Just the first verse of the traditional ballad "Little Musgrave", which is apparently the tune given in the Bagford Collection (17C), and reproduced in a book by Chappel (1855) - the relevant page is shown in the image.
This melody was found by my friend Dave Rado asking around on Mudcat (as was the version of The Braes o' Balquidder I put here a while ago).

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Little Musgrave

The air "The Braes o' Balquidder" pre-existed the song by Robert Tannahill of the same name. This recording of the air is actually a midi file - converted by Dave Rado into MP3 format so that I could upload it to Soundcloud - which I created from the sheet music of the air at https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Braes_of_Balquidder_(The).
The song, it appears, was originally set to a different tune, also known as "The Carles o' Buchanan", which I have now recorded.

Braes Of Balquidder (Trad Air)

Possibly the first ever recording of this song to this precise tune, which is almost certainly the tune to which the original author, Robert Tannahill, intended it to be sung.  The tune seems to have become altered via the folk tradition, so that when Ewan McColl learned it from his mother, Betsy Miller, it was already markedly different from the version published in 1823, shown in the image.
Thanks to Dave Rado for doing the background research that led to my learning this!

James Eisner

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