Songfacts®:

• "A Scottish Soldier" was Andy Stewart's follow up to his novelty song "Donald Where's Your Troosers?" In a TV interview, Stewart said the idea came to him in a public house; he wrote two verses and sang it the next day. It was inspiration, he said.
• The melody is taken from the Scottish folk song "The Green Hills Of Tyrol," which itself is taken from "La Tua Danza Sì Leggiera," a chorus from Rossini's Guillaume Tell (William Tell) opera.
  
  The song is about a soldier who finds himself fighting in Tyrol, which is in Austria. Victorious in battle but critically injured, he asks the piper not to play the pibroch (funeral music) there, but in the Scottish hillside.
  
  Scottish troops were not known to fight in Tyrol, but the character William Tell in Guillaume Tell travels there, which is how "The Green Hills of Tyrol" was named.
• "A Scottish Soldier" was released on the Top Rank label in September 1960 backed by "The Muckin' O' Geordie's Byre." The sheet music retailed for 2/6d from James S. Kerr of Glasgow; the song was arranged by Iain MacFadyen. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for all above
• In the UK, this peaked at #19 but spent 36 weeks in the Top 40, a run that lasted from January to September, 1961.