We're honoured to have had our version of this song included on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival commemorative CD.

Background
We tracked this down a few years ago. Mark and Graeme's grandfather - William Wilson - died in 1982, and they have only very faint memories of him. However William's sister Rhoda is still alive and well. She was the superintendent at Carrowdore Mission Hall Sunday School, which the two boys attended for donkeys years.

About 4 years ago, not long after the Low Country Boys got started, Rhoda gave Mark two pieces of paper with the handwritten lyrics for what turned out to be "My Ain Countrie" on them. She had faithfully copied them from William's personal collection, where they had been found after he died. So Mark - eventually - tracked down the original.

New York
The hymn was written by Mary Lee Demarest in New York around 1861 when she was 23 years old. Her mother had died when Mary was a child and Mary was raised by a Scottish nurse. The nurse told Mary a story of a Scottish couple called MacDuff who had emigrated from Scotland to America. However the wife was deeply homesick and said to her husband "I am wearying for my ain countrie". They later returned to Scotland. The expression stuck in Mary's head and was the inspiration for the hymn some years later.

Sankey
"My Ain Countrie" was first published in the New York Observer newspaper, but found popularity in Ira D Sankey's "Sacred Songs and Solos" hymnal, one of the most famous evangelical hymnbooks ever published. Sankey (1840 - 1908) was of Scotch-Irish descent. It's number 982 in the hymnal.

William MacEwan
Back in Britain, the Glaswegian singing evangelist William MacEwan (1870-1943) recorded the first gospel music in the world, for the Columbia Record Company, in London in 1911. He recorded six hymns in one session, one of which was "My Ain Countrie". MacEwan made 82 recordings from 1911 - 1932, which were issued on a box set of 3 cassettes in the 1980s; a selection later appeared on the CD "The Original Glasgow Street Singer Evangelist" in 1994, on the Lismor label from Glasgow. MacEwan was a megastar of his generation, and his fame took him to America. He recorded six hymns in New York in May 1926, including "In the Garden" and "The Old Rugged Cross". He recorded again in New York in December 1929, February 1930 and January 1931.

The hymns and recordings of MacEwan and Sankey had a great impact on the evangelical churches of Ulster in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The country had been gripped by enormous revival in 1859 and then again during the time of WP Nicholson in the 1920s. MacEwan 78s are easily found in "flea markets" and house clearance shops of Ulster even today.

We hope you enjoy our version of "My Ain Countrie".