Scottish Folk Song Lyrics And Guitar Chords
The song lyrics and chords of these Scottish folk songs are some of the most popular in Scotland. Scottish folk songs are very similar to the Irish tunes, some are quiet sad and very melodic. Over time I hope to build on what's here, Also included are a few Scottish Gaelic songs If you have and Scottish songs you feel should be included here then send them to me. Thanks. Over half of the songs that used to be here are now moved to the three new sections for The McCalmans The Corries and Runrig as they either wrote them or made them famous. All the guitar songs are in the chordpro format.
Scottish folk songs
Introduction:
Scottish folk songs are an integral part of the country's cultural heritage and have been passed down through generations, evolving over time to reflect the changing times and influences. These songs are deeply rooted in the history, traditions, and way of life of the Scottish people. They serve as a medium for storytelling, preserving ancient tales and legends, and also as a form of expression for the everyday struggles and joys of the people. In this thesis, we will delve into the origins, evolution, and significance of Scottish folk songs, exploring their themes, styles, and impact on the Scottish culture.
Origins and Evolution of Scottish Folk Songs:
The roots of Scottish folk songs can be traced back to the ancient Celtic traditions of the country. These songs were initially passed down orally, with each generation adding their own interpretations and nuances to them. As the country went through various political and social changes, the songs also evolved, reflecting the struggles and triumphs of the Scottish people. The Scottish folk song tradition was also influenced by the influx of other cultures, such as Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and French, resulting in a diverse range of styles and themes.
Themes and Styles:
Scottish folk songs cover a wide range of themes, including love, war, history, and nature. The songs often tell stories of heroes and heroines, battles and wars, and the struggles of everyday life. One of the most prominent themes in Scottish folk songs is the love for one's homeland, with songs like 'My Heart's in the Highlands' and 'Scotland the Brave' paying tribute to the beauty and resilience of Scotland. The songs also reflect the strong connection of the Scottish people to nature, with many songs dedicated to the mountains, rivers, and landscapes of the country.
The styles of Scottish folk songs vary greatly, depending on the region and the influences. The most famous style is the Scottish ballad, which often tells a story in a narrative form and is accompanied by instruments such as the fiddle, bagpipes, and harp. The songs also incorporate elements of Gaelic singing, with its distinctive ornamentation and use of drone notes. Other styles include work songs, laments, and dance songs, each with its own unique characteristics.
Significance and Impact:
Scottish folk songs have played a significant role in shaping the Scottish identity and preserving the country's cultural heritage. These songs have been a source of inspiration and comfort for the Scottish people, especially during times of hardship and oppression. They have also been used as a means of political and social commentary, reflecting the struggles of the people and advocating for change. Additionally, Scottish folk songs have been instrumental in keeping the language and traditions alive, with many songs being sung in the native Gaelic language.
The impact of Scottish folk songs extends beyond the borders of Scotland, with their popularity and influence spreading to other countries. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Scottish immigrants brought their music with them to North America, where it merged with other styles to form new genres such as bluegrass and country music. Today, Scottish folk songs continue to be performed and enjoyed all over the world, showcasing the enduring legacy of these songs.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, Scottish folk songs have a rich and diverse history, reflecting the country's traditions, culture, and struggles. These songs have evolved over time, but their essence remains unchanged, connecting the Scottish people to their roots and preserving their unique identity. Whether in the form of a lament, a ballad, or a dance song, Scottish folk songs continue to captivate audiences and serve as a powerful reminder of the enduring spirit of the Scottish people.
Introduction:
Scottish folk songs are an integral part of the country's cultural heritage and have been passed down through generations, evolving over time to reflect the changing times and influences. These songs are deeply rooted in the history, traditions, and way of life of the Scottish people. They serve as a medium for storytelling, preserving ancient tales and legends, and also as a form of expression for the everyday struggles and joys of the people. In this thesis, we will delve into the origins, evolution, and significance of Scottish folk songs, exploring their themes, styles, and impact on the Scottish culture.
Origins and Evolution of Scottish Folk Songs:
The roots of Scottish folk songs can be traced back to the ancient Celtic traditions of the country. These songs were initially passed down orally, with each generation adding their own interpretations and nuances to them. As the country went through various political and social changes, the songs also evolved, reflecting the struggles and triumphs of the Scottish people. The Scottish folk song tradition was also influenced by the influx of other cultures, such as Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and French, resulting in a diverse range of styles and themes.
Themes and Styles:
Scottish folk songs cover a wide range of themes, including love, war, history, and nature. The songs often tell stories of heroes and heroines, battles and wars, and the struggles of everyday life. One of the most prominent themes in Scottish folk songs is the love for one's homeland, with songs like 'My Heart's in the Highlands' and 'Scotland the Brave' paying tribute to the beauty and resilience of Scotland. The songs also reflect the strong connection of the Scottish people to nature, with many songs dedicated to the mountains, rivers, and landscapes of the country.
The styles of Scottish folk songs vary greatly, depending on the region and the influences. The most famous style is the Scottish ballad, which often tells a story in a narrative form and is accompanied by instruments such as the fiddle, bagpipes, and harp. The songs also incorporate elements of Gaelic singing, with its distinctive ornamentation and use of drone notes. Other styles include work songs, laments, and dance songs, each with its own unique characteristics.
Significance and Impact:
Scottish folk songs have played a significant role in shaping the Scottish identity and preserving the country's cultural heritage. These songs have been a source of inspiration and comfort for the Scottish people, especially during times of hardship and oppression. They have also been used as a means of political and social commentary, reflecting the struggles of the people and advocating for change. Additionally, Scottish folk songs have been instrumental in keeping the language and traditions alive, with many songs being sung in the native Gaelic language.
The impact of Scottish folk songs extends beyond the borders of Scotland, with their popularity and influence spreading to other countries. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Scottish immigrants brought their music with them to North America, where it merged with other styles to form new genres such as bluegrass and country music. Today, Scottish folk songs continue to be performed and enjoyed all over the world, showcasing the enduring legacy of these songs.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, Scottish folk songs have a rich and diverse history, reflecting the country's traditions, culture, and struggles. These songs have evolved over time, but their essence remains unchanged, connecting the Scottish people to their roots and preserving their unique identity. Whether in the form of a lament, a ballad, or a dance song, Scottish folk songs continue to captivate audiences and serve as a powerful reminder of the enduring spirit of the Scottish people.
Below is the PDF Ebook of folk songs lyrics and chords. The songs are in 3 different keys, There's over 500 songs in the ebook. Most have only 3 easy chords.
Price €8.90 . I'll email the ebook after payment.
Price €8.90 . I'll email the ebook after payment.
The Voice of the People ABOUT THE SERIES EDITOR
Dr Reg Hall is a visiting fellow in the Graduate Research Centre in Culture & Communication at the University of Sussex. Engaged now in preparing A History of Irish Music & Dance in London, his academic work is enhanced by four decades of close contact with many traditional musicians, singers and dancers in the Irish immigrant community. An active musician throughout that time with Bampton Morris and Padstow Blue Ribbon 'Obby 'Oss, he has associated with country musicians in the south of England and he has known a good number of the performers featured in this series. His production credits include a number of significant record releases of traditional music. Lateral thinking, a working class family background and professional experience in social work have contributed to his challenge to received wisdom. His radical views on the whole field of traditional music and dancing, part of a growing movement of re-assessment, are in the best traditions of Topic Records. The Voice of the People
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
The Topic Records catalogue of long-playing records, deleted some time ago with the phasing out of vinyl, included about 120 albums of English, Irish and Scottish traditional music. The creativity of the original producers-making the recordings. programming the albums and writing the notes - set the standards for their time and their work remains an important stepping-stone in our understanding and appreciation of traditional music. In making much of this material available again two or three decades later, Topic Records has adopted an approach for a different medium and a new audience. This formidable project is presented as a series of thematic anthologies, but, more importantly, the selection of material and the annotation reflects a revised view of traditional music.
Some aspects of traditional music have interested outside observers for a couple of centuries, and it is the values, interests and activities of those outsiders - the founders and activists of the folk-song and folk-dance movements -- that have set definitions of what the outside world should find interesting in traditional music. Part of the motivation behind the preparation of this series has been to shift the emphasis away from the values of the folk-song collectors and to present traditional music in its own right, reflecting its history, social contexts and the values of its practitioners. The paradox is that, although the focus here is on traditional music, the series owes its existence to the folk-song movement. Some consideration, therefore, of the main phases of that movement is needed to put the series in context.
The early folk-song and folk-dance collectors-middle-class, educated and operating within the mentality of their time-were motivated by varying shades of nationalism. and it was held, very commonly within nationalist thinking, that society in general had lost its innocence and that a nation could regain its soul by purifying its culture. Thus, in the 1880s, the notion of a lost golden age informed the Merrie England movement and the Irish and Scottish Gaelic Revivals. Ballad studies, long-established within the field of literature, showed that balladry had once been in the mouths of the common people, while some academic musicians, with an interest in ancient music, pointed to national airs as the potential raw material for new schools of art music to oust what was held to be the offending influence of European romanticism. Getting back to the innocence of a golden age required a search for its survivors; those people thought to have the longest cultural memories, untainted by the artiness of elite society and the vulgarity of the brutalised, industrial poor.
The finger pointed to 'the peasantry, and a few dedicated and inspired collectors, most notably at the turn of the century, sought out members of the rural working population and recorded on paper thousands of song airs, song texts and dance tunes. There was no intention of documenting the music-making of those rural workers and their families; the aim was to gather raw material for a minor revolution in art and popular music. Mediating their finds through the conventions of their own culture of art-music and literature, the collectors defined their new genres as 'folk-song' and 'folk-dance' (in Ireland 'Irish song' and 'Irish dance'), which they promoted, often heavily edited and reconstructed, through music publishers, live concert performance and state education systems.
The post-war revival of the folk-song movement - the so-called Folk Revival-was inspired initially by models in the American labour movement, and moved politically to the left, where it occupied ground further down the social scale in the urban working and lower middle classes. The Folk Revival was also rooted in a form of cultural moralism, reacting against the commercial music of show business and aiming for the creation of a proletarian entertainment and art form. Whereas the Victorians and Edwardians defined 'folk-song' narrowly, the new wave of the movement was eclectic. Almost anything could be 'folk-song-industrial workers' songs, material derived from the music-hall, songs of protest and contemporary writing on social issues. Within the proliferation of British folk-clubs and Irish ballad-lounges, there developed performance styles unique to the folk-song movement, and these styles, owing little to traditional music-making, entered the mainstreams of English, Scottish and Irish popular culture.
In parallel with this post-war movement, there was a new phase of field-collecting, made possible by the availability of the relatively cheap means of making sound recordings. Folk-song collecting could now capture the subtleties of intonation, accent, inflection, pitch, rhythm, timing and language of authentic performance. Although some folk-song collectors at the beginning of the century had made use of the cylinder recording machine and the British Broadcasting Corporation had made some studio and location recordings in the 1930s and early 1940s, Brian George was the real modern pioneer. Assisted in January 1947 by Seamus Ennis, who had just left the Irish Folklore Commission, he recorded on location in Ireland with a disc- cutting machine for the BBC. Shortly afterwards, working with portable tape- recorders and with little prior knowledge of the extent of traditional music-making in these islands, Alan Lomax (Columbia Records, NYC), Peter Kennedy and Seamus Ennis (BBC, London), Hamish Henderson (School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh) and Ciarán MacMathuna (Radio Éireann, Dublin) embarked upon endeavours of great discovery and excitement.
The initial period, however, was relatively short-lived, particularly as the BBC, the English Folk Dance & Song Society and the major record companies showed no lasting interest. However, national institutions in Scotland and Ireland have continued to collect in the field, and Radio Éireann (now RTÉ) has for several decades responded to public demand for Irish traditional-music programmes as popular entertainment. The exposure of traditional singers and musicians on radio (albeit very limited in Britain) and commercial records, in folk- clubs and on concerts from the early 1950s has made some impact on the Folk Revival, and within a section of that movement there has developed a taste for authentic performance. The tape-recorder, of course, has been available to amateur enthusiasts, and many-self-financed and working in isolation-have made valuable field-recordings, and a number of independent record producers have made interesting material available.
Those at the forefront of contemporary thinking about traditional music and dance have in recent years applied the academic and professional disciplines of ethnomusicology, community studies, social history, biography, multi-media recording and archiving to document and examine them in their social and historical contexts. There has been a shift from the elitist, patronising notion that 'folk-song' is the corporate and primitive creation of an anonymous, amorphous population of 'folk', who in the jargon of the 1950s are 'bearers of tradition'. It can now be recognised that traditional music and dance are created and developed by real identifiable people within real identifiable communities. While they are at the lower end of the social scale, the vitality and richness of their art and entertainment are as deserving of serious attention as the popular culture and high art of other sections of the community.
Any attempt to describe, let alone define, traditional music and dance is inevitably loaded with paradoxes and contradictions. To start with it there is no popular or even academic consensus about what they include and exclude. Having long co- existed and cross-bred with popular culture, the boundaries between the tradition and popular culture are blurred, and it can be argued there is value in keeping them blurred. Traditional music and dance have belonged primarily to rural working communities, though not exclusively to them and not to all members of every such community. For example, in southern Co. Sligo at the beginning of the century. traditional music-making was for some an almost obsessional daily occurrence, yet for others it was treated with indifference or even open hostility. Evidence suggests that as a general rule the piece-meal migration of rural workers to towns puts an end to their traditional music-making and dancing, yet rural practices and repertories have sometimes been modified to suit the needs of urban communities.
It is widely believed that traditional music-making has flourished and survived longest in isolated and remote areas, yet in rural Northumberland, Scotland and Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s it was the bus services, bringing people together, and the gramophone and the radio, circulating repertory and style, that gave the popularity of music- making a significant boost. No community in these islands, including the most isolated and remote, has been free from generations of population shift, as labour has pursued employment opportunities in the army, at sea, in farm work and heavy construction and in service for the gentry, and as migrant workers have returned home. It is these movements and mixing of populations that have contributed to the dissemination of repertory and modes of practice beyond parish borders.
The tradition is essentially an aural one with each performer learning his or her material by ear from another, yet some learned song texts and dance tunes from print and manuscript. Some performed their material exactly as they learned it, while others honed it to their own liking and imbued it with their own meaning and significance. Some struggled as children, unaided and even in the face of family opposition, to make a musical instrument and devise a playing technique, while others had expert tuition from older musicians on factory-made instruments. Some sang primarily at home for family entertainment, others sang to ease the monotony of repetitive labour, while some sang alone for their own satisfaction. In rural England a primary location for traditional music-making was the pub, the preserve of men, incidentally excluding women and children, whereas in rural Ireland it was the domestic kitchen, where gatherings of family and neighbours embraced both sexes and several generations. Most traditional music-making has been amateur, yet it was not so long ago that dance musicians were invariably paid for their services and there were livings for dance teachers and street singers and musicians.
The broad repertory of traditional songs comes from a number of sources. Some songs originate from composition within the tradition itself, while others have been adapted from material from outside the tradition, most notably from seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century ballad sheets and the nineteenth-century music hall. Some are archaic survivals, but some others are either contemporary or are set in the recent past. The texts are invariably constructed in conventional poetic language and the story lines and scenarios are based on equally conventional themes, while the tunes, not necessarily though sometimes wedded to on a stock of well-used melodic phrases. The creative potential and vagaries of aural transmission have tended towards mutations and hybrids of both words and tunes, which have resulted in countless variations. The same is true of dance tunes, for, while there is clearly some archaic survival, most dance-tune types were adapted from the dance music of the nobility and gentry (and later middle class) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tempered by a massive creative force within the tradition itself.
The recordings in this series represent cultures that have passed or are passing rapidly, as the social and economic conditions and the habitats that supported them have gone or are going for ever. These performances have timeless appeal and resonances, but what of the meaning and significance these songs and tunes had for the singers and musicians themselves and their audiences? Succeeding generations will have ever-increasing difficulty in grasping the nature and quality of the lives these performers lived. How will they understand the family structures and community ties, the gender roles and the inhibitions between the sexes, the rigid class structures, the livelihoods, the poverty and hardship, and the high level of violence in the communities that practiced traditional music-making? The brief biographies of the performers should offer some insight into the social contexts and set minds thinking. The dialects and accents in which these songs are sung are being rapidly eliminated, and the subtleties of meaning implied in the inflections, vocabulary and syntax might easily be lost on future listeners. The song-texts, given as the singers sing them and transcribed with a considered balance between standard and dialectal English and Scots, are offered primarily as an aid to understanding. When transcribed in print, the words of some songs seem fragmented or confused, yet in live performance the general drift of meaning is invariably clear enough.
This series makes available a large body of recorded songs, instrumental music and calendar customs from 'the tradition', drawn from the archive at Topic Records and a number of private collections. It includes recordings made on location often in the homes of the performers, some in live public performance and some from commercial 78rpm records now in the public domain. In the case of the English and the Welsh 78rpm records, they were originally issued for a very limited 'folk-song' and 'folk-dance' public, but in the case of the Scottish and Irish records they were put out as ethnic popular music. Some recordings presented here were made by amateur enthusiasts, as early as the mid-1950s, with portable and sometimes domestic equipment and, though the sound has been cleaned up in the studio, they still have something of the quality of a faded holiday snap. The final selection has been governed by a subjective view of good performance and good material, an equally subjective belief in the aesthetic merit and historical value of each track and an eye to fairness of representation. A major constraint has been the nature and the quantity of the material available, which inevitably reflects the self-directing activities and priorities of those who made the recordings. This has resulted in distortions of representation relating to geographical regions, performance genres. and the age, gender and social background of performers; other CDs in the Topic catalogue, however, will fill some of the gaps.me all my lads that follow the plough.
LIFE OF RURAL WORKING MEN & WOMEN
Since most people for whom traditional song was art and entertainment worked on farms or were closely associated with farm economy, it is not surprising that farm work features heavily in the broad repertory of traditional song. Most of the material here bears the stamp of composition from within the working community and abounds in detail of working life and working practices. The hiring system for taking on farm labour was widespread in Scotland, the north of England and parts of Ireland until the Second World War, when employment and farming practice began to change. Single men and women made themselves available for work at annual and half-annual hiring fairs, where they would be offered a place on a farm for a year or six months for board and lodging and a very modest negotiated wage. At best, they might be hired by a decent small farmer, who paid a little over the rate for fair working and living conditions and reasonable food. The farm servant then might spend his or her term in conditions not so different from those of the farmer and his family, and might happily return for a further term or recommend the farmer to his or her friends and relatives. At worst, the farmer would be mean and exploitative, and conditions might be the next thing to slavery. The hiring contract favoured the employer, as he retained the wages until the end of the term, and if the worker left before time he or she got nothing. The hiring system features in The Barnyards O' Delgaty, Copshawholm Fair, The Cranbally Farmer, The Mains O' Fogieloan, Nicky Tams, The Rocks Of Bawn and The Tarves Rant. Copshawholm Fair, which incidentally was last held in 1912, catalogues the traders and show people who brought the fun and glamour for the day into the lives of those poor working people who had come to fee, but it also throws light on the advantage the farmer had over the female farm servant when it came to negotiating wages. Mean and bad employers are complained about bitterly in The Cranbally Farmer and The Barnyards O' Delgaty, while, on the lighter, humorous side, characters and jobs on the farm are observed sharply in The Mains O' Fogieloan, Nicky Tams and Sleepytoon, the latter being a composition by Willie Kemp's brother-in-law, George Morris.
Rural work was always tough, with workers generally under-paid, under-fed and over-worked (The Rocks Of Bawn), but songs are not all of complaint and many celebrate the joys of a country life. I Am A Miller To My Trade is a straightforward tale of courtship and contentment in marriage, and The Lark In the Morning. The Bonnie Labouring Boy and The Lads That Was Reared Among Heather praise young working men. Haymaking, of course, was back-breaking and tiring work, often a race against a change in the weather, and it was scarcely the romantic idyll represented in The Pleasant Month Of May. While several generations of country singers have knocked this song into something that was acceptable to them, it still has a whiff of eighteenth century hack-writing about it. We're All Jolly Fellows As Follow The Plough and Four Horses detail the pride that horsemen have in their occupation. The historian Alan Howkins has pointed out that this was typical of the southern English workman with horses, whose development from a farm lad into a ploughman or a carter came with adult maturity and family responsibility. In the north of England and in Scotland, the practice was different; single young men, still adolescents emotionally and lacking status at the lower end of the farm-servant hierarchy, frequently worked with horses. The image of Scottish ploughboys in songs such as The Tarves Rant was of lads breaking free from constraints on their rare day off, with an eye for the girls, eager for a drink and willing for a fight. In Wi' Ma Big Kilmarnock Bonnet their sense of fun extended to their duping a naive work- mate into enquiring after a particular girl who worked a notorious street in Glasgow.
If conditions in the country were bad, the farm workers did not always take it lying down. Ploughmen are urged in We're All Jolly Fellows As Follow The Plough to stand up for themselves and to "fear not the master". However, in The Grazer Tribe, set in the time when the Irish rural economy was being geared to supply England with cheap meat, small farmers are incited to evasive action and criminal resistance. Getting at the supervisors is handled quite mildly in Hopping Down In Kent, but nevertheless the jokes at their expense would have been overheard by them whenever the song was sung with great gusto in chorus by the hoppers. The story-line of The Farmer's Servant may well have represented every young farm lad's dream of getting in with the farmer and getting one over on him by hopping into bed with his wife. Sung down the pub, possible within the hearing of a farmer, it expressed a degree of light-hearted needle. In similar vein, the kitchen maid in The Mains O' Fogieloan has the power and means to feed the lowly farm servant extras when the farmer is away. The most common and effective method, however, of partially redressing the economic imbalance between landowners and the poor was poaching, and though there are no poaching songs here the subject is illustrated extensively in To Catch A Fine Buck Was My Delight: Songs Of Hunting & Poaching (Topic TSCD668). The physical escape from the poverty and constraints of rural life called for drastic action and contributed to
the population drift to industrial towns and emigration to the New World. Enlistment in the army, though dangerous, was a less permanent escape and the theme appears in The Rocks Of Bawn and Lovely Molly.
The few songs in this volume with love interest would largely ring true for rural audiences. Boy meets girl and everything works out in the end in Tossing The Hay and I Am A Miller To My Trade; the ploughboy leaves his love to join the army in Lovely Molly: lovers of different social levels are prevented from marrying in The Bonnie Labouring Boy; and The Weaver's Daughter stays single to look after her aging father. A miller's daughter is remembered in the dance tune, The Maid Of The Mill, an air (harking back to a 1764 play of the same title by Isaac Bickerstaff) employed by William Shield in Rosina, an opera dating from 1782. The story of The Rich Lady Gay has no resonance of reality. A rich woman approaches a ploughboy and, though they are strangers, she proposes to him and they marry. Wishful thinking verging on the erotic for a poor labouring man! Perhaps the ploughboy should have woken up in the last verse.
Those wishing to pursue these songs further are recommended to consult Steve Roud's computer data-base, Folk-Song Index, held at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. London, which is a comprehensive reference work to printed, manuscript and recorded sources. None of the songs in this volume appears in the seminal early collection. Francis James Child, The English & Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98, reprinted New York, Dover, 1965) & the classification system, G.Malcolm Laws, American Balladry From British Broadsides (Philadelphia, American Folklore Society, 1957).
The Performers
PADDY BEADES was born around 1913 in the parish of Brideswell in the south of Co. Roscommon about six miles from Athlone. His family were farming people and he worked as a part-time builder beside carrying on with the farm. There is no clear evidence of where he learned his songs, and it is thought that he picked some of them up on his travels once he became well-known as a singer, performing mostly at concerts in parish halls and at ceilis. He made forty or more commercial recordings between 1937 and 1954, and, although he is said to have had opportunities to turn professional, he preferred not to change his way of life. Joe Lynch, the professional singer and actor (and traditional tin-whistle player!) acknowledges the boost Paddy gave him when he was setting out in show business.
[Ackt: Declan Coyne; & Treoir (1995), vol.27, no.2.1
EDDIE BUTCHER was born at Magilligan, Co. Derry, in 1900, the fifth of ten children in the family. His father was a daysman, working by the day for local farmers. Eddie started work at the age of twelve, lifting potatoes for sixpence a day, and he then hired for six-month terms at hiring fairs in Coleraine and Limavady in Co. Derry. At the age of twenty, he was driving a two-horse plough for the extremely low half- yearly wage of £13 rising in his late twenties to £21. He settled, on marriage, nearby at Aughill and turned from farm work in favour of gardening, cutting peat, building, road-making, thatching and quarrying, spending the last eighteen years of his working life with the Ministry of Agriculture on the River Roe drainage scheme. The social life in his community centred largely on evening house-visiting, and both his parents' and his own were known as ceilidh houses. Most of Eddie's songs came from his father and were learned before he left home; others he learned from his brothers and his wife's sisters, and none at that time came from outside the family. He is reputed to have been able to pick up a song at one hearing, and late in life had good recall of songs he had not sung for years. He could also make songs of his own on current events in the locality. At some time after the war, the custom of ceilidhing faded out and he then sang almost exclusively at home with friends.
ARTHUR FELTWELL, known as Hockey, was born in the fenland close to Southery in Norfolk and he later moved into the town. He left school at ten to work with his father, who was a horseman, and he went on to work with steam traction engines. For the main part of his working life, forty-seven years to be exact, he was a lorry- driver. He was married and had four children. He learned songs from his father and other horsemen, and his five brothers sang and his eldest brother, Piper, also played the accordion. He sang, often at darts matches, in all seven of the pubs in Southery and favoured The Nag's Head. He had his own transport when that was uncommon in his community, and he drove his mates to other pubs in the district, where they knew there would be music. Hockey once sang on the radio from the BBC studio in Norwich, but there is no account of when and how that came about. He was first recorded by Sam Steele and, after Russell Wortley came to know him, he arranged for Topic Records to record him informally on location. [Ackt: Keith Summers from Hockey's wife, son Ken and daughter-in-law.
*
MICHAEL FLANAGAN, known as Straighty or Mikey, was born in 1893 in Ballyduffbeg near Inagh, Co. Clare, where he farmed for the whole of his life. In his community, music-making took place at home or in the homes of friends and neighbours during evening house-visiting. Straighty considered his mother and father to have been good singers, and he began singing in front of others when he was sixteen. He learned most of his repertory of songs between the ages of twenty and thirty from friends, ballad sheets and song books. The song Michael Power was the only one he claimed to have learned from his father.
[Ackt: uncredited, Outlet OAS3013: & Jim Carroll & Pat Mackenzie.]
ROBERT (BOB) FORRESTER was from Carlisle, Cumberland. He sang songs he had learned from his father and paternal grandfather, and the latter passed on to him at least one dance tune, The Cumberland Waltz. During the late 1940s and early evidence of where ne learned nis songs, and 11
1950s, he and Norman Alford went on cycling trips sketching and fishing in north Cumberland, and, in the pubs at night, they played mouth-organ and tin-whistle duets and encouraged some of the locals to sing their old songs. Tom Gray, the librarian in Carlisle, arranged for Jack Little, a local sound engineer who owned a disc-cutting machine, to record some of those singers on location, and he recommended Bob to the BBC in Newcastle for a number of broadcasts. [Ackt: Sue Mycock, Reynard Records RRoo2.1
EDDIROBERT (BOB) HART was born in 1892 at Southerton in Suffolk. His grandfather was farm manager for the Earl of Stradbroke and his father was a farm worker. His mother died when he was ten and he lived much of his time with his grandparents, moving with his family to Wrentham in Suffolk when he was thirteen, at which time he left school. He recalled, "I started work on a farm, but the job never lasted long, as I had a row with the boss and left right away. I walked to Lowestoft - eight miles
and got a job on a sailing trawler. After about a year, I moved to a steam trawler as a stoker. We used to travel as far as the Shetland Islands - from May to November - and work back to Grimsby." He joined up in 1914 and served in France, where he was seriously wounded in the jaw in 1916. He married in 1917 and settled in Snape in Suffolk upon his discharge from hospital in 1922. He worked as a bricklayer's labourer at Snape maltings, working under George Ling, who appears in this series. Bob's mother played the melodeon, and the first songs he sang were the hymns she and the children sang at home. He picked up his adult repertory among fishermen at sea and in the pubs around Blaxhall and Snape, and he had all his songs written out in a book. [Ackt: Keith Summers in Traditional Music, 6 & 7 (1977-8) & Topic 12TS225 & 12TS292; & Rod Stradling.
MARY ANN HAYNES (née Milest) was born in a caravan behind The Coach & Horses in Portsmouth, Hampshire, in 1903, the daughter of a horse-dealer. As a young girl,she travelled throughout southern England with her family to fairs and markets, and as she told Mike Yates, "We used to go to the vinegar & pepper fair at Bristol, then to Chichester, Lewes, Canterbury and Oxford, then up to Appleby and back down to Yalding." Later she settled in Brighton, Sussex, where, following the premature death of her husband, she brought up a large family single-handed on her earnings as a flower-seller. Mike Yates recorded nearly a hundred old songs from her and, while precise details of where she learned and performed them is not known, it is was almost certainly within the close-knit traveller community. [Ackt: Mike Yates,
JOE HEANEY was born in Carna, Co. Galway, in 1921 in a sparsely populated area of Connemara dependent on subsistence farming and fishing. He was a native-Irish speaker and learned English at school. He went to school for a time in Dublin in 1935. He came to England in 1949, arriving in London in 1958, where he worked as a builder's labourer, and he moved on to Glasgow in the early 1960s and then to America. He thought that the song repertory of his immediate community had been enriched during The Famine, when inland people in those hard times came to the coast to get fish stayed over night, passing the time in the evening singing and telling stories. Most of his songs came from his father, and he learned others after he left home, but, as he said, "I never got a song out of a book." Joe Heaney claimed the first time he ever sang to anybody was at a feis, probably in Co. Galway, in 1939. when he was put forward in a competition. He qualified to go to the Oireachtas. the national music festival in Dublin, where he won first prize in the 'traditional singing in Irish' category. During his stay in London, he sang an occasional song in The Bedford Arms in Camden Town to an informal audience of rural immigrants from the West of Ireland, and later, taken up by the folk-song movement, he appeared as the star guest at Ewan MacColl's Singers' Club. ELIZABETH ANN (LIZZIE) HIGGINS, whose married name was Youlden, was born in 1929 in the Geiest Row in the centre of Aberdeen, the daughter of Jeannie (Robertson) and Donald Higgins. Her mother and her first cousin, Stanley Robertson, both appear in this series. Both sides of the family were travellers, but Lizzie had little first- hand experience of the travelling life, as, by the time she was born, her parents were settled in Aberdeen. The war-time bombing of that city led to the family's temporary removal to Banchory, where her parents had earlier camped during summer seasons. Having previously been regarded as a good scholar with a bent towards poetry, she left the school at Banchory at fifteen to escape the torment directed at her for her traveller background, and she 'escaped' into the tough occupation of fish-filleting. The fishing industry had seasonal slack periods, during which time Lizzie did casual farm-work outside the city.
Lizzie had childhood memories of her maternal grandmother Maria Robertson singing, and she was brought up with her mother's songs and the piping of her father and his brother Isaac. Most of her own singing was in domestic settings with family and friends, and she learned material both from her close family and a wider circle of acquaintances, while some of her songs are her own settings of words to pipe airs from her father. The 'discovery' of her mother by Hamish Henderson of the School of Scottish Studies in 1953 and her subsequent exposure within the folk-song movement inevitably drew Lizzie into the same fold. However, she shied away from public performance until as late as 1967, after which she made a number of folk- club and concert appearances throughout Britain.
THE HYDE BROTHERS have left behind no known biographical material, except that they were part of the Irish immigrant population in New York in the late 1920s. Their music is that of the rural house-dance back home, when young and old congregated in the kitchen of a three-room cottage for a social evening. The title of their jig, The Back O' The Haggart, means the end of the farm yard furthest from the house.
FRED JORDAN was born in 1922 at Ludlow in Shropshire. His father had moved from Yorkshire in 1903 for better wages, working in various jobs, including farm work, quarrying, barbering and horse-dealing, until he became an insurance agent after the Great War. His mother was from South Yardley, Warwickshire, and was a seamstress before marriage. Fred left school at fourteen in 1936 with no job prospects save farming, and he was taken on by a farmer at three shillings and sixpence a week, an arrangement confirmed annually for three years at a hiring fair. During the War, the method of hiring changed to six-month contracts and the Ministry of Labour classified Fred in a reserved occupation. He worked at about eight different places, living-in with the farmer's family like all the single workers. He undertook a wide range of tasks with horses and in arable and stock farming. In 1953. he bought a two-room cottage (one up & one down) in Aston Munslow, and thereafter he worked as a casual farm-worker, taking jobs as and where he chose. Intelligent, articulate and now well-travelled, he has retained the values, the lifestyle and the outward trimmings of the pre-war rural worker.
Fred's mother (like her contemporary, Cecilia Costello) sang in Birmingham music halls as a girl for sixpence or a shilling, supporting top-line professionals like Vesta Tilley, and her principle in performing was "always leave them with a tear." Fred learned songs from both his father and mother singing at home and from Gypsies, including May Bradley's family, who lived in his locality. (May Bradley appears in this series). When he was seven, a travelling theatre company appeared at Ludlow and asked for members of the audience to come forward to entertain. His mother sang The Gypsy Countess and he followed with The Gypsy's Warning, earning himself a pound. He has sung in pubs since childhood and he sang regularly on a Saturday night in The Hen & Chickens in Ludlow. Nowadays, as a consequence of the gentrification of most pubs, his singing locally is restricted to old folks' dos three or four times a year. His fortunes as a singer changed with his 'discovery' by Peter Kennedy, who recorded him for the BBC in 1952. After a decade of reticence, compounded by his family's disapproval of his "making an exhibition" of himself, he has become a unique and very popular club and festival performer within the folk-song movement, continuing to pick up songs that appeal to him in the process. [Ackt: Heather Horner from Fred Jordan; & Mike Yates, WILLIE KEMP was born in 1889, the son of a hotel-keeper in the small town of Oldmeldrum, Aberdeenshire. He served an apprenticeship as a lithographic draughtsman in Aberdeen and later taught at night school for twenty years. At some stage in his life, he worked as a master printer in Clerkenwell in London, ending his working life back in Aberdeen as the head of a cardboard-box manufacturing firm. His introduction to traditional music was as a child in the kitchen of his father's hotel where the staff socialised with farm servants. He took part in Sunday school concerts in Oldmeldrum and union smoking concerts after he moved to Aberdeen, and his career as a semi-professional entertainer, 'The Cornkister King', took off after an incident at a church cafe chantant. His broad Buchan Doric rendering of The Wedding O' McGinnis To His Cross-Eyed Pet was misinterpreted as a blue song by the minister and he was pulled of the stage, much to the outrage of the audience. Subsequent coverage in the press brought offers to appear in town and country all over the north and north-west of Scotland. He had much earlier been advised by a preacher to 'clean up' some bothy ballads for his repertory, and he made it his business to pick-up such material, including The Wedding O' McGinnis and some other songs which he bought from George Bruce Thomson of New Deer, Aberdeenshire. He acknowledged learning much from time spent with William Jack's concert party. He appeared in concerts with the violinist James Scott Skinner, and during the Great War he toured with The Artistics concert party to raise funds for the Red Cross. He was recommended to the Scottish Service.
PADDY TUNNEY's parents were from adjoining farms that straddled the Donegal- Fermanagh border, one farm in the Irish Free State and the other in Northern Ireland. Born in Glasgow in 1921, he was shortly afterwards taken home to his mother's family farm in Co. Donegal and at the age of five moved to his father's family farmstead. He attended technical school in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal and went to work as a forester for the Ministry of Agriculture in Northern Ireland. In 1943. he was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for illegal nationalist activities, serving four and a half years in HM Prison Belfast, where among other things he learned to speak Irish. Upon release he trained at University College, Dublin, as a health inspector and was eventually posted to Letterkenny in Co. Donegal. He was brought up with family music-making and community country-house dancing. He recalls sitting on the knee of Michael Gallagher, his maternal grandfather, while the old man sang to him, The Lark In The Morning, being one of the old man's favourite songs. Paddy's father played the fiddle and melodeon and lilted and sang. Paddy began singing as a child, picking up songs from the family and particularly from his mother, Bridget Tunney. Throughout his adult life he has continued to learn songs from singers from all over Ireland, and he has written on his songs and musical background.
WILLIAM JAMES (WILLIE) SCOTT, the son of a one-time gamekeeper and shepherd, was born one of seven children at Andrew's Knowes, Canonbie, Dumfriesshire in 1897 on the Scottish side of the border with England. The family moved into Cumberland around the turn of the century and back to Scotland three years later. Willie left school at eleven and went to work on a farm at Stobbs near Hawick on a twelve-hour day from six in the morning until six in the evening (or later if there was enough light) for seven shillings a week plus his keep. At the age of nineteen, he married Frances Thomson, the daughter of a Canonbie ploughman, and from that time until his retirement in 1968, he worked in a number of locations on the Scottish side of the border as a shepherd, supplementing his living when times were rough by general farm work. In 1953, he moved to Fifeshire. He was brought up with singing and dance music in his family and as a child he heard singing at sheep shearings, fairs and sales, when the fiddle was played at night for dancing. His father was a singer but Willie sang mostly his mother's songs, and he learned The Lads That Was Reared Among The Heather from his eldest brother Tom. All his siblings were singers and/or musicians: Tom played the fiddle, accordeon, mouth- organ and Jew's harp, and Willie taught himself the fiddle as a youngster and built a repertory of dance tunes. He frequently sang within his own communities (bearing in mind that he moved around from time to time following work opportunities) at shepherds' suppers and similar events. His wife was also regarded as a good singer and accordeon player and together they appeared in local amateur dramatics. In 1961, Willie began to receive invitations to folk-clubs and festivals, which gave him a new lease of life as a singer.
Dr Reg Hall is a visiting fellow in the Graduate Research Centre in Culture & Communication at the University of Sussex. Engaged now in preparing A History of Irish Music & Dance in London, his academic work is enhanced by four decades of close contact with many traditional musicians, singers and dancers in the Irish immigrant community. An active musician throughout that time with Bampton Morris and Padstow Blue Ribbon 'Obby 'Oss, he has associated with country musicians in the south of England and he has known a good number of the performers featured in this series. His production credits include a number of significant record releases of traditional music. Lateral thinking, a working class family background and professional experience in social work have contributed to his challenge to received wisdom. His radical views on the whole field of traditional music and dancing, part of a growing movement of re-assessment, are in the best traditions of Topic Records. The Voice of the People
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
The Topic Records catalogue of long-playing records, deleted some time ago with the phasing out of vinyl, included about 120 albums of English, Irish and Scottish traditional music. The creativity of the original producers-making the recordings. programming the albums and writing the notes - set the standards for their time and their work remains an important stepping-stone in our understanding and appreciation of traditional music. In making much of this material available again two or three decades later, Topic Records has adopted an approach for a different medium and a new audience. This formidable project is presented as a series of thematic anthologies, but, more importantly, the selection of material and the annotation reflects a revised view of traditional music.
Some aspects of traditional music have interested outside observers for a couple of centuries, and it is the values, interests and activities of those outsiders - the founders and activists of the folk-song and folk-dance movements -- that have set definitions of what the outside world should find interesting in traditional music. Part of the motivation behind the preparation of this series has been to shift the emphasis away from the values of the folk-song collectors and to present traditional music in its own right, reflecting its history, social contexts and the values of its practitioners. The paradox is that, although the focus here is on traditional music, the series owes its existence to the folk-song movement. Some consideration, therefore, of the main phases of that movement is needed to put the series in context.
The early folk-song and folk-dance collectors-middle-class, educated and operating within the mentality of their time-were motivated by varying shades of nationalism. and it was held, very commonly within nationalist thinking, that society in general had lost its innocence and that a nation could regain its soul by purifying its culture. Thus, in the 1880s, the notion of a lost golden age informed the Merrie England movement and the Irish and Scottish Gaelic Revivals. Ballad studies, long-established within the field of literature, showed that balladry had once been in the mouths of the common people, while some academic musicians, with an interest in ancient music, pointed to national airs as the potential raw material for new schools of art music to oust what was held to be the offending influence of European romanticism. Getting back to the innocence of a golden age required a search for its survivors; those people thought to have the longest cultural memories, untainted by the artiness of elite society and the vulgarity of the brutalised, industrial poor.
The finger pointed to 'the peasantry, and a few dedicated and inspired collectors, most notably at the turn of the century, sought out members of the rural working population and recorded on paper thousands of song airs, song texts and dance tunes. There was no intention of documenting the music-making of those rural workers and their families; the aim was to gather raw material for a minor revolution in art and popular music. Mediating their finds through the conventions of their own culture of art-music and literature, the collectors defined their new genres as 'folk-song' and 'folk-dance' (in Ireland 'Irish song' and 'Irish dance'), which they promoted, often heavily edited and reconstructed, through music publishers, live concert performance and state education systems.
The post-war revival of the folk-song movement - the so-called Folk Revival-was inspired initially by models in the American labour movement, and moved politically to the left, where it occupied ground further down the social scale in the urban working and lower middle classes. The Folk Revival was also rooted in a form of cultural moralism, reacting against the commercial music of show business and aiming for the creation of a proletarian entertainment and art form. Whereas the Victorians and Edwardians defined 'folk-song' narrowly, the new wave of the movement was eclectic. Almost anything could be 'folk-song-industrial workers' songs, material derived from the music-hall, songs of protest and contemporary writing on social issues. Within the proliferation of British folk-clubs and Irish ballad-lounges, there developed performance styles unique to the folk-song movement, and these styles, owing little to traditional music-making, entered the mainstreams of English, Scottish and Irish popular culture.
In parallel with this post-war movement, there was a new phase of field-collecting, made possible by the availability of the relatively cheap means of making sound recordings. Folk-song collecting could now capture the subtleties of intonation, accent, inflection, pitch, rhythm, timing and language of authentic performance. Although some folk-song collectors at the beginning of the century had made use of the cylinder recording machine and the British Broadcasting Corporation had made some studio and location recordings in the 1930s and early 1940s, Brian George was the real modern pioneer. Assisted in January 1947 by Seamus Ennis, who had just left the Irish Folklore Commission, he recorded on location in Ireland with a disc- cutting machine for the BBC. Shortly afterwards, working with portable tape- recorders and with little prior knowledge of the extent of traditional music-making in these islands, Alan Lomax (Columbia Records, NYC), Peter Kennedy and Seamus Ennis (BBC, London), Hamish Henderson (School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh) and Ciarán MacMathuna (Radio Éireann, Dublin) embarked upon endeavours of great discovery and excitement.
The initial period, however, was relatively short-lived, particularly as the BBC, the English Folk Dance & Song Society and the major record companies showed no lasting interest. However, national institutions in Scotland and Ireland have continued to collect in the field, and Radio Éireann (now RTÉ) has for several decades responded to public demand for Irish traditional-music programmes as popular entertainment. The exposure of traditional singers and musicians on radio (albeit very limited in Britain) and commercial records, in folk- clubs and on concerts from the early 1950s has made some impact on the Folk Revival, and within a section of that movement there has developed a taste for authentic performance. The tape-recorder, of course, has been available to amateur enthusiasts, and many-self-financed and working in isolation-have made valuable field-recordings, and a number of independent record producers have made interesting material available.
Those at the forefront of contemporary thinking about traditional music and dance have in recent years applied the academic and professional disciplines of ethnomusicology, community studies, social history, biography, multi-media recording and archiving to document and examine them in their social and historical contexts. There has been a shift from the elitist, patronising notion that 'folk-song' is the corporate and primitive creation of an anonymous, amorphous population of 'folk', who in the jargon of the 1950s are 'bearers of tradition'. It can now be recognised that traditional music and dance are created and developed by real identifiable people within real identifiable communities. While they are at the lower end of the social scale, the vitality and richness of their art and entertainment are as deserving of serious attention as the popular culture and high art of other sections of the community.
Any attempt to describe, let alone define, traditional music and dance is inevitably loaded with paradoxes and contradictions. To start with it there is no popular or even academic consensus about what they include and exclude. Having long co- existed and cross-bred with popular culture, the boundaries between the tradition and popular culture are blurred, and it can be argued there is value in keeping them blurred. Traditional music and dance have belonged primarily to rural working communities, though not exclusively to them and not to all members of every such community. For example, in southern Co. Sligo at the beginning of the century. traditional music-making was for some an almost obsessional daily occurrence, yet for others it was treated with indifference or even open hostility. Evidence suggests that as a general rule the piece-meal migration of rural workers to towns puts an end to their traditional music-making and dancing, yet rural practices and repertories have sometimes been modified to suit the needs of urban communities.
It is widely believed that traditional music-making has flourished and survived longest in isolated and remote areas, yet in rural Northumberland, Scotland and Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s it was the bus services, bringing people together, and the gramophone and the radio, circulating repertory and style, that gave the popularity of music- making a significant boost. No community in these islands, including the most isolated and remote, has been free from generations of population shift, as labour has pursued employment opportunities in the army, at sea, in farm work and heavy construction and in service for the gentry, and as migrant workers have returned home. It is these movements and mixing of populations that have contributed to the dissemination of repertory and modes of practice beyond parish borders.
The tradition is essentially an aural one with each performer learning his or her material by ear from another, yet some learned song texts and dance tunes from print and manuscript. Some performed their material exactly as they learned it, while others honed it to their own liking and imbued it with their own meaning and significance. Some struggled as children, unaided and even in the face of family opposition, to make a musical instrument and devise a playing technique, while others had expert tuition from older musicians on factory-made instruments. Some sang primarily at home for family entertainment, others sang to ease the monotony of repetitive labour, while some sang alone for their own satisfaction. In rural England a primary location for traditional music-making was the pub, the preserve of men, incidentally excluding women and children, whereas in rural Ireland it was the domestic kitchen, where gatherings of family and neighbours embraced both sexes and several generations. Most traditional music-making has been amateur, yet it was not so long ago that dance musicians were invariably paid for their services and there were livings for dance teachers and street singers and musicians.
The broad repertory of traditional songs comes from a number of sources. Some songs originate from composition within the tradition itself, while others have been adapted from material from outside the tradition, most notably from seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century ballad sheets and the nineteenth-century music hall. Some are archaic survivals, but some others are either contemporary or are set in the recent past. The texts are invariably constructed in conventional poetic language and the story lines and scenarios are based on equally conventional themes, while the tunes, not necessarily though sometimes wedded to on a stock of well-used melodic phrases. The creative potential and vagaries of aural transmission have tended towards mutations and hybrids of both words and tunes, which have resulted in countless variations. The same is true of dance tunes, for, while there is clearly some archaic survival, most dance-tune types were adapted from the dance music of the nobility and gentry (and later middle class) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tempered by a massive creative force within the tradition itself.
The recordings in this series represent cultures that have passed or are passing rapidly, as the social and economic conditions and the habitats that supported them have gone or are going for ever. These performances have timeless appeal and resonances, but what of the meaning and significance these songs and tunes had for the singers and musicians themselves and their audiences? Succeeding generations will have ever-increasing difficulty in grasping the nature and quality of the lives these performers lived. How will they understand the family structures and community ties, the gender roles and the inhibitions between the sexes, the rigid class structures, the livelihoods, the poverty and hardship, and the high level of violence in the communities that practiced traditional music-making? The brief biographies of the performers should offer some insight into the social contexts and set minds thinking. The dialects and accents in which these songs are sung are being rapidly eliminated, and the subtleties of meaning implied in the inflections, vocabulary and syntax might easily be lost on future listeners. The song-texts, given as the singers sing them and transcribed with a considered balance between standard and dialectal English and Scots, are offered primarily as an aid to understanding. When transcribed in print, the words of some songs seem fragmented or confused, yet in live performance the general drift of meaning is invariably clear enough.
This series makes available a large body of recorded songs, instrumental music and calendar customs from 'the tradition', drawn from the archive at Topic Records and a number of private collections. It includes recordings made on location often in the homes of the performers, some in live public performance and some from commercial 78rpm records now in the public domain. In the case of the English and the Welsh 78rpm records, they were originally issued for a very limited 'folk-song' and 'folk-dance' public, but in the case of the Scottish and Irish records they were put out as ethnic popular music. Some recordings presented here were made by amateur enthusiasts, as early as the mid-1950s, with portable and sometimes domestic equipment and, though the sound has been cleaned up in the studio, they still have something of the quality of a faded holiday snap. The final selection has been governed by a subjective view of good performance and good material, an equally subjective belief in the aesthetic merit and historical value of each track and an eye to fairness of representation. A major constraint has been the nature and the quantity of the material available, which inevitably reflects the self-directing activities and priorities of those who made the recordings. This has resulted in distortions of representation relating to geographical regions, performance genres. and the age, gender and social background of performers; other CDs in the Topic catalogue, however, will fill some of the gaps.me all my lads that follow the plough.
LIFE OF RURAL WORKING MEN & WOMEN
Since most people for whom traditional song was art and entertainment worked on farms or were closely associated with farm economy, it is not surprising that farm work features heavily in the broad repertory of traditional song. Most of the material here bears the stamp of composition from within the working community and abounds in detail of working life and working practices. The hiring system for taking on farm labour was widespread in Scotland, the north of England and parts of Ireland until the Second World War, when employment and farming practice began to change. Single men and women made themselves available for work at annual and half-annual hiring fairs, where they would be offered a place on a farm for a year or six months for board and lodging and a very modest negotiated wage. At best, they might be hired by a decent small farmer, who paid a little over the rate for fair working and living conditions and reasonable food. The farm servant then might spend his or her term in conditions not so different from those of the farmer and his family, and might happily return for a further term or recommend the farmer to his or her friends and relatives. At worst, the farmer would be mean and exploitative, and conditions might be the next thing to slavery. The hiring contract favoured the employer, as he retained the wages until the end of the term, and if the worker left before time he or she got nothing. The hiring system features in The Barnyards O' Delgaty, Copshawholm Fair, The Cranbally Farmer, The Mains O' Fogieloan, Nicky Tams, The Rocks Of Bawn and The Tarves Rant. Copshawholm Fair, which incidentally was last held in 1912, catalogues the traders and show people who brought the fun and glamour for the day into the lives of those poor working people who had come to fee, but it also throws light on the advantage the farmer had over the female farm servant when it came to negotiating wages. Mean and bad employers are complained about bitterly in The Cranbally Farmer and The Barnyards O' Delgaty, while, on the lighter, humorous side, characters and jobs on the farm are observed sharply in The Mains O' Fogieloan, Nicky Tams and Sleepytoon, the latter being a composition by Willie Kemp's brother-in-law, George Morris.
Rural work was always tough, with workers generally under-paid, under-fed and over-worked (The Rocks Of Bawn), but songs are not all of complaint and many celebrate the joys of a country life. I Am A Miller To My Trade is a straightforward tale of courtship and contentment in marriage, and The Lark In the Morning. The Bonnie Labouring Boy and The Lads That Was Reared Among Heather praise young working men. Haymaking, of course, was back-breaking and tiring work, often a race against a change in the weather, and it was scarcely the romantic idyll represented in The Pleasant Month Of May. While several generations of country singers have knocked this song into something that was acceptable to them, it still has a whiff of eighteenth century hack-writing about it. We're All Jolly Fellows As Follow The Plough and Four Horses detail the pride that horsemen have in their occupation. The historian Alan Howkins has pointed out that this was typical of the southern English workman with horses, whose development from a farm lad into a ploughman or a carter came with adult maturity and family responsibility. In the north of England and in Scotland, the practice was different; single young men, still adolescents emotionally and lacking status at the lower end of the farm-servant hierarchy, frequently worked with horses. The image of Scottish ploughboys in songs such as The Tarves Rant was of lads breaking free from constraints on their rare day off, with an eye for the girls, eager for a drink and willing for a fight. In Wi' Ma Big Kilmarnock Bonnet their sense of fun extended to their duping a naive work- mate into enquiring after a particular girl who worked a notorious street in Glasgow.
If conditions in the country were bad, the farm workers did not always take it lying down. Ploughmen are urged in We're All Jolly Fellows As Follow The Plough to stand up for themselves and to "fear not the master". However, in The Grazer Tribe, set in the time when the Irish rural economy was being geared to supply England with cheap meat, small farmers are incited to evasive action and criminal resistance. Getting at the supervisors is handled quite mildly in Hopping Down In Kent, but nevertheless the jokes at their expense would have been overheard by them whenever the song was sung with great gusto in chorus by the hoppers. The story-line of The Farmer's Servant may well have represented every young farm lad's dream of getting in with the farmer and getting one over on him by hopping into bed with his wife. Sung down the pub, possible within the hearing of a farmer, it expressed a degree of light-hearted needle. In similar vein, the kitchen maid in The Mains O' Fogieloan has the power and means to feed the lowly farm servant extras when the farmer is away. The most common and effective method, however, of partially redressing the economic imbalance between landowners and the poor was poaching, and though there are no poaching songs here the subject is illustrated extensively in To Catch A Fine Buck Was My Delight: Songs Of Hunting & Poaching (Topic TSCD668). The physical escape from the poverty and constraints of rural life called for drastic action and contributed to
the population drift to industrial towns and emigration to the New World. Enlistment in the army, though dangerous, was a less permanent escape and the theme appears in The Rocks Of Bawn and Lovely Molly.
The few songs in this volume with love interest would largely ring true for rural audiences. Boy meets girl and everything works out in the end in Tossing The Hay and I Am A Miller To My Trade; the ploughboy leaves his love to join the army in Lovely Molly: lovers of different social levels are prevented from marrying in The Bonnie Labouring Boy; and The Weaver's Daughter stays single to look after her aging father. A miller's daughter is remembered in the dance tune, The Maid Of The Mill, an air (harking back to a 1764 play of the same title by Isaac Bickerstaff) employed by William Shield in Rosina, an opera dating from 1782. The story of The Rich Lady Gay has no resonance of reality. A rich woman approaches a ploughboy and, though they are strangers, she proposes to him and they marry. Wishful thinking verging on the erotic for a poor labouring man! Perhaps the ploughboy should have woken up in the last verse.
Those wishing to pursue these songs further are recommended to consult Steve Roud's computer data-base, Folk-Song Index, held at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. London, which is a comprehensive reference work to printed, manuscript and recorded sources. None of the songs in this volume appears in the seminal early collection. Francis James Child, The English & Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98, reprinted New York, Dover, 1965) & the classification system, G.Malcolm Laws, American Balladry From British Broadsides (Philadelphia, American Folklore Society, 1957).
The Performers
PADDY BEADES was born around 1913 in the parish of Brideswell in the south of Co. Roscommon about six miles from Athlone. His family were farming people and he worked as a part-time builder beside carrying on with the farm. There is no clear evidence of where he learned his songs, and it is thought that he picked some of them up on his travels once he became well-known as a singer, performing mostly at concerts in parish halls and at ceilis. He made forty or more commercial recordings between 1937 and 1954, and, although he is said to have had opportunities to turn professional, he preferred not to change his way of life. Joe Lynch, the professional singer and actor (and traditional tin-whistle player!) acknowledges the boost Paddy gave him when he was setting out in show business.
[Ackt: Declan Coyne; & Treoir (1995), vol.27, no.2.1
EDDIE BUTCHER was born at Magilligan, Co. Derry, in 1900, the fifth of ten children in the family. His father was a daysman, working by the day for local farmers. Eddie started work at the age of twelve, lifting potatoes for sixpence a day, and he then hired for six-month terms at hiring fairs in Coleraine and Limavady in Co. Derry. At the age of twenty, he was driving a two-horse plough for the extremely low half- yearly wage of £13 rising in his late twenties to £21. He settled, on marriage, nearby at Aughill and turned from farm work in favour of gardening, cutting peat, building, road-making, thatching and quarrying, spending the last eighteen years of his working life with the Ministry of Agriculture on the River Roe drainage scheme. The social life in his community centred largely on evening house-visiting, and both his parents' and his own were known as ceilidh houses. Most of Eddie's songs came from his father and were learned before he left home; others he learned from his brothers and his wife's sisters, and none at that time came from outside the family. He is reputed to have been able to pick up a song at one hearing, and late in life had good recall of songs he had not sung for years. He could also make songs of his own on current events in the locality. At some time after the war, the custom of ceilidhing faded out and he then sang almost exclusively at home with friends.
ARTHUR FELTWELL, known as Hockey, was born in the fenland close to Southery in Norfolk and he later moved into the town. He left school at ten to work with his father, who was a horseman, and he went on to work with steam traction engines. For the main part of his working life, forty-seven years to be exact, he was a lorry- driver. He was married and had four children. He learned songs from his father and other horsemen, and his five brothers sang and his eldest brother, Piper, also played the accordion. He sang, often at darts matches, in all seven of the pubs in Southery and favoured The Nag's Head. He had his own transport when that was uncommon in his community, and he drove his mates to other pubs in the district, where they knew there would be music. Hockey once sang on the radio from the BBC studio in Norwich, but there is no account of when and how that came about. He was first recorded by Sam Steele and, after Russell Wortley came to know him, he arranged for Topic Records to record him informally on location. [Ackt: Keith Summers from Hockey's wife, son Ken and daughter-in-law.
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MICHAEL FLANAGAN, known as Straighty or Mikey, was born in 1893 in Ballyduffbeg near Inagh, Co. Clare, where he farmed for the whole of his life. In his community, music-making took place at home or in the homes of friends and neighbours during evening house-visiting. Straighty considered his mother and father to have been good singers, and he began singing in front of others when he was sixteen. He learned most of his repertory of songs between the ages of twenty and thirty from friends, ballad sheets and song books. The song Michael Power was the only one he claimed to have learned from his father.
[Ackt: uncredited, Outlet OAS3013: & Jim Carroll & Pat Mackenzie.]
ROBERT (BOB) FORRESTER was from Carlisle, Cumberland. He sang songs he had learned from his father and paternal grandfather, and the latter passed on to him at least one dance tune, The Cumberland Waltz. During the late 1940s and early evidence of where ne learned nis songs, and 11
1950s, he and Norman Alford went on cycling trips sketching and fishing in north Cumberland, and, in the pubs at night, they played mouth-organ and tin-whistle duets and encouraged some of the locals to sing their old songs. Tom Gray, the librarian in Carlisle, arranged for Jack Little, a local sound engineer who owned a disc-cutting machine, to record some of those singers on location, and he recommended Bob to the BBC in Newcastle for a number of broadcasts. [Ackt: Sue Mycock, Reynard Records RRoo2.1
EDDIROBERT (BOB) HART was born in 1892 at Southerton in Suffolk. His grandfather was farm manager for the Earl of Stradbroke and his father was a farm worker. His mother died when he was ten and he lived much of his time with his grandparents, moving with his family to Wrentham in Suffolk when he was thirteen, at which time he left school. He recalled, "I started work on a farm, but the job never lasted long, as I had a row with the boss and left right away. I walked to Lowestoft - eight miles
and got a job on a sailing trawler. After about a year, I moved to a steam trawler as a stoker. We used to travel as far as the Shetland Islands - from May to November - and work back to Grimsby." He joined up in 1914 and served in France, where he was seriously wounded in the jaw in 1916. He married in 1917 and settled in Snape in Suffolk upon his discharge from hospital in 1922. He worked as a bricklayer's labourer at Snape maltings, working under George Ling, who appears in this series. Bob's mother played the melodeon, and the first songs he sang were the hymns she and the children sang at home. He picked up his adult repertory among fishermen at sea and in the pubs around Blaxhall and Snape, and he had all his songs written out in a book. [Ackt: Keith Summers in Traditional Music, 6 & 7 (1977-8) & Topic 12TS225 & 12TS292; & Rod Stradling.
MARY ANN HAYNES (née Milest) was born in a caravan behind The Coach & Horses in Portsmouth, Hampshire, in 1903, the daughter of a horse-dealer. As a young girl,she travelled throughout southern England with her family to fairs and markets, and as she told Mike Yates, "We used to go to the vinegar & pepper fair at Bristol, then to Chichester, Lewes, Canterbury and Oxford, then up to Appleby and back down to Yalding." Later she settled in Brighton, Sussex, where, following the premature death of her husband, she brought up a large family single-handed on her earnings as a flower-seller. Mike Yates recorded nearly a hundred old songs from her and, while precise details of where she learned and performed them is not known, it is was almost certainly within the close-knit traveller community. [Ackt: Mike Yates,
JOE HEANEY was born in Carna, Co. Galway, in 1921 in a sparsely populated area of Connemara dependent on subsistence farming and fishing. He was a native-Irish speaker and learned English at school. He went to school for a time in Dublin in 1935. He came to England in 1949, arriving in London in 1958, where he worked as a builder's labourer, and he moved on to Glasgow in the early 1960s and then to America. He thought that the song repertory of his immediate community had been enriched during The Famine, when inland people in those hard times came to the coast to get fish stayed over night, passing the time in the evening singing and telling stories. Most of his songs came from his father, and he learned others after he left home, but, as he said, "I never got a song out of a book." Joe Heaney claimed the first time he ever sang to anybody was at a feis, probably in Co. Galway, in 1939. when he was put forward in a competition. He qualified to go to the Oireachtas. the national music festival in Dublin, where he won first prize in the 'traditional singing in Irish' category. During his stay in London, he sang an occasional song in The Bedford Arms in Camden Town to an informal audience of rural immigrants from the West of Ireland, and later, taken up by the folk-song movement, he appeared as the star guest at Ewan MacColl's Singers' Club. ELIZABETH ANN (LIZZIE) HIGGINS, whose married name was Youlden, was born in 1929 in the Geiest Row in the centre of Aberdeen, the daughter of Jeannie (Robertson) and Donald Higgins. Her mother and her first cousin, Stanley Robertson, both appear in this series. Both sides of the family were travellers, but Lizzie had little first- hand experience of the travelling life, as, by the time she was born, her parents were settled in Aberdeen. The war-time bombing of that city led to the family's temporary removal to Banchory, where her parents had earlier camped during summer seasons. Having previously been regarded as a good scholar with a bent towards poetry, she left the school at Banchory at fifteen to escape the torment directed at her for her traveller background, and she 'escaped' into the tough occupation of fish-filleting. The fishing industry had seasonal slack periods, during which time Lizzie did casual farm-work outside the city.
Lizzie had childhood memories of her maternal grandmother Maria Robertson singing, and she was brought up with her mother's songs and the piping of her father and his brother Isaac. Most of her own singing was in domestic settings with family and friends, and she learned material both from her close family and a wider circle of acquaintances, while some of her songs are her own settings of words to pipe airs from her father. The 'discovery' of her mother by Hamish Henderson of the School of Scottish Studies in 1953 and her subsequent exposure within the folk-song movement inevitably drew Lizzie into the same fold. However, she shied away from public performance until as late as 1967, after which she made a number of folk- club and concert appearances throughout Britain.
THE HYDE BROTHERS have left behind no known biographical material, except that they were part of the Irish immigrant population in New York in the late 1920s. Their music is that of the rural house-dance back home, when young and old congregated in the kitchen of a three-room cottage for a social evening. The title of their jig, The Back O' The Haggart, means the end of the farm yard furthest from the house.
FRED JORDAN was born in 1922 at Ludlow in Shropshire. His father had moved from Yorkshire in 1903 for better wages, working in various jobs, including farm work, quarrying, barbering and horse-dealing, until he became an insurance agent after the Great War. His mother was from South Yardley, Warwickshire, and was a seamstress before marriage. Fred left school at fourteen in 1936 with no job prospects save farming, and he was taken on by a farmer at three shillings and sixpence a week, an arrangement confirmed annually for three years at a hiring fair. During the War, the method of hiring changed to six-month contracts and the Ministry of Labour classified Fred in a reserved occupation. He worked at about eight different places, living-in with the farmer's family like all the single workers. He undertook a wide range of tasks with horses and in arable and stock farming. In 1953. he bought a two-room cottage (one up & one down) in Aston Munslow, and thereafter he worked as a casual farm-worker, taking jobs as and where he chose. Intelligent, articulate and now well-travelled, he has retained the values, the lifestyle and the outward trimmings of the pre-war rural worker.
Fred's mother (like her contemporary, Cecilia Costello) sang in Birmingham music halls as a girl for sixpence or a shilling, supporting top-line professionals like Vesta Tilley, and her principle in performing was "always leave them with a tear." Fred learned songs from both his father and mother singing at home and from Gypsies, including May Bradley's family, who lived in his locality. (May Bradley appears in this series). When he was seven, a travelling theatre company appeared at Ludlow and asked for members of the audience to come forward to entertain. His mother sang The Gypsy Countess and he followed with The Gypsy's Warning, earning himself a pound. He has sung in pubs since childhood and he sang regularly on a Saturday night in The Hen & Chickens in Ludlow. Nowadays, as a consequence of the gentrification of most pubs, his singing locally is restricted to old folks' dos three or four times a year. His fortunes as a singer changed with his 'discovery' by Peter Kennedy, who recorded him for the BBC in 1952. After a decade of reticence, compounded by his family's disapproval of his "making an exhibition" of himself, he has become a unique and very popular club and festival performer within the folk-song movement, continuing to pick up songs that appeal to him in the process. [Ackt: Heather Horner from Fred Jordan; & Mike Yates, WILLIE KEMP was born in 1889, the son of a hotel-keeper in the small town of Oldmeldrum, Aberdeenshire. He served an apprenticeship as a lithographic draughtsman in Aberdeen and later taught at night school for twenty years. At some stage in his life, he worked as a master printer in Clerkenwell in London, ending his working life back in Aberdeen as the head of a cardboard-box manufacturing firm. His introduction to traditional music was as a child in the kitchen of his father's hotel where the staff socialised with farm servants. He took part in Sunday school concerts in Oldmeldrum and union smoking concerts after he moved to Aberdeen, and his career as a semi-professional entertainer, 'The Cornkister King', took off after an incident at a church cafe chantant. His broad Buchan Doric rendering of The Wedding O' McGinnis To His Cross-Eyed Pet was misinterpreted as a blue song by the minister and he was pulled of the stage, much to the outrage of the audience. Subsequent coverage in the press brought offers to appear in town and country all over the north and north-west of Scotland. He had much earlier been advised by a preacher to 'clean up' some bothy ballads for his repertory, and he made it his business to pick-up such material, including The Wedding O' McGinnis and some other songs which he bought from George Bruce Thomson of New Deer, Aberdeenshire. He acknowledged learning much from time spent with William Jack's concert party. He appeared in concerts with the violinist James Scott Skinner, and during the Great War he toured with The Artistics concert party to raise funds for the Red Cross. He was recommended to the Scottish Service.
PADDY TUNNEY's parents were from adjoining farms that straddled the Donegal- Fermanagh border, one farm in the Irish Free State and the other in Northern Ireland. Born in Glasgow in 1921, he was shortly afterwards taken home to his mother's family farm in Co. Donegal and at the age of five moved to his father's family farmstead. He attended technical school in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal and went to work as a forester for the Ministry of Agriculture in Northern Ireland. In 1943. he was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for illegal nationalist activities, serving four and a half years in HM Prison Belfast, where among other things he learned to speak Irish. Upon release he trained at University College, Dublin, as a health inspector and was eventually posted to Letterkenny in Co. Donegal. He was brought up with family music-making and community country-house dancing. He recalls sitting on the knee of Michael Gallagher, his maternal grandfather, while the old man sang to him, The Lark In The Morning, being one of the old man's favourite songs. Paddy's father played the fiddle and melodeon and lilted and sang. Paddy began singing as a child, picking up songs from the family and particularly from his mother, Bridget Tunney. Throughout his adult life he has continued to learn songs from singers from all over Ireland, and he has written on his songs and musical background.
WILLIAM JAMES (WILLIE) SCOTT, the son of a one-time gamekeeper and shepherd, was born one of seven children at Andrew's Knowes, Canonbie, Dumfriesshire in 1897 on the Scottish side of the border with England. The family moved into Cumberland around the turn of the century and back to Scotland three years later. Willie left school at eleven and went to work on a farm at Stobbs near Hawick on a twelve-hour day from six in the morning until six in the evening (or later if there was enough light) for seven shillings a week plus his keep. At the age of nineteen, he married Frances Thomson, the daughter of a Canonbie ploughman, and from that time until his retirement in 1968, he worked in a number of locations on the Scottish side of the border as a shepherd, supplementing his living when times were rough by general farm work. In 1953, he moved to Fifeshire. He was brought up with singing and dance music in his family and as a child he heard singing at sheep shearings, fairs and sales, when the fiddle was played at night for dancing. His father was a singer but Willie sang mostly his mother's songs, and he learned The Lads That Was Reared Among The Heather from his eldest brother Tom. All his siblings were singers and/or musicians: Tom played the fiddle, accordeon, mouth- organ and Jew's harp, and Willie taught himself the fiddle as a youngster and built a repertory of dance tunes. He frequently sang within his own communities (bearing in mind that he moved around from time to time following work opportunities) at shepherds' suppers and similar events. His wife was also regarded as a good singer and accordeon player and together they appeared in local amateur dramatics. In 1961, Willie began to receive invitations to folk-clubs and festivals, which gave him a new lease of life as a singer.
Scottish folk songs are a rich and diverse part of Scotland’s cultural heritage, often passed down through generations. These songs reflect Scotland’s history, struggles, landscapes, and sense of identity, covering themes of love, war, nature, and rebellion. With melodies that range from hauntingly beautiful ballads to lively dance tunes, Scottish folk music has had a profound influence on Celtic and world music traditions.
Key Characteristics of Scottish Folk Songs
Famous Scottish Folk Songs
Cultural Importance
Key Characteristics of Scottish Folk Songs
- Instruments
- Traditional Scottish folk music often features instruments like:
- Bagpipes (Great Highland Pipes): Iconic for Scottish music and used in celebrations, marches, and laments.
- Fiddle: A central instrument in both lively dance tunes and slower ballads.
- Harp (Clarsach): A traditional Celtic harp, used for softer, more lyrical songs.
- Accordion: Frequently used in Scottish ceilidh (social dance) music.
- Bodhrán: A traditional hand drum used for rhythm in folk songs.
- Traditional Scottish folk music often features instruments like:
- Themes
- Love and Heartache: Many Scottish folk songs explore tales of unrequited love, heartbreak, and romantic longing.
- Nature and Landscape: Scotland’s rugged beauty often serves as inspiration, with references to mountains, rivers, and heather-covered hills.
- Historical Struggles: Many songs chronicle Scotland’s battles for independence, particularly during the Jacobite uprisings (e.g., "The Skye Boat Song").
- Emigration and Exile: Reflecting Scotland’s history of forced emigration and diaspora, songs often express longing for home.
- Celebration and Dance: Scottish reels and jigs, performed at ceilidhs, showcase the lively and celebratory side of Scottish folk music.
Famous Scottish Folk Songs
- "The Skye Boat Song"
- A hauntingly beautiful song about Bonnie Prince Charlie’s escape to the Isle of Skye after the Jacobite defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.
- "Loch Lomond"
- A well-known ballad that expresses the sorrow of separation, often interpreted as a Jacobite lament for fallen soldiers.
- "Flower of Scotland"
- A modern folk anthem, often considered Scotland’s unofficial national anthem, celebrating Robert the Bruce’s victory over the English at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.
- "Auld Lang Syne"
- Written by Robert Burns, this famous New Year’s Eve song is a global celebration of friendship and remembrance.
- "Mairi’s Wedding"
- A lively song originally written for a wedding celebration, featuring cheerful lyrics and a danceable rhythm.
- "Ye Jacobites by Name"
- A Jacobite-era song reflecting the political and social divisions of Scotland during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Cultural Importance
- Storytelling Tradition: Many Scottish folk songs are ballads that tell vivid stories, keeping Scotland’s oral history alive.
- Celtic Influence: Scottish folk music shares a close relationship with Irish and Welsh folk traditions, contributing to the broader Celtic music genre.
- Ceilidhs and Festivals: Folk music remains central to Scottish celebrations, with ceilidh dances and folk festivals keeping the tradition vibrant today.
- Influence on Modern Music: Many contemporary folk and rock musicians, such as Dougie MacLean and The Corries, draw inspiration from traditional Scottish music. The genre’s influence extends to artists worldwide.
