The Fairy Dance

Nathaniel Gow, son of the famous Perthshire fiddler Niel Gow, wrote it in 1802 for the Fife Hunt, whose balls his band played. His original "Largo's Fairy Dance" was a pair of tunes, this one and "The Fairies Advance," named for the parish of Largo in Fife. He printed it in C in his Fifth Collection of 1809, and by the same year other publishers had already dropped the "Largo."

Fiddlers now play it in D, and it is often one of the first reels a Scottish fiddler learns. It spread to Ireland, where P. W. Joyce learned it as a boy in Limerick around 1840, and to Shetland, Cape Breton, French Canada and the American South. J. Scott Skinner published a set of variations on it in 1904.