Jenny Dang the Weaver

The tune was in print by 1724, in Dublin as "Port Royall" and in Edinburgh as the air of a song in Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany. A Scottish story credits it to the Rev. Alexander Garden of Birse in Aberdeenshire, whose wife is said to have beaten his handyman, a former weaver, around 1746 for refusing to clean the minister's boots. To "dang" is to beat.

It spread widely. Bremner printed it around 1757, New England fiddlers copied it into their tune books in the 1780s and 1790s, and pipers, Shetland fiddlers and Irish players all took it up. Sir Alexander Boswell later wrote a song to it about Jenny turning down a weaver's advances.