Earworm
Every few days, unrequested songs appear in my mental jukebox . Mostly, they come from way back in my life. It's as if I have no control over their re-emergence. Regarding the song I shall share with you today, I first heard it one winter in my village primary school. By a big black stove, we clustered around the old walnut wireless clasping our copies of "Singing Together" produced by the BBC. We didn't just listen, we sang. Those schools programmes were thoughtfully constructed so that we could rehearse each song in chunks. Later, we might sing what we had just learnt without radio accompaniment. The song is "Bonnie Charlie", more commonly titled, "Will Ye No Come Back Again?" It's a song of Scotland from the middle of the eighteenth century, written by Carolina Oliphant (Lady Nairne). It refers to the young pretender - Bonnie Prince Charlie and the tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism - including The Jacobite Uprising and ...