John Skinner (poet)

John Skinner (31 October 1721 – 16 June 1807) was a Scottish Episcopalian minister, historian, poet and songwriter.

Born in Balfour, Aberdeenshire, he was a son of a schoolmaster at Birse, and was educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen.

Brought up as a Presbyterian, he became an Episcopalian and ministered to a congregation at Longside, near Peterhead, for 65 years. After the failure of the Jacobite Rising, his congregation was subject to persecution and in May 1746 the Episcopalian chapel at Tiffery was burned by Government soldiers with the active participation of the local landowner, Lady Kinmundy.

Skinner wrote The Ecclesiastical History of Scotland from the Episcopal point of view, and several songs of which The Reel of Tullochgorum and The Ewie wi' the Crookit Horn are the best known, and he also rendered some of the Psalms into Latin. He kept up a rhyming correspondence with Robert Burns.

He died at the home of his son, John Skinner, Bishop Coadjutor of Aberdeen on 16 June 1807.

In 2005, a collection of Skinner's poems edited by David M. Bertie was published by the Buchan Field Club.