Hair Of The Dog reel

Requested by “No Cause For Alarm” a while back, and also a few days ago. I’ll have to comment on this later. Composed by Alan McLeod, formerly of “The Tannahill Weavers”.

I first heard this tune on John Skelton’s solo CD, and thought it was a great piece of whistle-playing, on an Eb whistle, if I remember correctly, and accompanied by Ged Foley on guitar.
Apart from occasionally in Aberdeen, when I play it as a duet with another whistle player who knows it, I’ve only ever heard it played on 2 occasions, and that would be in about 20 years.
John Allan Cameron from Canada played it one night at Aberdeen Folk Club - on guitar, which is no mean feat, and some Edinburgh musicians had picked it up from somewhere, and played it at a session at Pete Clark’s “Neil Gow” Fiddle Festival in Dunkeld 5 or 6 years ago. They were very surprised when I joined in, - as I was surprised to hear it come out in a session after so long.
There are c-sharp triplets in the third part, and I’m 99% certain that on the recording John does a technique where you run the middle 3 fingers of your top hand over the top holes on the whistle to obtain the triplet. It’s quite tricky to do, especially at the speed John plays at, but he pulls it off perfectly. He also plays a few melodic variations, but this is the basic tune.
And apologies to “No Cause For Alarm”, who hadn’t requested this, as I said above, but the tune played before it - one of John’s own called “The Road To Buggleskelly”, which I’ll post in the near future. I had obviously confused the 2 tunes.