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The Gallant Ninety-Twa

[ Roud 3776 ; Ballad Index Ord289 ; trad.]

John Ord: Bothy Songs and Ballads

Archie Fisher sang The Gallant Ninety Two in 1976 on his Topic album Will Ye Gang, Love. He noted:

Several Highland regiments, notably the Black Watch (“The Gallant Forty Twa”) and the Gordon Highlanders (“The Gallant Ninety Two”) had their regimental praise songs, sung by soldiers and civilians alike. The present song, made early in the 20^th century, was a lengthy affair, commemorating the Gordons’ exploits from the Peninsular War (“the dark Pyr’nees”) to the Boer War (“dark Majuba’s plunder”), but Archie has—perhaps mercifully—compressed the long panegyric into a brief and nuggety lyric. There’s a twelve-verse version of the words and tune in Ord’s Bothy Songs and Ballads in which Waterloo is more generously celebrated as a British victory rather than, as here, a Scottish one.