Effie MacDonald singing ‘Am falbh thu leam, a rìbhinn òg’
Sound clip of Effie MacDonald of Middleton singing ‘Am falbh thu leam, a rìbhinn òg’.
Courtesy of Mrs Effie MacDonald
Effie MacDonald of Middleton sings ‘Am falbh thu leam, a rìbhinn òg’, known colloquially as the ‘Tiree Love Song’. It was written by Alexander Sinclair (Alasdair Nèill Òig), a wine and spirit merchant in Glasgow.
In the song, he asks a young maiden to come with him over the sea where she will see everything she could desire in the isle of the west that once was his home: geese and white swans, views over the ocean to the neighbouring isles, the green meadows and the tranquillity of St Patrick’s chapel.
He tells her of the songbirds, the bumble bees and the blaze on the cattle, the cormorants and ducks, the marram grass growing on the dunes and the fragrance of the machair flowers, all to be found on his favourite part of Argyll – the green island of Tiree.