"The Skye Boat Song" (Roud 3772) is a late 19th-century Scottish song adaptation of a Gaelic song composed c.1782 by William Ross, entitled Cuachag nan Craobh ("Cuckoo of the Tree").[1] In the original song, the composer laments to a cuckoo that his unrequited love, Lady Marion Ross, is rejecting him. The 19th century English lyrics instead evoked the journey of Prince Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") from Benbecula to the Isle of Skye as he evaded capture by government soldiers after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.
Sir Harold Boulton, 2nd Baronet composed the new lyrics to Ross's song which had been heard by Anne Campbell MacLeod in the 1870s, and the line "Over the Sea to Skye" is now a cornerstone of the tourism industry on the Isle of Skye.
Alternative lyrics to the tune were written by Robert Louis Stevenson, probably in 1885. After hearing the Jacobite airs sung by a visitor, he judged the lyrics to be "unworthy", so made a new set of verses "more in harmony with the plaintive tune".[2]
It is often played as a slow lullaby or waltz, and entered into the modern folk canon in the twentieth century with versions by Paul Robeson, Tom Jones, Rod Stewart, Roger Whittaker, Tori Amos, and many others.
- ^ Cuachag nan Craobh, Tobar an Dualchais
- ^ Mrs R. L. Stevenson. "Prefatory Note". In Robert Louis Stevenson. Poems. Volume I. p. 58. London: Heinemann, 1924. The visitor was Elizabeth Anne Ferrier who stayed with Stevenson in June 1885 (Robert Louis Stevenson. Letters, Volume V. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995).