It’s Valentine’s Day: time to look at “MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart”

Love is in the air on February 14th, even across the piping and drumming world.

All music, even blues and piobaireachd, is created with some degree of love. In our repertory, the piece that immediately comes to mind – after, say, “The Clumsy Lover” – is the piobaireachd “MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart.”

Yes, that wonderful compound time tune beloved by pipers everywhere just bursts with adoration and longing.

But what prompted Donald Roy MacCrimmon to compose it? Was it a fair and bonnie Highland lass who spurned his advances? Or maybe he wooed a woman playing it at the door of her shieling at Borreraig?

Well, neither were the beneficiaries of this dulcet bagpipe love song. Not even close.

It turns out “MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart” is about a cow. Yes, a cow. Not just any old cow, but a beloved bovine lost in the Highlands in the 1700s. They searched relentlessly, but the beast’s skeleton was discovered a year later.

In Gaelic, the cow’s name was “Maol Donn,” which one might assume was a fawning name of endearment befitting an adored pet.

Sorry. “Maol Donn” means “dark one,” and it was a common name for cows that were—you guessed it—dark.

Here’s William Donaldson’s summary of the origins of “MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart” from his exclusive Set Tunes Series on pipes|drums:

This is one of the best-loved piobaireachds, an old favourite frequently offered in competition from the later 18th century onwards, and one of the tunes recorded by John MacDonald of Inverness on the Columbia label in 1927.

There are a number of stories attached to the tune, this one given by John Johnston of Coll in C.S. Thomason’s Ceol Mor Legends:

This is a tune composed by Clanranald’s piper–of the day–to a cow lost in a bog by a widow in Benbecula, South Uist. The cow was a noted one, & was greatly admired by the widow, as her only one apparently. It got lost in the common moss one day, & ultimately the whole neighbourhood turned out to look for it, likely in compassion for the owner, the piper among the rest; but its finding defied them, after their best efforts, nor was the skeleton of it found till over a year afterwards, by a mere accident. The whole circumstances, therefore afforded the piper a good theme to begin, which he did as if the widow herself was the author, thus:

“Gad iunndrain a tha me, si mo ghradh a mhaol dounn, Gad iarreidh feadh fhraochan, s’ gad shlaodadh a poul”

This tune was also a great favourite with the old pipers, though composed for a trifling matter, owing to its own merits & its plaintive air throughout. It is very old . . .

The Gaelic scholar and journalist Henry White of Easdale, who wrote under the pen name “Fionn,” stated in his historical notes to Glen’s Ancient Piobaireachd that the tune was a composition of Donald Roy MacCrimmon and that “Maol Donn” was a common name for a Highland cow.

So, next time you have a go at “MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart,” think not of a Highland lass, pretty and fair, but of a big hairy coo, lost and dark.

Moo.