Annotation:Katharine Oggle
KATHARINE OGGLE/OGIE/OGGY. AKA and see "Catherine Logie," "Highland Mary (3)," "Katherine Loggy," "Lady Catherine Ogle," "Ketrin Ogie," "Bonny Katherine Oggy." Scottish, Air and March. A Minor. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB (most versions): AABB' (Ross). The air was credited to Irish harper Rory dall O'Cahan by William Grattan Flood, the Irish antiquarian in his History of Irish Music. Rory dall spent most of his life in Scotland between 1601 and 1650, known to the court of King James in that country; despite this Flood seems anxious to claim the melody as Irish in origin. Unfortunately, Grattan Flood's work tends to be error-prone, and it is hard to credit any unsubstantiated assertions with much veracity. "Katherine Ogle" (there are numerous spelling variations) appears earliest in the Scottish Panmure Manuscript #9454, c. 1675, Seventy Seven Dances, Songs and Scots Airs for the Violin, and was printed under this title in the Appendix (written in 1688) to Playford's Dancing Master of 1686 (a note called it "a new dance"). On the strength of the Playford publication in the Dancing Master, 1686 edition, the English collector Chappell (1859) disputes the claim of Scottish ancestry. Chappell (1859), in fact, takes virulent exception to Stenhouse's scholarship regarding this tune after the latter claimed that the air was Scottish and dated it from the year 1680 (when it was sung by Mr. John Abell at a concert in Stationers' Hall). Chappell found that the only date Abell could possibly have sung it was in 1702, and he states that the earliest printing was in the Appendix to the 7th edition of Playford's Dancing Master of 1686 (where it appears under the title "Lady Catherine Ogle"); Chappell, who claimed many Irish and Scottish airs as English, was evidently unaware of the version in the Panmure Manuscript when he accused Stenhouse of being deliberately misleading regarding its national origin. John Glen (1891 and 1900) also disagrees with Chappell, noting that Chappell's own source, John Playford, published the tune a year before it was mentioned in The Dancing Master's appendix (1688) in Apollo's Banquet (5th edition, 1687) where it is called a "Scotch Tune" in footnotes and in fact appears under the title "A Scotch Tune" only. O'Farrell (c. 1806) also listed the melody as "Scotch." J.M. Wood (The Popular Songs and Melodies of Scotland, 1887) also concluded it was Scottish, "from internal evidence." It appears in one of the earliest Scottish fiddler's manuscript repertory books, c. 1705, in the private collection of Frances Collinson (1971). Early Scottish manuscript versions include the Guthrie Manuscript (c. 1680), the Panmure Violin 1 Manuscript (c. 1670's), and the Leyden Manuscript (c. 1692, though not the exact version given by Playford). The air appears in full in the Guthrie Manuscript (c. 1680's), which was named for Covenanting minister James Guthrie of Stirling, beheaded in 1661 for publishing a seditious pamphlet; it appears in a section of music inserted later in a book of his sermons. Mary Anne Alburger points out that he was probably no lover of dance music, and that it is possible someone sewed the music into Guthrie's book as a joke.
Later Scottish printings were in Orpheus Caledonius (1725 and 1733 editions) and it can be found in manuscript form in Edinburgh fiddler and writing master David Young's MacFarlane Manuscript (c. 1741, No. 29, p. 58, with seven variations by William Forbes of Disblair, 1661-1740), Francis Barsanti's Old Scots Tunes (Edinburgh, 1742), and the [James] Gillespie Manuscript of Perth (1768). A popular song to the air was written (or rather reworked) by Thomas D'Urfey in his Pills to Purge Melancholy (vi. 274-276, 1719-20) entitled "Bonny Kathern Loggy: A Scotch Song."
As I came down the hel-land [Highland] town, there were lasses many,
Sat in a rank on either bank, and one more gay than any;
Use leeks about for one kind face, and I spy’d Willy Scraggy,
Ise spir’d of him what was her name, and he caw’d her Kathern Loggy.
Later versions of the air appear in The Merry Musician; or, A Cure for the Spleen (i. 224, 1716) and Allen Ramsey's The Tea Table Miscellany. Published editions of ballad operas which include the tune are The Quaker's Opera (1731), Polly (1729), The Beggar's Wedding (1729), Pattie and Peggie (1730), The Lover's Opera (1730) and The Highland Fair (1731). Later it was used by the poet Robert Burns as the vehicle for his song "Highland Mary (3)" and appears in the Scots Musical Museum (1792, No. 164). The song begins:
Ye banks, and braes, and streams around
The castle o' Montgomery!
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers,
Your waters never drumlie:
There Simmer first unfauld her robes,
And there the langest tarry;
For there I took the last Farewell
O' my sweet Highland Mary.
Burns's song was familiar to Northamptonshire poet and musician John Clare (1793-1864), who learned a melody for it from a gypsy he encountered in 1825:
June 3. Finished planting my auriculas: went a-botanizing for ferns and orchises, and caught a cold in the wet grass, which has made me as bad as ever. Got the tune of "Highland Mary" from Wisdom Smith, a gipsy, and pricked another sweet tune without name as he fiddled it. [Cherry, Life and Remains of John Clare, 1883, p. 87]
Whether the tune he learned as "Highland Mary" was the same "Catherine Ogle" one Burns used, a variant, or a different tune is not known.
Lady Catherine Ogle was a real personage, who in 1591 married Sir Charles Cavendish of Stoke and Welbeck Abbey (c. 1553-1617), his second wife. They lived in Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire. She was born around 1570 and was the daughter of Cuthbert Ogle, 7th Lord Ogle, in Northumberland. Catherine inherited the barony of Ogle (she was the 8th Baroness), which then passed into the Cavendish family. The Cavendishes were "new money" of the era, having been minor gentry until Bess of Hardwick (Charles Cavendish's mother and the countess of Shrewsbury) transformed their fortunes through marriage and the shrewd promotion of her sons, until they were immensely rich. Sir Charles and Catherine are buried in the church of St. Mary in a sepulchral monument that covers the south wall of the Cavendish Chapel at Bolsover.
In America the melody appears in the music manuscript copybook of Henry Livingston, Jr. Livingston purchased the estate of Locust Grove, Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1771 at the age of 23. In 1775 he was a Major in the 3rd New York Regiment, which participated in Montgomery's invasion of Canada in a failed attempt to wrest Quebec from British control. An important land-owner in the Hudson Valley, and a member of the powerful Livingston family, Henry was also a surveyor and real estate speculator, an illustrator and map-maker, and a Justice of the Peace for Dutchess County. He was also a poet and musician, and presumably a dancer, as he was elected a Manager for the New York Assembly's dancing season of 1774-1775, along with his 3rd cousin, John Jay, later U.S. Chief Justice of Governor of New York. It also appears in the manuscript collection of Captain George Bush, begun in 1779. Bush was a fiddler who was for a time on George Washington's staff.
See also "Young Catherine," often attributed to Turlough Carolan.
