The Skye Boat Song

The text of the song gives an account of how Bonnie Prince Charlie, disguised as a serving maid, escaped in a small boat after the defeat of his Jacobite rising of 1745, with the aid of Flora MacDonald. The song draws on the motifs of Jacobitism although it was composed nearly a century and a half after the episode it describes.[2] It is often supposed that it describes Charles's flight from the mainland, but that is unhistorical. The only time Charles was in Skye was when he left Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides to avoid the increasingly thorough government searches.

The lyrics were written by Sir Harold Boulton, 2nd Baronet, to an air collected in the 1870s by Anne Campbelle MacLeod (1855–1921), who became Lady Wilson by marriage to Sir James Wilson, KSCI (1853–1926), in 1888. The song was first published in Songs of the North by Boulton and MacLeod, London, 1884, a book that went into at least twenty editions.[2] In later editions MacLeod's name was dropped and the ascription "Old Highland rowing measure arranged by Malcolm Lawson" was substituted. It was quickly taken up by other compilers, such as Laura Alexandrine Smith's Music of the Waters (published 1888). Lawson was the elder brother of artist Cecil Gordon Lawson.

According to Andrew Kuntz, a collector of folk music lore, MacLeod was on a trip to the isle of Skye and was being rowed over Loch Coruisk (Coire Uisg, the "Cauldron of Waters") when the rowers broke into a Gaelic rowing song "Cuachag nan Craobh" ("The Cuckoo in the Grove"). MacLeod set down what she remembered of the air, with the intention of using it later in a book she was to co-author with Boulton, who later added the section with the Jacobite associations. "As a piece of modern romantic literature with traditional links it succeeded perhaps too well, for soon people began 'remembering' they had learned the song in their childhood, and that the words were 'old Gaelic lines'," Andrew Kuntz has observed.[3]

The song was not in any older books of Scottish songs, though it is in most collections like The Fireside Book of Folk Songs. It is often sung as a lullaby, in a slow rocking 6/8 time.

It was extremely popular in its day, and from its first recording by Tom Bryce on April 29, 1899,[4] became a standard among Scottish folk and dance musicians. It was even more widely known from the 1960s onwards and has remained popular in mainstream music genres.

Michael Tippett originally included the song, titled as "Over the Sea to Skye", in his arrangements of Four Songs from the British Isles for unaccompanied four-part chorus in 1957, commissioned by North West German Radio, Bremen, for a festival of European folk song. The amateur choir for which they were intended found the songs too difficult, and the first performance took place in July 1958, given by the London Bach Group, conducted by John Minchinton, at Royaumont in France. Tippett's Selected Letters states that he proposed to replace "Over the Sea to Skye" because it was "too strictly held by a publisher here".

Alfred Deller recorded a version for his album Western Wind in 1958, together with Desmond Dupré on guitar and John Sothcott on recorder. It was performed to great acclaim and recorded by artist and social activist Paul Robeson in 1959 and 1960.[5]

Welshman Tom Jones recorded a version, which was arranged by Lee Lawson and Harold Boulton, on his debut album Along Came Jones in 1965. The same album, released in the U.S. as It's Not Unusual (and carrying only 12 of the original 16 tracks), did not give attribution for the arrangement but did characterise the song as "Trad.—2:57."[6] Esther & Abi Ofarim recorded the song under the title "Bonnie Boat" for their album Das Neue Esther & Abi Ofarim Album (1966).[7]

• Covers of "The Skye Boat Song", poparchives.com.au
• "The Skye Boat Song", by Robert Louis Stevenson, published in the collection Songs of Travel and Other Verses, Project Gutenberg
• Sir Michael Tippett – Over the Sea to Skye