Niel Gow(1727–1807)

Niel Gow was born on 22 March 1727 at the Perthshire village of Inver, two miles below Dunkeld on the north bank of the River Tay, the son of John Gow, a weaver, and Catherine McEwan. The household ran on the weaving loom and on the small parcel of croft land the family rented from the Atholl estate. There were no professional musicians in the family. Gow taught himself the fiddle on a borrowed instrument from the age of nine, by his own later account, playing alongside the parish-church precentor and the local dancing-master who came up from Dunkeld for the wedding-and-harvest-home seasons. He took his first paid engagement at thirteen at a Crieff harvest dance and was, by his late teens, the dance-fiddler of the upper Tay valley.

The Duke of Atholl's household retained him as house fiddler in 1745, when he was eighteen. The retention was the break of the career. The Atholl Dukes had run Blair Castle as the largest aristocratic Highland household of the eighteenth century, with regular winter assemblies, summer hunt-balls, and the periodic visits of the Scottish-British political and intellectual establishment through to it. Gow was given a small house and croft at Inver, a small annual salary from the Duke's purse, and the brief of playing fiddle at the Blair Castle house entertainments. He held the appointment from 1745 to his death in 1807, sixty-two consecutive years, the longest single house-musician's appointment in Scottish music history.

The compositions came at the rate of about two a year through the career. Roughly eighty-eight pieces attributed to him have survived in the *Collection of Strathspey Reels* (1784) published by his eldest son Nathaniel, the *Second Collection of Niel Gow's Reels* (1788), and through the four further volumes that his sons published across the 1790s and 1800s. The major surviving compositions include *Niel Gow's Lament for the Death of His Second Wife* (1805), still the most-quoted Scottish traditional fiddle lament; *Loch Erichtside* (the slow strathspey written for the Atholl water-party of 1779); *The Athole Highlanders' March to Loch Katrine* (1786); *Lament for Abercairney* (1779); and the dance-tune body of about seventy strathspeys, reels, jigs and hornpipes that have remained in the ceilidh-and-dance repertoire of Scottish traditional music continuously since.

He sat for Henry Raeburn at his Edinburgh studio in 1787 at the age of sixty. The Raeburn portrait, now in the National Gallery of Scotland, shows him seated in plain country plaid with the fiddle on his knee, looking past the painter with the focused expression of a working musician between tunes. The portrait became the foundational image of the Scottish fiddler. Raeburn painted Gow again at sixty-three in 1790, this time bow on string in mid-stroke, in a portrait the Atholl estate bought and that hangs at Blair Castle still. The two Raeburn portraits established his face in Scottish national-cultural memory as firmly as the compositions established his repertoire.

He was married twice, to Margaret Wiseman of Strathbraan (who died in 1782 after twenty-eight years of marriage) and to Margaret Urquhart (the second-wife lament was for her, after her death in 1805). The two marriages produced ten children, five of whom (Nathaniel, Andrew, John, William and the youngest Daniel) became fiddlers of distinction in the next generation, with Nathaniel in particular running a working musical-publishing business in Edinburgh through the early nineteenth century that put the Gow compositions into print and into international circulation. Niel Gow himself never left Perthshire for more than a few weeks; he played his last paid engagement at the Atholl wedding ball of October 1806 at the age of seventy-nine, was bedridden by Christmas, and died at the Inver house on 1 March 1807, six weeks short of his eightieth birthday. He is buried at Little Dunkeld churchyard a mile from the house, under a flat slab inscribed with his birth and death dates and a fiddle in relief. The Gow name in the Scottish catalogue is the patronymic of the Gaelic *gobha* (smith); he carried it from a Perthshire weaver's croft into the core of Scottish traditional music.