Scotland’s greatest songstress, Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, was the author of many beautiful songs often today thought of as traditional. The daughter of a staunchly Jacobite family, she wrote in sympathy to the cause, setting her songs to old tunes. Marriage to Major William Murray Nairne brought her to Edinburgh, where she carried on her “queer trade of song-writing” under a pseudonym, keeping it secret even from her husband. Lays from Strathearn appeared under her own name, posthumously, in 1846.
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