Angus Donald Beaton’s Lament waltz

A composition of the great Cape Breton fiddler Donald Angus Beaton, taken from the sheet music found at this page: http://www.celticmusiccentre.com/collections/dab/compositions.htm You can hear a bit of a recording of DAB playing it there, too. Presumably titled after a relative, that isn’t confusing, is it? In the liner notes of one of the CB field recordings issued in recent years on the Rounder label one fiddler’s bio mentions that he is the 3rd of three brothers, all named John; his mother was very apologetic - “I couldn’t think of anything else!” ;) A very Celtic thing, having few names to go around, thus the profusion of nicknames - Big, Red, Little, Black, just to think of a few ones I’ve come across in Scottish music.

This tune is very crooked, making it hard to play. This is one of DAB’s lesser known crooked tunes, with Tamerack’er Down (https://thesession.org/tunes/12152) being far more well known, played by many Cape Breton fiddlers. It was said somewhere around that Donald Angus experimented with uneven numbers of bars in tunes. It works quite pleasantly in Tamerack’er Down, but I can’t say this one works quite as well.