholland

Notes by Caitlin Hedge and Kivie Cahn-Lipman
Synopsis by Fiona Gillespie, edited by Kivie Cahn-Lipman
Glossary by Allan Ramsay, edited by Kivie Cahn-Lipman

Cover:     Sir David Wilkie, The Gentle Shepherd (Oil on panel, 11 ½ x 15 ½ in; 295 x 395 mm,
signed and dated 1823), courtesy of Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd.
Back cover:     Sir David Wilkie, A Scene from Ramsay’s ‘The Gentle Shepherd’.
National Galleries of Scotland. Purchased 1898
Design and layout by Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com

Special thanks to Brianna Robertson-Kirkland
Tremendous gratitude, as always, to Fred Tauber and the Avaloch Farm Music Institute

Makaris would like to buy a dram of fine single-malt Scotch for everyone involved in the publication of the remarkable book: The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay, edited by Murray Pittock. Vol. 1, The Gentle Shepherd, edited by Steve Newman and David McGuinness. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.