Welcome Home My Dearie

Welcome Home My Dearie tells the story of the bagpipe of the Scottish Lowlands from its heyday in the late 17th century to its gradual decline in the 19th century. Once known as 'the common bagpipe' but later consigned to museum collections, displaced by its Great Highland brother, its full history is told here for the first time.

'Welcome Home My Dearie' is the name of the tune Piper James Ritchie played 'with might and main', marching in front of a wedding procession through the town of Peebles in the mid-18th century. In this second volume of his history of piping in the Scottish Lowlands, Pete Stewart presents a vivid picture of life in the Lowland countryside, in the burgh towns and in Edinburgh, charting the role of the bagpiper through a century which saw so many dramatic changes. Framed between two elegies, one for a piper at the beginning of the century, loved and mourned, and one from the end, despised and rejected, 'Welcome Home My Dearie' pieces together the story of the bagpipe in the Lowlands from its heyday to its decline. It is a detective story too, using contemporary sources and long-forgotten images to reclaim history from legend, and like all good detective stories, it has a twist in the tail.

Includes more than 120 tunes from 18th century manuscripts and rare publications