This directory is my second attempt at transcribing all of John Walsh's "Caledonian Country Dances" publications. This is now somewhat a relic, as the collections have been merged in the JohnWalsh directory. This directory should disappear eventually.

Starting around 1740, a number of collections by this name were published by John Walsh in London. These were compiled by a number of different editors, and as was Walsh's practice, they rarely included any information about their sources. These are among the earliest known "Scottish" or "Caledonian" dance-music collections. I've been working on collecting all the tunes, with the accompanying dance descriptions when available. It should be noted that "Scottish" in this case refers mostly to the tune's source; "country dance" at the time wasn't distinctly different in Scotland and England, or in Holland and France, for that matter. The local dance styles probably differed somewhat, but this can't be determined from the published dance descriptions.

This is a collection that's "under construction", as I find time to hunt down copies of the music and transcribe it. Photographic copies of the original texts are slowly becoming available online, which is what makes this possible. The files here mostly contain single tunes in ABC notation, with the "alltunes.*" files at the end a single file that contains all the tunes transcribed so far.

The publications with the title "Caledonian Country Dances" are somewhat a mess. They typically have no publication date, and are referenced by various terms (Book, Volume, Edition, etc.) in no consistent manner. Versions of a tune appear in more than one of them, sometimes identical, sometimes different in various ways, and sometimes with different dance descriptions.

Transcription Notes:

The file names are now just the title, with '_' used as a separator. Initial articles are dropped. If a title exists in more than one source text, and the music or dance description have significant differences, there are multiple transcriptions, with a number added to the end of the title. This results in the alltunes.abc file being in alphabetical order by title. Nearly-identical versions from several sources are put in a single file, with several S: lines listing the sources.

There are many problems with the dance descriptions. The text is often not of good quality. Punctuation is often lost, periods and commas are difficult to distinguish, and random specks can look like periods. The thin parts of letters often fade or disappear. In the worst cases, "??" is used to indicate an illegible portion of text. In general, most of the words are legible (or can be inferred from context), but the punctuation shouldn't be treated as reliable.

In many cases, there are explicit statements or clues in the dance to determine the tune's repeat pattern. When this isn't possible, I've generally transcribed the repeat symbols as-is, which is usually different from modern practice. Initial double bars or begin-repeat symbols are used for full first bars, as is common with some publishers (but not others). Musicians playing for dancing will have to figure out the appropriate repeat pattern.

Initial "the" and "a" are omitted in file names, and are lower case in the T: header. This is sometimes recommended for computer files, since it makes correct alphabetization easy in different languages by using the rule "Sort on the title starting from the first upper-case letter".

There is also a cache subdirectory that contains transcriptions of some of the tunes from other people. I've found a few of these, and sometimes incorporated them into my files. I may eventually collect more tunes from other transcribers, and include them here as part of this collection.

The sources that I've used are:

1

IMSLP 74348first collection, edited by John Johnson, called "3rd edition" and also the collections labelled 1 and 2.

2

"Vol.II. PART I." and "Vol 1st, in 4 Books"
IMSLP #98359, second colelction, 84 pp.

3

labelled "3rd Edition", but not the same as #1 above.
IMSLP #173105,