I have always been fascinated by the stories attached to many Scottish dances. These stories are generally of two kinds. First we have those regarding the origin of the dance and second those who deal with the inspiration for the creation of the particular dance. The second category is often straight forward, particularly in the case of the many Scottish Country Dances that refer to a person, place, tune, or an event such as an Anniversary or a Jubilee. These are dances devised with a particular event or person in mind, or created to fit a particular tune. Many of the older Scottish Country Dances share their title with the “original” tune, suggesting that the figures were composed for that tune, and often the both the tune and the dance seem to have been composed and devised for a particular person, for example The Duke of Perth. However, in this case the same movement patterns have been associated with two more tune titles in different places in Scotland – Broon’s Reel (Broun’s/Brown’s Reel) and Pease Strae. Some popular tunes have more than one dance associated with them, for example Blue Bonnets which has both Country Dances and several (ten or more) solo dances set to that tune.
There seems to be a need to know the origin of dances and in particular the many solo dances. There are various stories circulating with regard to the origins of the Highland Fling, the Sword Dance and the Seann Triubhas. Most stories seem to relate back to certain few sources and have mutated in the process so that it is today very difficult to sort fact from fiction. If the facts were ever there? It is plausible that there was more substance to the reason of the origin of these dances than the stories circulating today suggest. In that lies a deeper meaning as to why the dances came to be, but what that may be we may never find out for certain. Many dances, such as the Seann Triubhas, Over the Water to Charlie and Tulloch Gorm have acquired strong connections, in their associated stories, with the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Discussing the ins and outs of these stories and any possible truth to their claims is better suited to a separate article debating them.
However, there is one particular dance I would like to draw attention to - the solo dance “Wilt thou go to the Barracks, Johnnie?”. Over the years I have found several revealing aspects as to how speculation on the supposed origin of a dance can become seen as fact among those who dance it. I first came across “Barracks, Johnnie” when attending the RSCDS Summer School at St. Andrews in the early 1980s. At the time I was more interested in the technique of how to dance the steps, than where it came from. My teacher was the late Robert “Bobby” Watson of Aberdeen who was a regular Highland dance tutor at the Summer School. One piece of information registered with me though, and was not questioned, that this had once been a recruiting dance. According to this belief, as told to me by various dance teachers, including Bobby Watson and the late Charlie Mill, the dance was believed to be an Army recruiting dance for the Gordon Highlanders in Aberdeenshire. The custom, according to the story, was to have it danced at the old “Feeing” Market or Fair in Aberdeen by a regimental dancer, with either pipe or drum accompaniment. This was to entice the onlookers to become “volunteers” and join the fighting forces. Another story tells that, sometimes, a pretty girl displayed the dance in front of the regiment standing on parade, for the same purpose. The dance was also to have been performed at the Army Barracks in Aberdeen. We will come back to these statements later.
Some eight years later I sent questionnaires to all the Scottish Regiments existing at the time asking about the dances each Regiment danced and their sources. This was part of my ongoing research. I expected some interesting facts from the Gordon Highlanders on this particular dance, but was surprised to hear that they had no record of the dance in their regimental dance history. In fact they had never heard of it. I searched further and found that the original source of the steps was to be found in a manuscript referred to as the “Hill Manuscript” by the RSCDS. The manuscript had been lent by the then owners to Mrs Isobel Cramb, a dance teacher known for her interest in solo dances. Many of the dances in this notebook were brought to wider attention by Mrs Cramb, and include the Earl of Erroll, The King of Sweden and Dusty Miller. The RSCDS call these dances “Ladies’ Step Dances” due to their interpretation of these dances as soft balletic style. The SOBHD and its associated Examination bodies UKA, BATD and SDTA call them “National Dances”. At the time none of the aforementioned associations could offer any more information regarding the origins of the dance.
Tracing the source of the statements of this dance being an Army recruiting dance finally led me to an article written by Mrs Cramb in the Clan Hay Magazine (Vol 1, No. 3 1952, p. 23-24). In this article Mrs Cramb wrote:
“About ten years ago a manuscript was lent to Dr. The Hon. E. Forbes-Sempill by a Mr. Hill who lived in Aberdeen. It was written in a most elegant hand and bore a title page thus: Frederick Hill’s Book of Quadrilles and Country Dances. Etc., March 22nd, 1841.
Dr. Forbes-Sempill made a copy of the manuscript at that time, and it was returned to the owner who was a grandson of the author. Mr. Hill has since died, and his daughter Mrs. Lorimer, has very kindly lent the original manuscript to me.
As the title-page indicates there are several quadrilles and a small collection of country dances in the book … Some of these dances are Highland dances already well-known to us — ‘The Marquis of Huntly’s Highland Fling’, ‘Blue Bonnets’, and ‘Shantruish’ (sic) — and then the exciting ones: ‘Scottish Measure’, ‘Wilt thou go to the Barracks, Johnnie?’ (this must be a recruiting dance); ‘The King of Sweden’ and the ‘Earl of Erroll’.
I have not been able to find any trace of these last three elsewhere in the country, so I think we can assume that they are Aberdeenshire dances. The ‘King of Sweden’ is probably also a Hay dance in view of the large proportion of Hay officers in the Army of Charles the 12th, King of Sweden. I have found the music for this dance in the Gillespie collection (1768), now in the National Library of Scotland. The music for ‘Wilt thou go to the Barracks, Johnnie?’ still eludes me, but I continue to search ...”
What is significant about this extract is that the article is full of speculation and suggestions on the possible origins of the dances included in the notebook. Mrs Cramb proposes an army connection, and a recruiting one at that, but also points out that the music “eludes” her.
In the early 1990s, I started searching for the Hill manuscript together with dance researcher Chris Metherell of Newcastle, who eventually managed to track it down and obtain copies of the manuscript from the current keepers. The notebook reveals many interesting aspects of dancing in early 1800s. One thing that can be seen when studying the style of notation in the notebook, is Mr Hill seems to be a pupil rather than a teacher, as suggested by Sir Ewan Forbes. Many of the notations are incomplete and few of them are consistent in their use of terminology. There could be many reasons for incomplete notations, but his use of words describing what appears to be similar movements vary from dance to dance and the whole layout suggests that he is noting down dances as he learns them. Tom and Joan Flett suggest that he could have been a pupil of Dancie Myron who is known to have been teaching in the area at the time (Flett & Flett, (1996) Traditional Step-Dancing in Scotland).
Looking at the description of the “Barracks Johnnie” the spelling of the title is of interest and gives a clue to the elusive music issue. The notebook title is - Wilt thou go to the Barricks Johnnie. Having searched for years for a tune tile including the word “Barracks” this spelling suggested pronunciation closer to “Berwick”. The next clue was the structure of the steps for this particular dance. When they are cross-referenced with the other entries for solo dances in the notebook, they showed great similarities with those of the dance The Dusty Miller, which is often played in 6/4 time. Dusty Miller is an old hornpipe played in triple time (3/2). So, was there a tune in 6/4 or 3/2 time, which included the word “Berwick”? A musician contact in Canada, Mr. Murray Schoolbraid, brought my attention to an old hornpipe named Go to Berwick, Johnny.
Go to Berwick, Johnnie is a triple-time hornpipe with a 3/2 signature. An old rhyme began —
“Go, go, (go)
go to Berwick, Johnny
Thou shalt have the horse
And I shall have the pony.”
This jingle is found in Ritson (ed. of 1869, p. 27); and quoted by William Stenhouse in Illustrations of the Lyric Poetry and Music of Scotland, (p. 459), who said that, “the silly old verses are usually chanted by nurses to divert their little ones.” Other, well-known lyrics in this metre are The Dusty Miller, Robin Shure in Hairst, Jokey said to Jenny, and Dance to Your Daddie. Stenhouse wrote in The Scots Musical Museum (c. 1824), that tunes of the category of 3/2 hornpipes had been played in Scotland “time out of mind”, and that James Allan, piper to the Duke of Northumberland, had assured him that, “This particular measure originated in the borders of England and Scotland.” Further investigation into the music may reveal more about the 3/2 hornpipe’s existence in Scotland.
So are we simply looking at a mutation of the tune title from Berwick to Barricks? Quite possibly, as the steps described by Hill fit the 3/2 signature and the tune better than any other possibility. Armed with this discovery, I then asked Bobby Watson, when visiting him in Aberdeen in the early 1990s how he came to know the steps in their current form. For anyone who did not know Bobby Watson, he was a dapper, quick-witted person full of jokes and stories, even when keeping a strict class. For once, when asked he turned serious after a few seconds of contemplation. He then proceeded to tell me, for once, in a serious manner how he came by the dance.
Bobby said he was given Mrs Cramb’s hand written notes of the dance that she had copied out of the notebook, with a request to see if he could make sense of them. One day he was working away in the studio in his house, trying out various ideas of what he thought it could be, when he heard the local pipe band march past outside playing the 6/8 march Cock O’ the North. He got inspired to set steps to that tune and from that the dance developed until he had 8 steps loosely based on Hill’s terminology, the last two steps of which he felt ought be done to faster tempo. That is how the steps came to be taught by Bobby. It spread among the Highland Dancers and the various organisations, the tempo has changed and the last two steps are no longer speeded up, so that it can now be found as a 2/4 march to the tune The Braes O’ Mar or even as a 4/4 strathspey. The story of its regimental connection seems to have lived on as well. Nobody has, to my knowledge, questioned the facts of this story.
So to summarise, we seem to have a dance – Wilt thou go to Barricks, Johnnie (Go to Berwick, Johnnie) - quite likely danced to the 3/2 hornpipe of the same name, as would go with all the other solo dances in Hill’s notebook where the dance titles correspond with a tune of the same name. According to the Fletts’ research, Mr Hill could have been a pupil of Dancie Myron in around 1841 in the Alford area of Aberdeenshire. Hill’s notation came some 120 years later to inspire a dance teacher – Bobby Watson - to make up steps based on his dance knowledge combined with a chance inspiration of a tune – Cock O’ the North which has strong North East connotations. The dance has continued to change, not so much in the technique and positioning of the feet but due to tempo changes of its music from 6/8 to 2/4 or 4/4.
It is not the place here to deeply analyse the difference of step structure between the original notation and what is performed by Highland Dancers today, but both style and structure is way different, so we are really looking at two different dances. An original that fits 3/2 tempo of which we can only speculate on how exactly the steps may have been done; and a modern composition inspired by the original notation, where we know how each step looks as the composition was made up from modern Highland Dance movements.
Interestingly enough neither dance can be tied to the Gordon Highlanders as in the story, as indicated earlier, but the function of the story has helped keeping the imagination of dancers alive, giving them an image of what the dance could have been when taught Bobby Watson’s modern version of the steps. So why not keep dancing some good steps and enjoy the dance, whatever the origin may or may not have been!
This is part of Johnson, James., The Scots Musical Museum with illustrations of the Lyric Poetry and Music of Scotland. Ed. William Stenhouse and David Laing, Edinburgh, 1853.
Mats Melin
