Alan Lomax in NE Scotland 1951

ALAN LOMAX IN NE SCOTLAND
About Alan Lomax's 1951 collecting trip in the North East

Alan Lomax's recordings of Scots song (as distinct from Gaelic song) are dominated by singers from North East Scotland, an area of mostly low lying fine farming land that has the grey granite city of Aberdeen at its heart, the rich North Sea before it, and the rocky almost peopleless Highland Massif at its back.

The land is rich in song. The pre-eminent authority on ballads, Francis J Child (1825-1896) of Harvard, selected many Aberdeenshire versions as his 'A texts'. Gavin Greig (1856-1914), the pioneering North East collector and commentator, worked with Rev James D Duncan (1848-1917) to amass from singers and informants an astonishing 3500 texts and 3300 tunes of "the older popular minstrelsy of the district". These include not only thrilling and highly informative multiple versions of 'Child Ballads' as identified and codified by F J Child, but songs of farm work, of sea and army life, love and longing and much else.

The songs of farm labour, the 'bothy ballads', are a distinctive creation of the North East. There are two types, those written by farm workers and telling in detail of the work and the character of the farmer, and the broader theatrical humour of the music hall style compositions of professional entertainers. The emphasis is more on text, and slight variations on the same tunes appear repeatedly, but the North East tunes have vitality and sweetness too.

Alan Lomax recorded many songs and stories from well known singers - Jeannie Robertson, Davie Stewart, Jimmy MacBeath and John Strachan.

But he also recorded other less-documented singers in The North-East.

Here is just a partial list.

* John Mearns and his wife singing duets and solos

* Willie Matheson singing only one verse of each of 23 songs

* Young Blanche Wood singing Portnockie songs

* Bob Cooney with The Wee Toon Clerk and The Road To Dundee

* 'Lordie' Hay gives The Bonny Lass o Fyvie, Jock Hawk's Adventures In Glasgow, and the Tarves Rant

* James Wiseman [of Portnockie?] gives a fine Codlins song

* Archie Lennox, grandfather of singer Annie Lennox, gives Come Up And See Ma Garret and I Have Never Ever Blacklegged In My Life

* John Mearns' son Jack and a group of Aberdeen school pals sing street and play songs and game lyrics

* George Chalmers sings I'm A Handsome Young Widow

* Dave Dowman sings Auld Maid In A Garrett

* Bill Finney sings Drumdelgie

To hear Lomax's North-East recordings use the below link, then choose Aberdeen, Davie Stewart, Jeannie Robertson, Jimmy MacBeath, Portnockie or Turriff - and explore!

http://research.culturalequity.org/get-audio-ix.do?ix=session&id=SC51&idType=abbrev&sortBy=abc

NOTE

For more information about Hamish Henderson's collecting work with Jimmy MacBeath, Willie Mathieson, Jeannie Robertson, Davie Stewart and John Strachan, see Alias MacAlias and Timothy Neat's two volume biography of Henderson.

This site is edited by Ewan McVicar

Jimmy MacBeath Page

Jimmy MacBeath was born in a thatched cottage on Church Street in the fishing village of Portsoy on the Banffshire coast, on August 30, 1894. For most of his life Jimmy footslogged the roads of Scotland and beyond, earning pennies from street singing and shillings from casual labour, living in “model” public lodging houses.

Jimmy died in January 1972 in Tor-na-dee Hospital, Aberdeen, and was buried in Portsoy.

A newspaper article about him suggests he left home as a young man because he was unable to live with his mother’s strict house rules and her house-proud attitude, which saw Jimmy having to take off his shoes every time he went into the house. Peter Hall has written that Jimmy began work at the age of 13 at a farm a few miles inland at Deskford. For his six months feeing he got £4, payable at the end of the six months. He started to learn the store of bothy ballads that were to become his trademark. At school he [had] put by snippets of playground lore and at home listened to his mother singing old ballads like “Lord Randal” and broadside pieces like “The Butcher Boy.”
Jimmy left farm employment and began a life of casual employment and wandering. His use of time periods and place names in the varying accounts of his travels that he gave to Alan Lomax and others is often inconsistent, but his first long walk from Inverness to Perth seems to have happened in about 1908. In the First World War Jimmy served in the Flanders trenches with the Gordon Highlanders and later in Ireland with the Royal Army Medical Corps. Then he returned to the road.
In turn he was dishwasher, fruit picker, kitchen porter; but in addition he had his songs. Developed first in the bothies and later under the tutelage of old timers like Aul Jock o Blyth and Geordie Stewart of Huntly, Jimmy’s compelling voice and style were soon to be heard in the streets of the larger Northeast towns, at the markets and fairs, around the countryside and in every welcoming pub and bar.
He travelled not just the roads of Scotland. He went through England to the Channel Islands, and later to Nova Scotia, where he found the French Canadian girls “too verocious, like they were hot in the blood.” Most of the time he lived in “model lodging houses,” doing casual work and singing for money at fairs and feeing markets where he would find an eager paying audience.
In 1951 Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson were collecting songs in Turriff, and veteran bothy singer “Lordy” Hay recommended they seek out Jimmy, who was based at the time in the North Lodge model lodging house in Elgin. An obituary article by Raymond Anderson gives a warm appreciation of Jimmy’s latter years.
Alan Lomax wanted Jimmy to go to Turriff with him, but the singer was very apprehensive about this, as the unappreciative police of that town had told him never to set foot in it again. But he decided to take a chance and was put up in one of the best rooms of Turriff’s best hotel — all at the expense of Columbia Records. The very next year he was off to London to record for the earliest folk series on television. Jimmy was now popular in folk clubs throughout Britain and he also sang abroad. But money never remained with him very long, it just slipped through his fingers.
This traveling minstrel sang in many unusual places — at wakes in Ireland and at silent movies in place of a piano. He is probably best known for a song he got from Geordie Stewart — “Come All Ye Tramps and Hawkers.”
Ironically, towards the end of his life, Jimmy got more invitations to sing at clubs in England than in Scotland. In his late life bronchitis left him fighting for breath, but he could astonish people by bursting into “Come All Ye Tramps and Hawkers” moments after finding it difficult to breathe.
“The sight of a stage would work wonders with Jimmy,” said Hamish Henderson.
But if Jimmy ever played any of his records at the “model” lodging house, the other men soon told him to turn it off. Few of them liked his songs. There he was looked on as a lost character. Possibly even the last of the characters who used to be well known in the “model.”
Ewan McVicar recalls well how delighted and impressed the 1960 audience at the Glasgow Folk Club were with Jimmy’s singing, but more vividly how astonished and embarrassingly grateful Jimmy was to receive the sum of eight pounds, more than he had ever before earned from an evening’s performance.

For much more about Hamish Henderson's collecting work with Jimmy see Alias MacAlias and Timothy Neat's two volume biography of Henderson.

Alan Lomax’s recordings of Scots song (as distinct from Gaelic song) are dominated by singers from Northeast Scotland, an area of mostly low-lying fine farming land that has the gray granite city of Aberdeen at its heart, the rich North Sea before it, and the rocky almost people-less Highland Massif at its back.

The land is rich in song. The preeminent authority on ballads, Francis J. Child (1825–1896) selected many Aberdeenshire versions as his “A texts.” Gavin Greig (1856–1914), the pioneering Northeast collector and commentator, worked with Reverend James D. Duncan (1848–1917) to amass from singers and informants an astonishing 3,500 texts and 3,300 tunes of “the older popular minstrelsy of the district.”[1] These include not only thrilling and highly informative multiple versions of “Child ballads,” as identified and codified by F. J. Child, but also songs of farm work, of sea and army life, of love and longing, and much else.

The songs of farm labor — known as “bothy ballads”[2] — are a distinctive creation of the Northeast. There are two types, those written by farmworkers and telling in detail of the work and the character of the farmer, and those incorporating the broader theatrical humor of the music-hall style compositions of traveling professional entertainers. The creators of bothy ballads were interested in narrative rather than in melody, and slightly varied versions of the same tunes are repeatedly employed, but the tunes used have vitality and sweetness, too.

Two of the Scottish subjects of the Portraits series, Davie Stewart and Jimmy MacBeath, were friends. They had both served in the Gordon Highlanders during World War II; both had the “roving notion” and made a living when and where they could, oftimes through the declaiming of songs on the street. Yet when they traveled and worked together, one sang while the other bottled (collected money from the crowd); they were unable to sing together because their styles differed so. Jimmy had the solid and vigorous farm worker style, Davie Stewart had the fluid high-drama traveler way with a song.

They were born close by each other, in fishing towns of the Northeast, but neither sang much of the sea. Rather, they turned to the rich agricultural land that grew fine versions of dramatic old ballads and pragmatic new bothy ballads. They seldom sing on these recordings with metronomic timing. The chord-based accompaniments of the folk song revival have more recently imposed a rhythmic choke hold on many old songs that live and breathe freely in these Lomax recordings, where the narrative rules.

They shared many songs. The Portraits recordings allow comparison of their differing ways with “Mormond Braes” and “The Dowie Dens of Yarrow.” Jimmy MacBeath’s version of “Tramps and Hawkers” became the standard text for Scots singers, who nevertheless preferred Davie’s virtuoso account of “MacPherson’s Rant.”

Jimmy MacBeath sings confidentially, with a pacing that maximizes the story, when he is singing to the microphone in Alan Lomax’s house. He uses a more regular rhythm, with an open-throated rasp and roar, when projecting to a crowd; he is yet always so confident and relaxed. His masterful presentation and distinctive appearance (he was described as having a “face like a tortoise”) charmed audiences. Alan Lomax described Jimmy MacBeath as “A quick-footed sporty little character, with the gravel voice and urbane assurance that would make him right at home on skid row anywhere in the world. He’s been everywhere and nowhere for fifty years running, and he has a song about it.” When he sings you can hear the sparkle in his eye, the arms waving to emphasize the swing of a tune or a comic point, and understand why he could draw an enthusiastic crowd of farmworkers at a hiring fair or market. ——Linlithgow, West Lothian, Scotland, 2001

A PORTRAIT OF JIMMY MACBEATH —Hamish Henderson

Jimmy MacBeath, last “King of the Cornkisters,” was born in Portsoy in 1894 and died in Tor-na-Dee Hospital, Milltimber, Aberdeenshire on January 7, 1972.

Like his friend and traveling companion Davie Stewart, Jimmy spent the greater part of his life as wandering singer, and his travels took him into every corner of the North-East and (in his heyday) as far as Stornoway, Belfast, the Channel Islands, and Canada. Like Davie again, he became one of the few “professionals” of an earlier period to find a rather wobbly but welcome place in the ranks of the entertainers who have been doing the rounds of folk clubs and festivals since the present folk revival got under way in the late 1950s, and he was a familiar kenspeckle figure at Blairgowrie, Keele, Loughborough, and Cecil Sharp House. Although his last years were spent in relative poverty — he was for a decade an inmate of the model lodging house at 33 East North Street, Aberdeen — this new lease of fame and the occasional paid gig did do something to ease an existence that in the end must often have been hard to thole.

We have a description of Jimmy as a schoolboy from an informant who was in the same class at Portsoy School. Jimmy, whose nickname was Scout, sat at the bottom of the class with another lad by-named Piggy and “made fun of his lessons.” However, he had already begun to store songs and rhymes in his retentive memory, as I discovered when I began to record the fragments of nursery rhymes, playground songs, and harvest-field gallimaufries which are related to the “dreg song” of the Lothian and Fife oyster-fishers, and which can still be found here and there, sometimes far from their region of origin. Jimmy listened with interest to the recordings of dreg-song fragments and contributed a version of his own which he had learnt in the playground of Portsoy School:

Mary Annie, sugar cane
Bumbee bedlar
Saxteen saidler.
A mannie in a hairy caipie
Rowin’ at the fairie [ferry] boatie.
Fairie boatie ow’r dear,
Ten pounds in the year.
Jock Fife had a coo
Black and white about the moo.
Hit can jump the Brig o’ Dee
Singin' Cock-a-linkie.

Jimmy heard this version when he was eight from “a laddie cried Mair” who also became a farm servant. The “mannie in the hairy caipie” recalls the lines in Herd’s eighteenth-century version:

“Hey hou Harry Harry / Mony a boat skail'd the ferry” and maybe provides a hint that the horsemen were not the only worker in Scotland to invoke the occasional aid of Hairy, alias Clootie.

Jimmy learned the “bothy style” — the way of life of the farm servants of the pre-First World War North-East — the hard way. He left school at thirteen and was fee’d at Brandane’s Fair to farm in the parish of Deskford, south of Cullen in Banffshire. His fee for the first-six month term was four pounds; this was raised to five guineas for a second term. His most vivid memory of that first year was a savage beating with the back chain of a cart for not being in proper control of his horses:

Ye ca’d oot muck wi’ your pair at that time, ye used your pair at that time. The foreman went oot first, and of course I was oot ahin’, man; I happened tae miss my hin’sling, o’ my cairt, like — and the horse gaed agley, dae ya see? He [the foreman] pulled me oot-ow’r the cairt and thrashed me wi’ a back chain — richt ow’r the back wi’ a back chain. An’ the faimer was passin’ at the time, and never lookit near hand.

This punishment, meted out a greenhorn halflin, does not seem to have been exceptional. Other informants such as Jimmy Stewart (a Turriff worthy, known as “the Laird o’ Delgaty”) have recorded similar stories for our archive. No wonder Jimmy MacBeath later described the North-East farm servants of that period as “a very sad-crushed people, very sair crushed doon.” Conditions of work, living accommodation, and the food (generally brose) provided for the lads were all the subject of outspoken complaint in bothy ballads, and when Jimmy sang “Drumdelgie” to audiences far outside the North-East, he was able to communicate more of the immediate reality of a farm laborer’s life in the old days than a hundred government papers or bureaucratic reports could possibly have done.

The outbreak of World War I did at any rate provide a chance of a break from this “hard slavery work.” Jimmy enlisted in the Gordons and saw service in the trenches of France and Flanders. He also spent some time in Ireland with the RAMC and helped to plant several bothy ballads in the rich fertile soil of Kildare.

When he was demobilised, he was faced with the depressing prospect of re-entering farm service, but fate — in the shape of Geordie Stewart of Huntly, a wealthy travelling scrap dealer, and a brother of Lucy Stewart of Fetterangus — willed otherwise. Geordie was a connoisseur of ballad singing, and it was he who put the idea into Jimmy's head that he might be better employed using his extraordinary voice, with its unique gravelly tone, as a street singer than meekly submitting to the necessity of a return to the bothy life. Geordie not only assured Jimmy that fame, money, and a great lyric future lay before him on the road; he also taught him two or three dozen of the songs which he was afterwards to make famous, including the best version collected to date of “Come A’ Ye Tramps and Hawkers.”

At first Jimmy seems to have been rather self-conscious about singing on the streets, especially in places where he was known. The same school friend of Jimmy, whom I quoted earlier, happened by accident to come on him at the very outset of his career, when he was singing in the streets in Banff. As soon as his compatriots appeared, Jimmy took one look at them, stopped in mid-song and moved off. But it was not long before he had that awkward hurdle behind him and was fully prepared to sing anywhere, and on any occasion, at the drop of a hat — or the crack of a nicky tam.[6] His became a welcome “weel-kent face” at all sorts of events, public and private, in Aberdeenshire — from Aikey Fair to a local football team celebration. Mr. MacKenzie, of MacKenzie’s tearooms in Elgin (where Jimmy was later to work as kitchen porter in the mid-1950s) informed me that it was not uncommon for Jimmy to earn as much as £25 in a single day, when he as at the top of his form, and this was naturally quite a lot of money in the 1920s and ’30s. But money always flowed through Jimmy’s hands like water: he spent quite a lot of it on booze, and was always ready to “stand his hand” in company, but he was also an impulsively — one might almost say compulsively — generous person and had a real sympathy with those who happened to be less fortunate than himself — as anyone can testify who ever saw him together with blind people.

The time of the year when Jimmy really came into his own was Aikey Fair, the famous “Continental Sunday” fair which is held in July on a brae not far from Old Deer, and in sight of Drostan's Abbey. (Aikey Brae was the locality of the final defeat of the Comyns by Robert Bruce in 1308.) This used to be a celebrated horse market (held on Wednesdays) but with the gradual disappearance of the horse as a working beast on North-East farms, this side of the fair faded out. However, the Sunday fair is still a great occasion, and attracts singer, pipers, fiddlers, melodeon players, and other wandering folk artists — the majority of them “travelling people” — from all over the North-East, and even further afield. There are also revivalist preachers who occasionally have a tough time of it if the musicians feel like drowning their fire and brimstone by the direct method. When Jimmy MacBeath turned up, he at once became the centre of a lively group of farm servants, who urged him to sing “The Banks o' Ross-shire,” “Torn A’, Rippit A’,” “The Ball o’ Kirriemeer,” and other colorful items from his repertoire. (In this he seems to have been in the direct line of descent from Blind Jamie Rankin, the singer Peter Buchan employed to collect songs and stories for him, cf. Gavin Greig and Alexander Keith, Last Leaves, pages 279–80.)

Afterwards Jimmy would repair to a hotel bar in Old Deer and the fun would continue. I remember well seeing him in his glory in that same bar in the evening of the fair day in 1953; one of the young farm servants, who had obviously formed a strong attachment to him, was sitting and listening attentively, while Jimmy taught him “Airlin's Fine Brae's” verse by verse. I felt it was a real privilege to witness the actual act of oral transmission, especially when the transmitter was once none other than the reigning “King o’the Cornkisters.”

Jimmy also used to sing at “Turra Market” (Porter Fair), and it was in Turriff that Alan Lomax and I made our first recordings of him in 1951. The lead that carried us to Jimmy came from “Lordie” Hay, a veteran bothy singer whom I had met on an earlier tour. This was the same humorous blue-blooded “Lordie,” brother of “Prince,” who is mentioned in the bothy balled “Wester Badenteer, “Syne Lordie wi the auld Scotch sands nae heard in music halls.” We recorded a number of songs from “Lordie” Hay the Commercial Hotel in Turriff; in addition, he provided a graphic account of the career and personality of Jimmy MacBeath and obligingly told us where we would probably find him; this turned out to be the North Lodge, a model lodging-house in Elgin.

The following day we drove west from Turriff, via Banff and Buckie. Alan dropped me off at Jessie Murray’s house in Buckie and drove on alone to Elgin to pick up Jimmy. Jessie Murray, a great ballad singer, was in rare fettle and I hardly noticed the two hours go by, when suddenly I heard Alan's car draw up in front of the house. A moment or two later, Jessie and I had a simultaneous first vision of Jimmy's beaming, rubicund, booze-blotched face as he walked into the kitchen, followed by Alan. There was a moment of silence. Then Alan said: “Hamish, Jessie — I want you to meet Jimmy MacBeath.”

lf an hour later we were en route for Turriff, and Jimmy was singing in the back of the car. To start the ball rolling, I had sung him a short four-verse variant of “Come A’' Ye Tramps and Hawkers” which I had learned from a Dundee-born farm servant, Tam MacGregor, when I was a student. (Tam and I had been “chaulmered” together on an Appin farm, and I learned several songs from him in the authentic bothy style when we were lying on adjacent bone-shaker beds). Jimmy at once sang his own version, now world-famous, and we were away.

When he learned that we were heading for “Turra Toon,” Jimmy was none too confident of his reception. The last time he had been there, he had been slung out of the town by the local police, who had told him never to set foot in Turriff again. However, Alan assured him that this was a “special case” — as indeed it was — and Jimmy rode back into Turriff in triumph. He was shortly taking his ease, and royal dram, in the best hotel in the town.

Indeed, Jimmy, who was never slow to claim descent from the Macbeth who “stabbed King Duncan through the mattress” — and, given any encouragement, from the best-looking of the three Weird Sisters too — was quick to realise that here, in the shape of two wandering folklorists, was fate in a Ford Anglia, and that his reappearance (against all the odds) in Turra Toon signified a qualitative change in more than his own personal picaresque career. Those early recording sessions in the Commercial Hotel marked the intersection in space and time of the old world of Aikey Fair and the new world of the as yet undreamed-of Keele Festival of the future, with its hundreds of youthful enthusiasts from all over Britain gathered to hear Flora MacNeil, Ewan MacColl, Margaret Barry, Felix Doran, Belle and Alex Stewart -- and Jimmy MacBeath himself, the symbolic unifying factor in the whole clanjamfrie.

So in the Turriff hotel bedroom which I was shortly to re-occupy when Edinburgh University finally “bought” the idea of subsidising a collecting tour, Jimmy really went to town. He gave an uproarious performance of “The Moss o’ Burreldales,” the song which epitomises the Scots tinker way of life; he delighted us with a lovely rendering of the “Forfar Sodger” complete with gesticulations; he put on gallus red-hackled swagger for “The Gallant Forty-twa”; and, after telling us the story of James MacPherson, the tinker-gypsy outlaw hanged at Banff in November 1700, he went on to sing the folk version of “MacPherson's Rant” which was shortly to supplant Robert Burns’ cloak-and-dagger rewrite on the lips of folk-singers all over Scotland.

Later that summer Jimmy came to Edinburgh to sing at the first People's Festival ceilidh organised by me for the Edinburgh Labour Festival Committee. This was held in the Oddfellows' Hall, just across the road from Sandy Bell's bar, and in both places Jimmy created a sensation. His first song in the hall was “Come A’ Ye Tramps and Hawkers,” and Alan Lomax’s tape recordings of the ceilidh communicate the elated atmosphere of that memorable occasion. Jimmy was much affected by the reception he got, and at the end of the show he informed the audience that this was his “swan song,” the culmination and the conclusion of his singing career: for reasons of ill health and age he would never be able to sing at a similar function again. (He was to visit Edinburgh and sing at my ceilidhs for close on another twenty years.)

After the “official” ceilidh had finished, we carried on at St. Columbia's Church Hall in Johnstone Terrace, and there Jimmy excelled himself. Ewan MacColl and Isla Cameron joined us, the Theatre Workshop show having finished, and the sight of Ewan's face, when he first received the full impact of Jimmy's personality and performance, remains vividly in my memory. Other singers and musicians present were Flora MacNeil, Calum Johnstone, John Burgess, Jessie Murray, Blanche Wood, and John Strachan. Hugh MacDiarmid honoured us with his presence; parts of A Drunken Man Looks at the Thistle were spoken during the evening, and at the end of a second or “unofficial” part of the show he was so moved that he publicly embraced old John Strachan after the singing of “Goodnight and Joy Be wi’ Ye A.”

A month or two later, in Alan Lomax's program “I Heard Scotland Singing,” Jimmy's voice was heard for the first time on the radio, together with the voices of several of the other singers mentioned above. This was the beginning of a protracted and often frustrating attempt on my part to get authentic traditional song on the BBC programmes, the “polished” lyric gem being what the public was supposed to want and — whether it wanted it or not — what is certainly got, in full measure.

We had two valuable allies in London, however; these were Peter Kennedy and Seamus Ennis, who at that time made up a small folk-song section in the BBC, under the aegis of Marie Slocombe. After the second People's Festival in 1952, I brought Seamus Ennis to the North-East, and in the Royal Oak Hotel, Banff, we recorded some wonderful sessions with Jimmy, “Lordie,” Frank Steele and other singers. The BBC discs made from these tape recordings gradually began to get heard on the radio even in programmes put out by BBC Scotland — although the latter showed a curious reluctance, literally for years, to use Jimmy and other authentic bothy ballad singers to anything like the extent to which they could — and should — have been used.

It was in 1953 that Alan Lomax invited Jimmy to London to take part in his first television series presenting folksingers from Scotland, Ireland, and England, and it is from his appearance in this series — which was much commented on — that one can really date Jimmy as an international celebrity on the folk scene. This was further enhanced by the appearance in 1954 of Volume VI (Scotland) of the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music albums, which I helped Alan to edit. Later records which featured his singing include the Caedmon series of “Folksongs of Britain” (issued in Britain by Topic), and our own Bothy Ballads LP on the Tangent label. In 1960 Collector brought out an EP of his singing (JES10); recordings had been made at the Linburn Ceilidhs for War Blinded, organised by the School of Scottish Studies, and in 1968 Topic produced an LP (Wild Rover No More, Topic 12T173) edited by Peter A. Hall.

The festivals organised by the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland at Blairgowrie and Kinross made Jimmy's name and fame known to an up-and-coming generation of folk-song aficionados in the 1960s, and in 1966 Chapbook devoted a special number to him (The Rt. Hon. Jimmy MacBeath, Vol. 3, No. 2). At roughly the same time Sing (Britain's earliest folk-song magazine) produced a marvelous illustrated bumper number devoted to the first (1965) Keele Festival; the test was by very much an “Establishment” figure on the folk scene. “Jimmy MacBeath, King of the tramps and hawkers, and a surprise only to those who had never heard him before, endeared himself to his listeners with gesture, twinkling toes and throaty singing.”

Jimmy’s last public appearance in Edinburgh was at the bi-centenary ceilidh in honour of “The Shirra and his Gang” (Sir Walter Scott and his confederates) which was held in the Portobello Town Hall on August 17, 1971. In spite of worsening chest ailments, he put on a gallant performance and was much acclaimed by an audience which included scholars from many parts of the world.

Jimmy MacBeath died a few days after Hogmanay in 1972. Some months later the BBC made amends for years of neglect by broadcasting a splendid programme in his honour, put together and presented by Arthur Argo and produced by James Hunter.

Ah got that sang aff Geordie Ross, the Beauty tramp... he had many sangs... Oh, he wis a little wee man tae look at... a wee stoot... cheery kin... and he paiddled aboot with a box an he wis very crabbit at time tae. If onythin gaed against him he wis very contermashus... he would pretend that he wis a great knocker-oot, as it were, when he got this twa-three drams in o him an that, an when he startit tae pit up his fists he aye drew them doon again. Och! It wis the dram that was speakin. He’d face up [in a fight] but he’d aye fail. When the drink’s in the wit’s oot. Oh, he wis a great dancer. He hed a dance whit he caa'd the Pin Reel... He could dance on ae leg... he jist diddled himsel, and he had me play the mouth organ tae him... dancin the Pin Reel... on his one leg, and of course it took a bit o daen tae dae that. [7]

Davie Stewart was born in 1901 in Windmill Street, Peterhead, a major fishing port in northeast Scotland, to a Scottish Traveler family, the Stewarts of Buchan, Aberdeenshire. He died in October 1972 while on a visit to the Folk Club in St. Andrews.
Davie’s father and grandfather were both called Robert Stewart and were traveling tinsmiths and hawkers. His father “could sing, but he was mostly a piper.”
My father . . . took a fisher-hoose, like off the fishermen. . . . He used to gae awa herrin fishin wi the fishermen from Peterhead and Fraserburgh.
Davie attended schools in Aberdeen, New Blyth, and Fraserburgh. In spring and summer the family would take to the roads of the North. Davie began to earn money by singing for money when he was very young.
I was about six when I started getting fly for it, you see, and I went away mostly on my own, maybe going away for a week or a fortnight and my people always wondering where I went to. I’d go to other Travelers and live wi them. I went to school when I was four years old and I left it when I was nine. When I was nine year old I went away from home and sometimes I worked wi the farmers, and sometimes I was hawking; sometimes I sung and sometimes I begged. I used to go to the farm house door and sing a songie or twa, and the old woman would come out and gie me a piece and jelly [bread and jam] or a bowl of milk. Then the ploomen used tae take me down to the bothies and I used to sing in the bothies wi them, in fact, I learned a lot of songs off the ploughmen. When Davie was 13 World War I started, and he was determined to enlist, as all his cousins were doing. He joined the Third Reserve Battalion, the Gordon Highlanders, and twice his father produced Davie's “birth lines” to prove he was underage, and “I got tooken back.” The third time, at age 15, Davie succeeded. He was wounded three times serving in France.
He had been taught by his father to play the Highland pipes when at home, at about age eight and too small to hold a full-sized instrument properly, so his father had bought a “half size” set for “aboot five bob.” Like his father had before him, Davie became a piper in the Gordons.
I was so thickheaded I couldn’t learn music, so I used to sit back and hear them playing and I would just pick it up.
When he came out of the army, age 21 or 22, he began to play “boxes” — first melodeon and then the accordion, in a style perhaps derived from pipes technique, with an approach to accompaniment on the bass buttons that was sometimes unusual, sometimes downright sketchy, and on occasion doggedly dissonant. He played at markets and fairs in Aberdeenshire, at farmhouse doors, and in bothies until 2 in the morning, when he would pick up more songs. Sometimes he earned money by hawking and tinkering, sometimes by seasonal farm work.
“Maybe I would work for a week or two or three at the hay at this farm, then maybe I did his turnips, then maybe I would come back for his potato picking. In between jobs I did busking to make up my living.”
For many years Davie traveled Ireland, where he made music, married, and raised a family. At last in 1950, family needs took him from the road.
We come back again to Blairgowrie, Scotland, for the berries. And I says to the wife, says I, “We’ll have to try and settle down.” She says, “Yes, we’re getting older now, and it doesn’t do to be runnin about like this, rearin family — getting proper schoolin.” So we went away to Dundee and got a house in Dundee.
In March 1962, Davie moved to live in Glasgow. Although commercial recordings of his singing were issued and he was invited to perform in folk clubs and was a favorite and feted guest at festivals, he could between times be met with busking for coppers along the “back courts” behind the massed three or four tenement flats that lined the canyon streets of the city.

For more information about Hamish Henderson's collecting work with Davie Stewart see Alias MacAlias and Timothy Neat's two volume biography of Henderson.

The below text is from the CD notes for the Davie Stewart PORTRAIT album 'Go On, Sing Another Song', Rounder CD 82161-1833-2

The land is rich in song. The pre-eminent authority on ballads, Francis J Child (1825-1896) of Harvard, selected many Aberdeenshire versions as his 'A texts'. Gavin Greig (1856-1914), the pioneering North East collector and commentator, worked with Rev James D Duncan (1848-1917) to amass from singers and informants an astonishing 3500 texts and 3300 tunes of "the older popular minstrelsy of the district".[1] These include not only thrilling and highly informative multiple versions of 'Child Ballads' as identified and codified by F J Child, but songs of farm work, of sea and army life, love and longing and much else.

The songs of farm labour, the 'bothy ballads'[2], are a distinctive creation of the North East. There are two types, those written by farm workers and telling in detail of the work and the character of the farmer, and the broader theatrical humour of the music hall style compositions of professional entertainers. The emphasis is more on text, and slight variations on the same tunes appear repeatedly, but the North East tunes have vitality and sweetness too.

Two of the Scottish subjects of the Portraits series, Davie Stewart and Jimmy McBeath, were friends. They had both served in the Gordon Highlanders during World War 1, both had the 'roving notion' and made a living when and where they could, oftimes through the declaiming of songs on the street. Yet when they travelled and worked together one sang while the other bottled [collected money from the crowd]. They were unable to sing together because their styles differed so. Jimmy had the solid and vigorous farm worker style, Davie had the fluid high drama traveller way with a song.

They were born close by each other, in fishing towns of the North East, but neither sang much of the sea. Rather they turned to the rich agricultural land that grew fine versions of dramatic old ballads and pragmatic new bothy ballads. They seldom sing on these recordings with metronomic timing. The chord-based accompaniments of the Folk Song Revival have more recently imposed a rhythmic chokehold on many old songs that live and breathe freely in these Lomax recordings, where the narrative rules.

They shared many songs. The Portrait recordings allow comparison of their differing ways with "Mormond Braes" and "The Dowie Dens Of Yarrow". Jimmy’s version of "Tramps and Hawkers" became the standard text for Scots singers, who however preferred Davie’s virtuoso account of "MacPherson's Rant".

Jimmy McBeath's singing style varied, conversational to a microphone but expansive to an audience. Davie Stewart always employed the high opera style that would catch pennies from the passing football crowd, the cinema queue he worked along, or the 'back court' behind three or four story tenement [poor quality multi story flats] windows from which a coin wrapped in a scrap of paper would be flung down. Davie was of traveller stock, and sang in a dramatic, vivid and hard-surfaced traveller style that demands attention. The intensity of delivery is not designed for a 20 or 30 minute solo set to a

Davie & Jimmy

Davie Stewart and Jimmy MacBeath were famed Northeast Scotland singers who traveled and sang on the roads of Britain, Ireland, and further afield. The tapes of song, stories, and interviews that Alan Lomax recorded over several days with them individually (and with other traditional singers from the British Isles that he took to stay with him in London in the late 1950s) contain such bountiful riches that the previously issued Portraits series of CDs of these artists could only cherry-pick and had to concentrate on song.[1] These CDs concentrate on Stewart and MacBeath’s spoken narratives — on their accounts of personal experiences, beliefs, and practices — and include traditional storytelling as well as ten full songs and fragments of several more. The first disc considers the nature, pleasures, and dangers of the traveling life. The second focuses on family life and work.

MacBeath’s and Stewart’s song repertoires, life experiences, and stories sometimes overlap or parallel, and at times diverge sharply. MacBeath was born in Peterhead and Stewart in Portsoy, two fishing communities 43 miles apart by road that belong to a cluster of ports tightly intermingled through their shared dependence on fishing — the boats often netting far away from home. Both ports perch on the edge of rich farmlands which they service. Jimmy MacBeath did work on a fishing boat for a spell, but not until 1941. On leaving home he “fee’d” with a farmer, and with the other single men in the bothy[2] (farm residence) he learned chunky, dialect-rich bothy ballads of the farm life and thrilling old ballads of lords and ladies gay and sad. Davie Stewart also worked and sang in the farm bothies, sometimes as a casual laborer undertaking harvesting and other seasonal tasks, but more often singing to the farmer’s family or to the bothy men. Davie was from a close-knit clan of tinsmiths, hawkers, and music makers who for centuries had padded Scotland’s byways, camped on green sites, and dealt cautiously with the settled peoples of the land. Jimmy MacBeath was born of settled folk but “took the roaming notion” and trudged far and wide, carrying as few possessions as possible, losing contact with his family, and making temporary alliances with other street singers, including Davie. Davie Stewart acquired a wife, a cart, and a bender tent (see disc 2, track 7), and children, for the sake of whose education he eventually settled into permanent housing. Jimmy MacBeath lived [DNS all his life??] among other single itinerants in lodging houses.

The British folk song revival of the 1950s swept both Davie and Jimmy into a new setting where the songs that they had garnered, and that had occasionally brought them an uncertain income, became sought after and highly valued, and the performance skills they had honed before crowds of impatient football fans and farm labourers on the spree impressed and astonished young British song enthusiasts, among whom they became “respected — indeed, almost revered.”[3]

Davie Stewart

Davie Stewart was born in 1901 in Windmill Street, Peterhead,[4] a major fishing port in northeast Scotland, to a Scottish Traveler family, the Stewarts of Buchan, Aberdeenshire. He died in October 1972 while on a visit to the Folk Club in St. Andrews.

Davie’s father and grandfather were both called Robert Stewart and were traveling tinsmiths and hawkers. His father “could sing, but he was mostly a piper.”

My father . . . took a fisher-hoose, like off the fishermen. . . . He used to gae awa herrin fishin wi the fishermen from Peterhead and Fraserburgh.[5]

Davie attended schools in Aberdeen, New Blyth, and Fraserburgh. In spring and summer the family would take to the roads of the North. Davie began to earn money by singing for money when he was very young.

I was about six when I started getting fly for it, you see, and I went away mostly on my own, maybe going away for a week or a fortnight and my people always wondering where I went to. I’d go to other Travelers and live wi them. I went to school when I was four years old and I left it when I was nine. When I was nine year old I went away from home and sometimes I worked wi the farmers, and sometimes I was hawking; sometimes I sung and sometimes I begged. I used to go to the farm house door and sing a songie or twa, and the old woman would come out and gie me a piece and jelly [bread and jam] or a bowl of milk. Then the ploomen used tae take me down to the bothies and I used to sing in the bothies wi them, in fact, I learned a lot of songs off the ploughmen.[6]

When Davie was 13 World War I started, and he was determined to enlist, as all his cousins were doing. He joined the Third Reserve Battalion, the Gordon Highlanders, and twice his father produced Davie's “birth lines” to prove he was underage, and “I got tooken back.” The third time, at age 15, Davie succeeded. He was wounded three times serving in France.

He had been taught by his father to play the Highland pipes when at home, at about age eight and too small to hold a full-sized instrument properly, so his father had bought a “half size” set for “aboot five bob.” Like his father had before him, Davie became a piper in the Gordons.

I was so thickheaded I couldn’t learn music, so I used to sit back and hear them playing and I would just pick it up.

When he came out of the army, age 21 or 22, he began to play “boxes” — first melodeon and then the accordion, in a style perhaps derived from pipes technique, with an approach to accompaniment on the bass buttons that was sometimes unusual, sometimes downright sketchy, and on occasion doggedly dissonant. He played at markets and fairs in Aberdeenshire, at farmhouse doors, and in bothies until 2 in the morning, when he would pick up more songs. Sometimes he earned money by hawking and tinkering, sometimes by seasonal farm work.

“Maybe I would work for a week or two or three at the hay at this farm, then maybe I did his turnips, then maybe I would come back for his potato picking. In between jobs I did busking to make up my living.”

For many years Davie traveled Ireland, where he made music, married, and raised a family. At last in 1950, family needs took him from the road.

We come back again to Blairgowrie, Scotland, for the berries.[7] And I says to the wife, says I, “We’ll have to try and settle down.” She says, “Yes, we’re getting older now, and it doesn’t do to be runnin about like this, rearin family — getting proper schoolin.” So we went away to Dundee and got a house in Dundee.

In March 1962, Davie moved to live in Glasgow. Although commercial recordings of his singing were issued and he was invited to perform in folk clubs and was a favorite and feted guest at festivals, he could between times be met with busking for coppers along the “back courts”[8] behind the massed three or four tenement flats that lined the canyon streets of the city.

Jimmy MacBeath

Jimmy MacBeath was born in a thatched cottage on Church Street in the fishing village of Portsoy on the Banffshire coast, on August 30, 1894. He died in January 1972 in Tor-na-dee Hospital, Aberdeen, and was buried in Portsoy.

A newspaper article about him suggests he left home as a young man because he was unable to live with his mother’s strict house rules and her house-proud attitude, which saw Jimmy having to take off his shoes every time he went into the house. Listen, however, to how his voice softens when he talks of his mother’s singing (disc 2, track 2). Peter Hall has written:

He began work at the age of 13 at a farm a few miles inland at Deskford. For his six months feeing he got £4, payable at the end of the six months. He started to learn the store of bothy ballads that were to become his trademark. At school he [had] put by snippets of playground lore and at home listened to his mother singing old ballads like “Lord Randal” and broadside pieces like “The Butcher Boy.” [9]

Jimmy left farm employment and began a life of casual employment and wandering. His use of time periods and place names in the varying accounts of his travels that he gave to Alan Lomax and others is often inconsistent, but his first long walk from Inverness to Perth (as detailed on disc 3, track 5) seems to have happened in about 1908. In the First World War Jimmy served in the Flanders trenches with the Gordon Highlanders and later in Ireland with the Royal Army Medical Corps. Then he returned to the road.

In turn he was dishwasher, fruit picker, kitchen porter; but in addition he had his songs. Developed first in the bothies and later under the tutelage of old timers like Aul Jock o Blyth and Geordie Stewart of Huntly, Jimmy’s compelling voice and style were soon to be heard in the streets of the larger Northeast towns, at the markets and fairs, around the countryside and in every welcoming pub and bar.[10]

He travelled not just the roads of Scotland. He went through England to the Channel Islands, and later to Nova Scotia, where he found the French Canadian girls “too verocious, like they were hot in the blood.” Most of the time he lived in “model lodging houses,”[11] doing casual work and singing for money at fairs and feeing markets where he would find an eager paying audience.

In 1951 Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson were collecting songs in Turriff, and veteran bothy singer “Lordy” Hay recommended they seek out Jimmy, who was based at the time in the North Lodge model lodging house in Elgin. An obituary article by Raymond Anderson gives a warm appreciation of Jimmy’s latter years.

Alan Lomax wanted Jimmy to go to Turriff with him, but the singer was very apprehensive about this, as the unappreciative police of that town had told him never to set foot in it again. But he decided to take a chance and was put up in one of the best rooms of Turriff’s best hotel — all at the expense of Columbia Records. The very next year he was off to London to record for the earliest folk series on television. Jimmy was now popular in folk clubs throughout Britain and he also sang abroad. But money never remained with him very long, it just slipped through his fingers.

This traveling minstrel sang in many unusual places — at wakes in Ireland and at silent movies in place of a piano. He is probably best known for a song he got from Geordie Stewart — “Come All Ye Tramps and Hawkers.”

. . . Ironically, towards the end of his life, Jimmy got more invitations to sing at clubs in England than in Scotland. In his late life bronchitis left him fighting for breath, but he could astonish people by bursting into “Come All Ye Tramps and Hawkers” moments after finding it difficult to breathe.

“The sight of a stage would work wonders with Jimmy,” said Hamish Henderson.

But if Jimmy ever played any of his records at the “model” lodging house, the other men soon told him to turn it off. Few of them liked his songs. There he was looked on as a lost character. Possibly even the last of the characters who used to be well known in the “model.”[12]

This writer recalls well how delighted and impressed the 1960 audience at the Glasgow Folk Club were with Jimmy’s singing, but more vividly how astonished and embarrassingly grateful Jimmy was to receive the sum of eight pounds, more than he had ever before earned from an evening’s performance.

Davie Meets Jimmy

The first time I met Jimmy MacBeath was in Turra [Turriff] market. He was singing at the market and I was 21 or 22 at that time, but I could hardly play the accordion, I didna ken a lot o’ tunes on the accordion . . . .

So I gaed awa oot tae the market that day. Of course I used to sing before I had the accordion, but man I tried tae fiddle awa wi’ the thing, and I played a tunie or twa tae the ploomen, but they started laughing at me. Then they got me to start to sing the cornkister songs, then they were a’ roon me . . .

And, of course, I made a few bob, a’ richt, and that was the first time I met MacBeath was when he came in the pub. So I heard Jimmy MacBeath singing and I says tae mysel’ like, “God, he isnae a bad singer at a.” He sang a lot o’ songies, well, one or twa, and the baith o’ us were in the pub and we had a drink thegither. Och, that’s years and years ago, and ever since that I’ve kenned Jimmy MacBeath. In fact we took a turn thegither, and we did this market and the next market, but I had a different voice from him some way . . . .

If I was at a market wi’ Jimmy he would just stand beside me and collect the money with me, and I would collect it for Jimmy. But still we never sung thegither, no, I kept my own money and Jimmy kept his money.

When the summer was over Jimmy went back to Elgin. That was his depot . . . . I went back to Aberdeen. I always went home in the winter-time. Jimmy too. Jimmy travelled, aye, all over the summer-time but in the wintertime he didn’t travel so much.[13]

Their Performance Styles

They were unable to sing together because their styles differed so. Jimmy had the solid and vigorous farm-worker style. Davie had the fluid, high-drama Traveler way with a song.

Though they were born in fishing towns of the Northeast, neither sang much of the sea. Rather they turned to rich agricultural land that grew fine versions of dramatic old ballads and pragmatic new bothy ballads. They seldom sing with metronomic timing on these recordings. The chord-based accompaniments of the folk song revival have more recently imposed a rhythmic chokehold on many old songs that live and breathe freely in these Lomax recordings, where the narrative rules.

Jimmy MacBeath’s singing style varied — conversational to a microphone but expansive to an audience. “Although Jimmy was thought of as a rumbustuous music-hall type of singer, he was exceptionally versatile and could also sing moving lyric love songs.”[14] In comic or character songs he could employ an astonishing vocal rasp and vigour of movement, then move to warm sentiment and sensitivity. His songs were a demonstration of “resilience in the face of a harsh, rough-hewn life and . . . a tangible retort to every encountered hardship.” [DNS Source?? Alias McAlias??] In general his texts were consistent, although he would vary the order of stanzas. The occasional lack of narrative clarity or consistency in his lyrics suggests that at times he learned and performed them in vocal chunks rather than by constant reference to the story.

In contrast, Davie Stewart employed the vivid, high-opera style[DNS He uses vibrato I think, but isn’t this more a Victorian music-hall style than “high opera”?? –EH]that would catch pennies from the passing football crowd, the cinema queue he worked along, or the “back court.” His was a hard-surfaced Traveler style that demands attention. His intensity of delivery is not designed for a 20- or 30-minute solo set to a paying audience, but for the sharing of songs in the round. As Hamish Henderson says, “His attitude to his text and his tune was highly fluid and improvisatory . . . [he] also had the tendency to fill in partly remembered lines with meaningless syllables.”[15] Davie seemed to delight in varying the words of his choruses; the transcriptions show only what he sang first time through.

Davie had a questing approach to the accordion or melodeon squeezebox. He began by casting around for the tune and the key and then mirrored the melody when singing. In his sketchy fill-ins the final chord and bass notes varied and clashed, as though his mind was elsewhere. As Vic Smith has observed, “The bass end is not following the conventional harmony rules. He repeats the dominant chord even when the structure of the tune has obviously changed; perhaps he was primarily a piper who would have been happier with the constant drone of the pipes.”[16]

Davie’s improvising instinct makes him a fine storyteller, although he was not noted for this, and Lomax coaxes impressive performances from him by getting Davie to tell stories to Lomax’s young daughter. He launches confidently and with style into berker and fairy tales, deftly intermingling action, explanation, and description, throwing in animal sound effects to pace and stretch narrative tension, anticipating the cultural and social knowledge level of his hearer, all to the obvious delight of his audience.

Davie at times distracts himself from the core storyline and has to gather his thread again. In contrast, Jimmy MacBeath has learned his stories by rote and stutters on occasion like a repeating record groove as he is mentally recalling the next section. His stories are passed on rather than retold. He gives on the Portrait album a tale of his native town, Bonny Portsoy, being claimed by the devil, but it is an ill-fitting mixture of three traditional tale elements, with wearisome repetition. His story (on disc 1, track 16) of planned murder thwarted then revealed through public performance, works better, but still he fails to tell Lomax why the murder was to be committed and he tags on a thoroughly unlikely ending.

Travelers, Tinkers, Traders, And Toerags

There’s different grades of traveling folk. You see, there’s what you call the poor Traveler, the down and out Traveller, then there’s the horse dealer, the man who deals among horses and ponies . . . . and then you’ve got the bigger ones with their trailers and motor cars. But there is no barrier. A tinker is a good trade. A tinker will go out there and sort pots and pans and make a good few pounds out of it, in fact I’ve done it myself.[17]

When these recordings were made there was a general assumption that all “Travelers” were Gypsies. More recent opinion is that the Travelers have varied origins. Hamish Henderson postulates that such nomadic Tinker clans as the Stewarts of Buchan are native to Scotland, “the descendants of a very ancient caste of itinerant metal-workers,” one of whose trades was tinsmithing or “whitesmithing.” Their high status in a tribal society without other access to such skills declined over centuries, while other Scots also took to the roads — broken clans who were dispossessed of their land or proscribed as outlaws, so that some lost their clan names and adopted the royal surname of Stewart. [18]

The Gypsies or Egyptians arrived in Scotland at the start of the sixteenth century, when they are reported to have come to the Scots king’s court, explaining that they were Christian Egyptians who had been forcibly converted to Islam. Now they had escaped and were on their way to Rome to get forgiveness from the Pope — could the king give them some money to help them on their way from Egypt to Rome via Edinburgh? They got some money. Clearly, the royal grasp of geography was sketchy.

Current theory is that the Gypsies were a north Indian nomadic group who began traveling west. Certainly a few of the “cant” words shared by Gypsy and Tinker (e.g., gadgie and manashee) have been traced to India. Cant is more a secret “cover-language” than a full-blown tongue.[19] Hamish Henderson estimates that hardly more than 15 percent of the cant spoken in Scotland’s Northeast is recognisable as Romany.

In certain regions a measure of fusion took place . . . and a mixed “Tinker-Gypsy” race came into being, but at the present day the Gypsies and Tinkers view each other as quite distinct groupings.[20]

They shared many cultural aspects. They lived in bender tents (see disc 2, track 7), which they carried on “floats” (small carts), or they had caravans. They earned a precarious income by hawking and selling, sometimes bought goods like dishes and small articles, sometimes handcrafts like pegs and baskets. Sometimes they mended white metal pots and kettles, sometimes they were scrap metal dealers. And, of course, they earned money through music.

At the time of the First World War there were still Tinkers goin roon the country playing. They all went to markets and fairs, playin and sellin things, the Tinkers.[21]

Davie Stewart was a Tinker-Traveler, always independently paying his way in life by selling goods and performing, and always with a home, whether a bender cover and sticks loaded on a cart or a rented flat in a city. In contrast, Jimmy MacBeath was often a tramp and a beggar, sometimes without socks for his feet as he says (disc 1, track 4). Jimmy’s life on the road and in lodging houses often depended on the generosity of strangers. But Davie and Jimmy were united by their need to travel and to use their singing ability to their financial benefit.

THE RICHES OF NORTHEAST SONG

Alan Lomax's recordings of Scots song (as distinct from Gaelic song) are dominated by singers from Northeast Scotland, an area of mostly low-lying, fine farming land that has the grey granite city of Aberdeen at its heart, the rich North Sea before it, and the rocky, almost peopleless Highland massif at its back.

The land is rich in song. The pre-eminent authority on ballads, Francis J. Child (1825–1896) of Harvard, selected many Aberdeenshire versions as his “A texts.” Gavin Greig (1856–1914), the pioneering Northeast collector and commentator, worked with the Reverend James D. Duncan (1848–1917) to amass from singers and informants an astonishing 3,500 texts and 3,300 tunes

of “the older popular minstrelsy of the district.”[22] These include not only thrilling and highly informative multiple versions of “Child Ballads” as identified and codified by Francis J. Child, but also songs of farm work, of sea and army life, of love and longing, and much else.

The songs of farm labor, the “bothy ballads,”[23] are a distinctive creation of the Northeast. There are two types, those written by farm workers and telling in detail of the work and the character of the farmer, and the broader theatrical humor of the music-hall style compositions of professional entertainers. The creators of the bothy ballads were interested in narrative rather than in melody, and slightly varied versions of the same tunes are repeatedly employed, but the tunes used have vitality and sweetness too. —Linlithgow, West Lothian, Scotland, 2002

[1] Portraits series in the Alan Lomax Collection, Davie Stewart, Go On, Sing Another Song (Rounder 1833) and Jimmy MacBeath: Tramps and Hawkers (Rounder 1834).

[2] A bothy is a farm building — permanent living quarters for unmarried male farm workers.

[3] Hamish Henderson, Alias MacAlias.

[4] This fact seems only to have been documented in the Lomax 1957 recordings. Other biographical notes simply say that he was born in the Northeast.

[5] Davie Stewart interviewed by Carl MacDougall, Chapbook, vol. 2, no. 6.

[6] Davie Stewart interviewed by Carl MacDougall.

[7] Seasonal work harvesting fruit bushes. The richness of the folklore of Berryfields of Blair became fabled. Hamish Henderson wrote, “Recording in the berry fields was . . . like holding a tin-can under the Niagara Falls.”

[8] Communal areas behind six or eight flats, with excellent acoustics. The musician or singer would be rewarded with a thrown coin wrapped in a scrap of paper. See Jimmy’s account of the first piece of silver earned in Hawick (disc 1, track 8).

[9] Peter Hall, Notes for LP Jimmy MacBeath: Bound To Be a Row, Topic 12T303.

[10] Peter Hall, ibid.

[11] Publicly run accommodation for otherwise homeless men, the population a mixture of itinerant and long-term residents. Very basic standards, but “model” because better than “flophouses.”

[12] Raymond Anderson, The Evening Express (Aberdeen) 19 Jan 1972 — credit for other information

[13] Davie Stewart interviewed by Carl MacDougall.

[14] Hamish Henderson to Raymond Anderson, ibid.

[15] Alias MacAlias.

[16] Vic Smith reviewing a Greentrax re-release of an eponymous 1978 album of Davie Stewart in Musical Traditions, Nov. 3, 1999.

[17] Davie Stewart interviewed by Carl MacDougall, ibid.

[18] Alias MacAlias.

[19] For examples of cant in use, see disc 1, track 3, and the Davie Stewart Portrait album (Rounder 1833) in the Alan Lomax Collection.

[20] Alias MacAlias.

[21] Davie Stewart interviewed by Carl MacDougall, ibid.

[22] Seven volumes of the Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection have been published since 1980. The eighth and final volume is to appear in 2002.

[23] A bothy is a farm building, permanent living quarters for unmarried male farm workers.

Jeannie Robertson Page

The following information is taken from a Wikipedia entry, hence the underlining [which will take you to other Wikipedia entries].

It is not known where Jeannie Robertson was born but she did live at 90, Hilton Street in Aberdeen, where a plaque now commemorates her. Like many of the Scottish Travellers from Aberdeen, Glasgow and Ayrshire, she went to Blairgowrie to pick raspberries once a year. Hamish Henderson was born in Blairgowrie and tried to track down the best singers there. In 1953 he followed her reputation to her doorstep in Aberdeen. According to legend Jeannie was reluctant to let him in. She challenged him to tell her the opening line of Child ballad no 163, The Battle of Harlaw and he complied. In November of the same year she was staying in the London apartment of Alan Lomax. In preparation for a TV appearance, Jean Ritchie, Margaret Barry and Isla Cameron were also there. They swapped songs with each other, while the tape rolled. It is sometimes stated that she made the first recording of The Battle of Harlaw but this is not so. The first recording was made in 1936 by the Bothy Ballad singer, Willie Kemp (for the Beltona label) and it may be from this that she learnt the song. Another of the songs she sang was Andrew Lammie (Mill o' Tifty's Annie) lasting over 13 minutes. At the end she told Alan Lomax about the parts of the story that she had not sung. Many of the 1953 recordings were issued as "The Queen Among the Heather" in 1975. They later reappeared along with other songs on a CD of the same name.

The television program was The Ballad Hunters, directed by David Attenborough, who later became director of BBC2 television. In 1958 Hamish Henderson recorded her in Edinburgh. Those recordings were issued as "Up the Dee and Doon The Don" on the Lismor label. The Traditional Music and Song Association founded the Blairgowrie Festival in 1965, during the fruit picking. The first festival saw Jeannie, plus Jimmy MacBeath and other valuable source singers, who learned folk songs without the influence of radios or books. Her 1968 appearance there was issued as part of an anthology on the Topic label. As well as classic ballads, she sang bawdy songs such as "Never Wed an Old Man". Jeannie was awarded the MBE in 1968 and died on 13 March 1975. Jeannie's most celebrated song is "I'm a man you don't meet every day", otherwise known as "Jock Stewart". It has been recorded by Archie Fisher, The Dubliners, The McCalmans, The Tannahill Weavers and The Pogues. Variants are known from the USA in the 1880s and Australia in the 1850s. It was to the 1990s what "The Wild Rover" was to the 1960s in folk clubs.
Jeannie's daughter Lizzie Higgins issued an album in 1975 - "Up and Awa' wi' the Laverock". Stanley Robertson, a storyteller, ballad singer and piper from Aberdeen, was Jeannie's nephew. Carmen Higgins, ex-fiddler with the Aberdeen folk band "Rock Salt and Nails", is closely related to Jeannie as well. Carmen Higgins has played with Old Blind Dogs, recorded a solo CD, and has appeared regularly on television, radio and in the press.

For much more about Jeannie and her songs see 'Jeannie Robertson: Emergent Singer, Transformative Voice' by Porter and Gower.

For more information about Hamish Henderson's collecting work with Jeannie Robertson see Alias MacAlias and Timothy Neat's two volume biography of Henderson.

John Strachan

Born 1875 on the Aberdeenshire farm of Crichie near Fyvie and died in 1958 on the same farm. A wealthy farmer, he “took a kindly paternalistic interest in the welfare of his fee’d men,” and was a highly knowledgeable champion of the songs of farm life and old ballads. “John Strachan says he’s a farmer. Really he’s a poet, and chronicler—with all the best bits of Buchan stored in his head.” [Lomax, 1951 BBC Radio]

John Strachan’s Portrait CD on Rounder shows the richness of his versions of songs, which led the American collector James Madison Carpenter in 1930 to invite John to visit Harvard College, but to his regret John did not go. “I wis pretty busy, I’d a lot o’ farmin to do.” [Henderson, Alias MacAlias]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Strachan (1875 - 1958) was a Scottish farmer and singer of Bothy Ballads. He was born on a farm, Crichie, near St. Katherines in Aberdeenshire. His father had made his fortune by trading in horses, and had rented the farm. From 1886 John attended Robert Gordon's College as a boarder in Aberdeen. In 1888 he moved with his father to Craigies in Tarves. In 1895 he moved back to Crichie, which became his own farm in 1897. It was still rented, but he bought it in 1918. By 1939 he was successful enough to own five farms. He became president of the Turriff Agricultural Association. He died in Crichie.
John Strachan was a "tradition bearer". He was part of the last generation to sing traditional songs in bothies, along with Davie Stewart, Jimmie MacBeath and Willie Scott, though he never met them, as far we know. A dancing master visited the farms. The farm labourers would learn to dance the highland fling and sword dances, at that time performed in hard shoes. John was dismissive of the modern fashion to perform Highland dancing in soft shoes, or "Patent slippers" as he called them. He learned songs from his mother and from the servants on his father's farm. His social status was higher than almost all other recorded singers of ballads. He was refused entry to a fraternity called "The Horseman's Word", intended for farmservants who looked after horses. They claimed to be able to control horses through whispering special words in a horse's ear.
In 1930 the American collector James Madison Carpenter came from Harvard with a wax cylinder recorder. He reached Crichie about midnight. Strachan sang "Dark and Shallow Water" for Carpenter. Strachan had learned the song from Jimmy Smith. Later they both travelled over 50 miles to find him, only to discover that he had forgotten the song. Carpenter was sufficiently impressed by Strachan to invite him to return to the States with him, but he refused. In 1935 a radio program "The Farm Year" was broadcast live from Crichie. Using songs, stories and authentic sound effects such as bagpipes and revving cars, they dramatised farm work. John Strachan and another singer, Willie Kemp, took part. John Mearns sang "The Bonnie Lass o' Fyvie" on the broadcast.
Fyvie is about 3 miles from Crichie. On 16 July 1951, John Strachan sang the song for Alan Lomax who recorded it using a portable tape recorder. It is the earliest known recording of the song. Some of the recordings made that year were issued commercially on "Folk Songs of Britain" in 1960, but the fullest version was in 2002 on the album "Songs from Aberdeenshire". They are fine examples of Doric dialect (Scotland).
1. The Hairst o Rettie
2. The Miller of Straloch
3. Glenlogie [Child No 238]
4. The Beggar Man [Child No 279 Appendix]
5. Rhynie (with chorus)
6. The Merchant's Son (fragmentary. With introduction)
7. The Minister's Daughters They Were There [The Ball of Kirriemuir]
8. Fragments: Loch Leven Castle, Fin the Bed Began to Heat (Tail Toddle), Cuckoo's Nest. With commentary]
9. Binnorie, O Binnorie [The Twa Sisters][Child No 10]
10. The Knight and the Shepherd's Daughter [Child No 110]
11. The Stootest Man in the Forty Twa (with chorus)
12. Bonny Udny
13. The Bonny Lass O Fyvie
14. Clyde's Water [Child No 216]
15. The Laird O Drum [Child No 236]
16. Robin Hood [Child No 114]
17. Macpherson's Rant
18. The Guise O Tough
19. Johnnie O Braidislie (with chorus)
20. The Bogheid Crew
21. Harrowing Time
22. Where the Gadie Rins (with chorus)
23. Lang Johnnie More [Child No 251]
24. I Had Some Far Better Verses Than That [interview]
John Strachan had a repertoire of songs that had been passed down by word of mouth, probably in this same locality, for over 200 years. Bob Dylan recorded "Peggy O" on his first album in 1962. Simon and Garfunkel recorded it in 1964, as "Peggy-O" (The Bonny Lass O Fyvie) on the album "Wednesday Morning 3AM". The Corries recorded it in 1965. On the album, Strachan sings "Lang Johnnie More", 43 verses long, lasting almost 13 minutes, to the tune of "Caul Kail in Aberdeen". Just afterwords, he said "Noo it's too long that". In 1851, probably nobody would have thought it unusual to sing songs as long as that. Strachan must have known many bawdy songs but seemed reluctant to sing them. He gave us a fragment of "The Ball of Kirriemuir", also known as "Four and Twenty Virgins went up to Inverness". At the end he says "It's a terrible een".

Other Singers Page

Cedar Place Children, Aberdeen
When Alan Lomax visited Cedar Place, a mile north of Aberdeen City center, to record the well-known sweet-voiced bothy ballad6 singers John Mearns and his wife, Alice, he also recorded their son Jackie Mearns (age 10 at the time) and a group of his young friends who lived and played together in the street — Pat and Jennifer Cushnie; Jim and Willie Hunter; Jack and Kathleen Mearns; Norma and Tom Watt; and Arthur, Christopher, and Gwen Ronald,
who “lived round the corner.”

Jack Mearns has vivid memories of the day:
"Alan was unaccompanied on his visit to my parents’ flat in Cedar Place, a quiet cul-de-sac in Aberdeen. The children were recorded in the street outside my home and my parents were recorded within our home. . . . When Alan was trying to record us singing and skipping, someone always tripped on the rope. Alan then
arranged for two children to “Caw the Ropey” [turn the rope] while the remainder sang. . . . I saw that he had a guitar in his campervan. After all the recording was over, and in response to my constant pleading, my father eventually asked Alan if he would be willing to play for us. Alan immediately agreed and retrieved his guitar.
He sat down on the piano stool and started singing an up-tempo American country song. While he was singing he stamped loudly on the floor with his foot. My brother and I were mortified because, as we stayed in an upstairs flat, we were never allowed to make a noise with our feet. My father always reminded us that “It was Mrs Brown’s roof.” Our horror quickly changed to sheer delight to see that Alan was being allowed to do what we children were forbidden to do."

Willie Matheson

Willie was born in Ellon and spent his life in the North-East. He started collecting songs while still at school, "but told neither his father nor the dominie for fear of getting a thrashing". He told this to Hamish Henderson, who recored his repertoire in 1952, and wrote the following.

"The first traditional singer to record his entire repertoire for the School of Scottish Studies, [he was] a septuagenarian retired farm servant who had devoted much spare time hroughout his life to collecting songs. In his kist, which he transported from farm to farm when he got a new fee, were three large ledger books full to overflowing with songs of all kinds, from classic ballads through lyric love-songs to place-name rhymes and bairn songs. Willie had either collected songs on the spot from his fellow ploughhmen, or had diligently followed up his informants by correspondence. He had also tried his hand at versifying, and onme of the [poems he wrote down alongside ballads and bothy songs was a moving elegy for his dead wife. Willie Matheson was quite capable of discoursing knowledgeably about different 'weys' of a ballad, and he would often quote 'what Gavin thocht aboot it' - giving the great collector his first name, in familiar Scots style - but the ballads, especially the tragic love ballads, were closer to him (and 'truer') than they could possibly be to the mere scholar; when he referred to Barbara Allen's callous cruel to her luckless lover on his death-bed, he would shed tears." From Alias McAlias, Hamish Henderson

Jessie Murray

A fishwife living in the North-East port of Buckie, Jessie would have trudged from door to door, ‘a little lady’ dressed all in black wearing a black shawl, a basket of fish or shellfish on her back. She was a fisherman’s widow aged at least 70 in 1951, and died in the 1950s. “I always remember Jessie Murray, and she came forward and gave a little curtsey to the audience. And she sang ‘Skippin Barfit Through The Heather,’ and of course these were songs you had never heard, and clearly the whole audience had never heard either.” [Janie Buchan, Radio Scotland 1994]

Blanche Wood

“Brown-haired and bonny Blanche Wood. Hers was the clear bell-like voice one hears so often in the North.” [Lomax, 1957 BBC Radio] Blanche is a K-Nocker, of the small fishing village of Portknockie, five miles east of the port of Buckie. In 1951 she was 18, and in the ceilidh sang songs her aunt Jessie Murray had taught her. Blanche’s father was a fisherman, and named a new boat for her, The Girl Blanche, launched by Blanche herself at age 15. Blanche married Robert Allen, who sawed the keels for fishing boats, but by 1961 the boatyards had shut and they moved to Edinburgh, where they still live. Blanche and her sister formed a singing double act which toured working men’s clubs in Scotland and England, singing ‘more modern songs.’

PEOPLE WE NEED INFORMATION ABOUT

George Chalmers

Bob Cooney

Dave Dowman

Bill Finney

'Lordie' Hay

Archie Lennox, grandfather of singer Annie Lennox

Willie Mathieson

John Mearns and his wife

James Wiseman [of Portnockie?]

THE BELOW TEXT IS FROM AN EARLIER WEBSITE

I HEARD SCOTLAND SINGING WEBSITE

Alan Lomax collecting in Scotland in the 1950s

In 1951 acclaimed US folklorist Alan Lomax cut an astonishing swathe through traditional song and music areas of Scotland, from Barra to Aberdeen and from Portsoy to Edinburgh. The wonders and wealth of song he found and preserved for us are still being mined today. The singers he recorded in 1951 included John Strachan of Fyvie, Flora McNeil and Calum Johnston of Barra, JImmie MacBeath of Portsoy, Jessie Murray of Portknockie and many other fine singers from the Western Isles and the North-East. He recorded pipers PM Willie Ross and PM John Burgess, and accordionist Jimmy Shand.

Copies of these 1951 recordings are the first 20 hours of tapes of the archive of the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh University.

Later in the 1950s Lomax recorded not only songs but their life stories and some traditional tales from three of his best-known informants - Jeannie Robertson, Jimmy MacBeath and Davy Stewart. The US label Rounder has issued CDs from the Lomax Scottish recordings of each of the above, and various compilations [ http://www.culturalequity.org/ ] but most of his work has never been commercially available. The Kist O Riches website has thousands of hours of recordings from the School of Scottish Studies, but these omit their copies of the Lomax recordings.

His Scottish recordings can be sampled at [http://research.culturalequity.org/get-audio-ix.do?ix=session&id=SC51&idType=abbrev&sortBy=abc ]. On the pages of this website you can find help in locating recordings of particular singers, musicians and where they were recorded, biographical information about many of the informants and about the people who helped Alan Lomax collect.

One blazing highlight of 1951 was the 1951 Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh, organised by Hamish Henderson and featuring Flora MacNeil, Jimmie MacBeath and John Strachan. Lomax was there to record it. See this page for details.

This site is created and managed by writer and singer Ewan McVicar, as a small tribute to the massive achievements of Alan Lomax. Scotland's traditional song and music is much inhis debt.

Alan Lomax In Scotland page

'DUNKING THEIR HEELS IN THE CORN AND CUSTARD'
by Ewan McVicar

It is hard to explain to people who were not around then how important American Alan Lomax was to the Revival in Britain.
In Ewan MacColl's autobiography Journeyman he titles a chapter 'Enter Alan Lomax'.
In it he says, "Lomax is a folklorist, collector, cultural anthropologist and innovator and explorer of virtually unknown territories and a seminal force in the realm of ideas."
In an essay on 'Collecting in Ireland with Alan Lomax' in 1951 Robin Roberts says, "Later, there were those who complained that Alan had roared through Ireland like Attila the Hun ... had not spent enough time with the people to understand them properly and he did not speak Irish. ... Now, of course, the collection is cherished in Ireland. He could not have foreseen that he started something that would blossom into a revival of the music...."
The collection referred to is Volume II, Ireland, World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, issued on Columbia, and now reissued on Rounder Records, as part of a wildly ambitious and exciting project not just to reissue the old classic and massively influential records that Alan Lomax compiled and edited, but also to get out on CD as much as can be issued of his field recordings. The modest eventual target is over 150 CDs.
Alan Lomax started young, working with his father John Lomax, then with others. With a fascinating scholar called Mary Elizabeth Barnicle in 1935 he recorded in the Bahamas. A favourite of mine out of many now issued on Rounder is a CD called Deep River Of Song Bahamas 1935, beautiful chanteys (that's how they spell it) and anthems from Cat Isand and Andros Island (the home of king-of-them-all guitarist Joseph Spence who was then I suppose too young to record for Lomax). The album includes an electrifyingly different version of the anthem made internationally famous by the Incredible String Band I Bid You Goodnight.
Volume I of the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music was England, and Volume III was Scotland. Calum MacLean was Lomax's guide in the Highlands and Hebrides, and Hamish Henderson took him through the North-East. The introduction to Volume III says that Lomax "had originally intended to give Scotland a modest corner on the album entitled English Folk Songs". Hamish and Calum put him right. The range of the 43 Scottish tracks is astonishing - the Selkirk Town Band and citizens, Ewan MacColl, Flora MacNeill, pipes and waulking and milking and buttermaking songs.
The new issues of material Lomax recorded are under the banner of The Alan Lomax Collection, gathering together his "field recordings, world music compilations, and ballad operas".
One element is the Portrait series of "brilliant artists and heroes of traditional music".
The first two Portraits were of Scotland's treasure Jeannie Robertson, and Irish street singer extraordinary Margaret Barry. The recordings are of interviews as well as songs.
Only four of the 18 Jeannie Robertson tracks have been issued before. Jeannie talks about her mother's singing style and makes her own observations on some of the songs.
While these Portraits were greeted with delight, they nonetheless ran into some severe criticism, from song experts who know how to pick over the bones, about some aspects of the transcriptions and notes.
The most obvious problem area on the Jeannie Robertson album was the transcription of the Battle of Harlaw, in which several placenames are misunderstood.
"Did ye come aa the way" becomes "Did ye come o'er the Wye".
"It's there they met Sir James the Rose, wi him Sir John the Graeme" turns into "It's there they met Sir James O'Ross, who answered John the Grame". Not close enough for a dowt, let alone a cigar.
The recording shows another aspect of Lomax's approach. Rather than visit and do a pressured recording in the singer's home, he took Jeannie down to stay with him in London in 1953, and recorded her singing and talking over several days.
He did the same with Jimmy MacBeath and Davie Stewart, in 1957. Lomax however recorded John Strachan, Buchan farmer and repository of wonderful versions of ballads, in John's home in Critchie near Fyvie in 1951.
These latter recordings were made jointly with Hamish Henderson, and are among the many gems on the first 24 tapes in the sound archives of the School of Scottish Studies, copies of those Lomax recorded during his 1951 Scottish trip.
The critics who hammered the quality of the sleeve notes on Jeannie and on Margaret Barry also had a dig at Hamish Henderson, niggling as to why he gives in print two contradictory accounts of when and where he met Davie Stewart. In fact this is a problem created by whoever indexed Hamish's book Alias McAlias. In the index two different Davie Stewarts - one the singer, boxplayer and piper who lived in Dundee, another a younger piper from Perthshire way - are conflated [an unpleasant thing to do to any piper].
But these critical nitpickers did me personally a great favour.
Because they swung their hatchets so vigorously and comprehensively, when the next set of Portraits were on the production table, Portraits Series Editor Matthew Barton and Collection Producer Anna Lomax Chairetakis were casting around for someone Scottish to do the transcriptions and notes for the Portraits of Jimmy MacBeath, Davie Stewart and John Strachan. I was invited to undertake some of the work. Not the accounts of the singers though - these obituaries had already been written magnificently by Hamish Henderson, and included in Alias MacAlias.
I found myself the startled custodian of a dozen CDs of song, tunes and conversation. Not just of MacBeath, Strachan and Stewart but also such legendary names as John Mearns, Willie Mathieson, Blanche Wood, Jessie Murray, Lordy Hay, Jimmy Shand. Also on Lomax's tapes are a raft of songs from Ewan MacColl (listed under his original name, Jimmie Miller), and from Hamish Henderson himself.
The North-East material is of course problematical to transcribe, and some critic will complain that an Invernesian like me should not have been entrusted with the task.
In my notes on the songs I leaned heavily on the work done by the editors of The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection. Their comments on the texts of versions saved much time, and also helped with identifying 'standard texts'.
My transcription of the songs was made far more confident by checking them against transcripts made of some of the songs by staff of the School Of Scottish Studies archives.
Both Jimmy and Davie played fast and loose with the words of their songs. Davie in particular was hard to transcribe with complete confidence. As Hamish Henderson says, "His attitude to his text and his tune was highly fluid and improvisatory […] Davie also had the tendency to fill in partly remembered lines with meaningless syllables."
On occasion he could trip himself up in royal style.
He introduces The Laird of the Dainty Doonbyes, chases all round his accordion till he finds the tune, though he mislays it again on occasion, without ever losing spirit and energy. Then, when approaching the end of the song he pauses briefly, and seems to mix up lines from two very different songs, for instead of placing the castle keys into her hand Davie puts another of the laird's most personal possessions there instead.
The new releases will contain other material stronger than it was possible to include in the 1950s. Jimmy MacBeath tells of a sexual encounter with two 'very veracious' French girls during his soldiering days in the Gordons in WW1. John Strachan sings verses of the Ball of Kirriemuir, highly concerned lest his wife overhear. "Oh, if she kent that I sang you yon song, I couldn't stay wi you."
Jimmy tells of a time at Keith Show when he sang a startlingly basic version of John Anderson My Jo, and, "I was just ta'en up next morning. And I got fined five pound or sixty days." The fine was paid by a butcher fan of Jimmy's.
Jimmy MacBeath plays up his wild and woolly image of life on the road and street, and claims to have been chased through the streets and washing houses of Peterhead on another occasion for singing McCafferty in the Landgate. He says he got fined ten shillings. Lomax asks "What would happen to you if you sang it in the army?" Jimmy replies, "Ah, I'd get worse. I'd get shot."
The tapes were transcribed in the USA in the 1950s, in the Library of Congress and not by Lomax himself I should think. Here is where the odd misunderstandings occur.
Jimmy is asked about bothy songs. He replies, " The real name is bothy ballad songs … they originated frae the corn kist, I suppose, a lot of them when they were singing in the stables and duntin their heels against the corn kist, ye see." The US transcript has "it originated from the corn and custart … dunking their heels against a corn cest."
He also defeats the transcriber with a song "about the Rossy - For John had to bring me along, through rain and sleet and snow". You may have recognised that in search of Rothesay the singer "wandered though the Broomielaw, through wind and rain and sleet and snaw".
Of course the great strength of all three singers is in the fine and vigorous versions of Child ballads and bothy ballads they sing for Lomax. John Strachan's fine versions of ballads are widely respected, and he has appeared on various anthologies, but this will be the first disc of his singing to appear - there is / was a cassette of him issued by Peter Kennedy's label.
Jimmy gives a wonderful (and convincing this time) account of songs being made in front of the bothy fire, and the words being burnt into the wood of the mantlepiece with a red hot poker.
I also faced the problem of translating cant songs. I still cannot find out what the word stollage used by Davie in a song called Last Nicht Ah Wis In the Granzie means - probably something to do with food.
Jimmy sang the well-known cant song Hey Barra Gadgey Will Ye Jazzafree? for Lomax, but explained that the cant of 'the travelling class' is different from "the real Romany cant. You couldn't do the real Romany cant, because it's very very very difficult to understand."
The tapes solve a few problems. Even the experts say they don't know exactly where Davie Stewart was born. He told Lomax that Windmill Street in Peterhead had that honour.
Another album is a double CD of Jimmy and Davie talking. Jimmy tells of The Horseman's Grip and Word, and the life of the farm, Davie of adventures with carts and horses during his years in Ireland.
Another is of childrens songs. J T R Ritchie's two books of Edinburgh children's song, based on his collecting work with the children of Norton Park School, were reissued very recently by Mercat Press. He and some of his informants are there on Lomax's tapes, along with songs and rhymes from North-East kids.
And there is a selection from the incredible 1951 Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh, complete with the warm, incisive and instructive introductions of Hamish Henderson himself. He begins by saying, "The great thing about the Buchan songs, I think, is their fine rumbustuous qualities, and the first song that you're going to hear from Mr Strachan tonight is the Guise O Tough."
Sadly, John Strachan was not in his best voice that night, although that did not diminish the exhilarated enthusiasm of the audience. The ceilidh featured Jimmy MacBeath, Flora MacNeil of Barra, Pipe Major John Burgess, John Strachan, Calum Thomson, and Jessie Murray of Portnockie and her niece Blanche Wood.
Hamish says that Jessie Murray "was born at the very hour and minute, she tells me, of the Tay Bridge Disaster, so as she came over the Tay Bridge today she got a fleeting feeling she might not see the ceilidh."
Ewan MacColl was there that night. So was Norman Buchan, and he wrote often of the excitement of the occasion, and the thrill of hearing Jessie Murray sing Skipping Barfit Through The Heather.
The ceilidh was due to end at ten pm, but continued 'up the road in St Columba's Hall' at an additional charge of two shillings. The Rounder recordings will cost you a little more than that, but what price would be too much to hear such singers now?

Ewan McVicar , 2001

ACE Online Archive

This archive beggars my descriptive powers.

Lomax trawled the recorded wonders of the world, collected on tape and film astonishing performances in the USA, the Caribbean and various European countries, and kept his work safe. For an overview and introduction go to

http://www.culturalequity.org/

For copyright reasons you can only listen on line to a 30 second snatch of each track. It is a tasting session. What tastes!

For his work in Scotland begin with the below link and select a geographical area. I am not qualified to comment on the hours of wonderful Gaelic material recorded in the Hebrides, but elsewhere on this I Heard Scotland Singing website is somedetail to guide you about who and what he recorded outwiththe Highlands.

Link to the Alan Lomax Scottish material

http://research.culturalequity.org/get-audio-ix.do?ix=session&id=SC51&idType=abbrev&sortBy=abc

WHAT'S NOT THERE

Some of the material Lomax included on compilation albums, and copied for the School of Scottish Studies had in turn been copied by Lomax from others, particularly BBC Radio's Scottish archives. For example there are two wonderful tracks of Joe Cadona playing viruoso panpipes and drum, and several recordings of Edinburgh children singing street songs that are not in the ACE on line material.

Lomax’s Helpers page

In his 1950s notes for the Heather And Glen compilation Alan Lomax says that Calum Maclean and Hamish Henderson are "the two most active folk song collectors of present day Scotland".

Hamish Henderson

Perthshire-born, Edinburgh-based Hamish Henderson was a collector of song and story, a discoverer of many key tradition bearers, a poet, songwriter, and a towering figure in the Scottish folk revival. He was Alan Lomax’s guide and companion in Edinburgh and on his collecting trips in North-East Scotland. See below a link for a short account of him. Timothy Neat has written a two volume biography of him, and Henderson's own writings in Alias MacAlias are essential reading for anyone interested in Scottish folklore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamish_Henderson

The MacLeans of Raasay - Calum, Sorley Alistair MacLean

Calum Maclean became, along with Hamish Henderson, one of the first collectors for the School of Scottish Studies. See below a link to an excellent article about him and his work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calum_Maclean

William Montgomerie

"[Lomax] had the insight to choose as one of his 'team' William Montgomerie who had been recording songs and ballads since the early 1940s. Ballad scholar, poet, and ardent supporter of the Scots language, Montgomerie believed that the essence of language and culture is captured in childhood". Margaret Bennett & Hamish Henderson

North-East Singers page

Alan Lomax recorded many songs and stories from each of the well known singers detailed below - Jeannie Robertson, Davie Stewart, Jimmy MacBeath, John Strachan.

But he also recorded other singers in The North-East - John Mearns and his wife, Willie Matheson, Blanche Wood, Bob Cooney, Lordie Hay, James Wiseman, Archie Lennox, a group of Aberdeen schoolkchildren, George Chalmers, Dave Dowman and Bill Finney.

We have also created a separate website that goes into some more detail about Lomax's North-East recordings. Seehttp://lomaxinnescotland.webs.com/

Jack Mearns has vivid memories of the day:
Alan was unaccompanied on his visit to my parents’ flat in Cedar Place, a quiet cul-de-sac in Aberdeen. The children were recorded in the street outside my home and my parents were recorded within our home. . . . When Alan was trying to record us singing and skipping, someone always tripped on the rope. Alan then
arranged for two children to “Caw the Ropey” [turn the rope] while the remainder sang. . . . I saw that he had a guitar in his campervan. After all the recording was over, and in response to my constant pleading, my father eventually asked Alan if he would be willing to play for us. Alan immediately agreed and retrieved his guitar.
He sat down on the piano stool and started singing an up-tempo American country song. While he was singing he stamped loudly on the floor with his foot. My brother and I were mortified because, as we stayed in an upstairs flat, we were never allowed to make a noise with our feet. My father always reminded us that “It was Mrs Brown’s roof.” Our horror quickly changed to sheer delight to see that Alan was being allowed to do what we children were forbidden to do.

Jimmy MacBeath

Born in the Buchan fishing village of Portsoy 1895, died 1972. For most of his life Jimmy footslogged the roads of Scotland and beyond, earning pennies from street singing and shillings from casual labour, living in “model” public lodging houses.

Jimmy was much affected by the reception he got [at the 1951 Ceilidh], and at the end of the show he informed the audience that this was his ‘swan-song’, the culmination and the conclusion of his singing career: for reasons of ill-health and age he would never be able to sing at a similar function again. (He was to visit Edinburgh and sing at my ceilidhs for close on another twenty years.) [Hamish Henderson]

In the 1960s Jimmy began to be recorded commercially and to sing in folk clubs and festivals. Alan Lomax described Jimmy as “a quick-footed, sporty little character, with the gravel voice and the urbane assurance that would make him right at home on Skid Row anywhere in the world.” In November 1953 Lomax recorded several hours of Jimmy singing and talking. Much of this has been issued on the albums Jimmy MacBeath: Tramps & Hawkers [Rounder CD 1834] and Two Gentlemen Of The Road [Rounder CD 1793] with Davie Stewart.
Jimmy MacBeath was born in a thatched cottage on Church Street in the fishing village of Portsoy on the Banffshire coast, on August 30, 1894. He died in January 1972 in Tor-na-dee Hospital, Aberdeen, and was buried in Portsoy.
A newspaper article about him suggests he left home as a young man because he was unable to live with his mother’s strict house rules and her house-proud attitude, which saw Jimmy having to take off his shoes every time he went into the house. Listen, however, to how his voice softens when he talks of his mother’s singing (disc 2, track 2). Peter Hall has written:
He began work at the age of 13 at a farm a few miles inland at Deskford. For his six months feeing he got £4, payable at the end of the six months. He started to learn the store of bothy ballads that were to become his trademark. At school he [had] put by snippets of playground lore and at home listened to his mother singing old ballads like “Lord Randal” and broadside pieces like “The Butcher Boy.”
Jimmy left farm employment and began a life of casual employment and wandering. His use of time periods and place names in the varying accounts of his travels that he gave to Alan Lomax and others is often inconsistent, but his first long walk from Inverness to Perth (as detailed on disc 3, track 5) seems to have happened in about 1908. In the First World War Jimmy served in the Flanders trenches with the Gordon Highlanders and later in Ireland with the Royal Army Medical Corps. Then he returned to the road.
In turn he was dishwasher, fruit picker, kitchen porter; but in addition he had his songs. Developed first in the bothies and later under the tutelage of old timers like Aul Jock o Blyth and Geordie Stewart of Huntly, Jimmy’s compelling voice and style were soon to be heard in the streets of the larger Northeast towns, at the markets and fairs, around the countryside and in every welcoming pub and bar.
He travelled not just the roads of Scotland. He went through England to the Channel Islands, and later to Nova Scotia, where he found the French Canadian girls “too verocious, like they were hot in the blood.” Most of the time he lived in “model lodging houses,” doing casual work and singing for money at fairs and feeing markets where he would find an eager paying audience.
In 1951 Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson were collecting songs in Turriff, and veteran bothy singer “Lordy” Hay recommended they seek out Jimmy, who was based at the time in the North Lodge model lodging house in Elgin. An obituary article by Raymond Anderson gives a warm appreciation of Jimmy’s latter years.
Alan Lomax wanted Jimmy to go to Turriff with him, but the singer was very apprehensive about this, as the unappreciative police of that town had told him never to set foot in it again. But he decided to take a chance and was put up in one of the best rooms of Turriff’s best hotel — all at the expense of Columbia Records. The very next year he was off to London to record for the earliest folk series on television. Jimmy was now popular in folk clubs throughout Britain and he also sang abroad. But money never remained with him very long, it just slipped through his fingers.
This traveling minstrel sang in many unusual places — at wakes in Ireland and at silent movies in place of a piano. He is probably best known for a song he got from Geordie Stewart — “Come All Ye Tramps and Hawkers.”
. . . Ironically, towards the end of his life, Jimmy got more invitations to sing at clubs in England than in Scotland. In his late life bronchitis left him fighting for breath, but he could astonish people by bursting into “Come All Ye Tramps and Hawkers” moments after finding it difficult to breathe.
“The sight of a stage would work wonders with Jimmy,” said Hamish Henderson.
But if Jimmy ever played any of his records at the “model” lodging house, the other men soon told him to turn it off. Few of them liked his songs. There he was looked on as a lost character. Possibly even the last of the characters who used to be well known in the “model.”
Ewan McVicar recalls well how delighted and impressed the 1960 audience at the Glasgow Folk Club were with Jimmy’s singing, but more vividly how astonished and embarrassingly grateful Jimmy was to receive the sum of eight pounds, more than he had ever before earned from an evening’s performance.

Jessie Murray

Jeannie Robertson

The following information is taken from a Wikipedia entry, hence the underlining and partly bold type..

The television program was The Ballad Hunters, directed by David Attenborough, who later became director of BBC2 television. In 1958 Hamish Henderson recorded her in Edinburgh. Those recordings were issued as "Up the Dee and Doon The Don" on the Lismor label. The Traditional Music and Song Association founded the Blairgowrie Festival in 1965, during the fruit picking. The first festival saw Jeannie, plus Jimmy MacBeath and other valuable source singers, who learned folk songs without the influence of radios or books. Her 1968 appearance there was issued as part of an anthology on the Topic label. As well as classic ballads, she sang bawdy songs such as "Never Wed an Old Man". Jeannie was awarded the MBE in 1968 and died on 13 March 1975. Jeannie's most celebrated song is "I'm a man you don't meet every day", otherwise known as "Jock Stewart". It has been recorded byArchie Fisher, The Dubliners, The McCalmans, The Tannahill Weavers and The Pogues. Variants are known from the USA in the 1880s and Australia in the 1850s. It was to the 1990s what "The Wild Rover" was to the 1960s in folk clubs.

Jeannie's daughter Lizzie Higgins issued an album in 1975 - "Up and Awa' wi' the Laverock". Stanley Robertson, a storyteller, ballad singer and piper from Aberdeen, was Jeannie's nephew. Carmen Higgins, ex-fiddler with the Aberdeen folk band "Rock Salt and Nails", is closely related to Jeannie as well. Carmen Higgins has played with Old Blind Dogs, recorded a solo CD, and has appeared regularly on television, radio and in the press.

Davie Stewart
Davie Stewart was born in 1901 in Windmill Street, Peterhead, a major fishing port in northeast Scotland, to a Scottish Traveler family, the Stewarts of Buchan, Aberdeenshire. He died in October 1972 while on a visit to the Folk Club in St. Andrews.
Davie’s father and grandfather were both called Robert Stewart and were traveling tinsmiths and hawkers. His father “could sing, but he was mostly a piper.”
My father . . . took a fisher-hoose, like off the fishermen. . . . He used to gae awa herrin fishin wi the fishermen from Peterhead and Fraserburgh.
Davie attended schools in Aberdeen, New Blyth, and Fraserburgh. In spring and summer the family would take to the roads of the North. Davie began to earn money by singing for money when he was very young.
I was about six when I started getting fly for it, you see, and I went away mostly on my own, maybe going away for a week or a fortnight and my people always wondering where I went to. I’d go to other Travelers and live wi them. I went to school when I was four years old and I left it when I was nine. When I was nine year old I went away from home and sometimes I worked wi the farmers, and sometimes I was hawking; sometimes I sung and sometimes I begged. I used to go to the farm house door and sing a songie or twa, and the old woman would come out and gie me a piece and jelly [bread and jam] or a bowl of milk. Then the ploomen used tae take me down to the bothies and I used to sing in the bothies wi them, in fact, I learned a lot of songs off the ploughmen.
When Davie was 13 World War I started, and he was determined to enlist, as all his cousins were doing. He joined the Third Reserve Battalion, the Gordon Highlanders, and twice his father produced Davie's “birth lines” to prove he was underage, and “I got tooken back.” The third time, at age 15, Davie succeeded. He was wounded three times serving in France.
He had been taught by his father to play the Highland pipes when at home, at about age eight and too small to hold a full-sized instrument properly, so his father had bought a “half size” set for “aboot five bob.” Like his father had before him, Davie became a piper in the Gordons.
I was so thickheaded I couldn’t learn music, so I used to sit back and hear them playing and I would just pick it up.
When he came out of the army, age 21 or 22, he began to play “boxes” — first melodeon and then the accordion, in a style perhaps derived from pipes technique, with an approach to accompaniment on the bass buttons that was sometimes unusual, sometimes downright sketchy, and on occasion doggedly dissonant. He played at markets and fairs in Aberdeenshire, at farmhouse doors, and in bothies until 2 in the morning, when he would pick up more songs. Sometimes he earned money by hawking and tinkering, sometimes by seasonal farm work.
“Maybe I would work for a week or two or three at the hay at this farm, then maybe I did his turnips, then maybe I would come back for his potato picking. In between jobs I did busking to make up my living.”
For many years Davie traveled Ireland, where he made music, married, and raised a family. At last in 1950, family needs took him from the road.
We come back again to Blairgowrie, Scotland, for the berries. And I says to the wife, says I, “We’ll have to try and settle down.” She says, “Yes, we’re getting older now, and it doesn’t do to be runnin about like this, rearin family — getting proper schoolin.” So we went away to Dundee and got a house in Dundee.
In March 1962, Davie moved to live in Glasgow. Although commercial recordings of his singing were issued and he was invited to perform in folk clubs and was a favorite and feted guest at festivals, he could between times be met with busking for coppers along the “back courts” behind the massed three or four tenement flats that lined the canyon streets of the city.

John Strachan

John Strachan’s Portrait CD shows the richness of his versions of songs, which led the American collector James Madison Carpenter in 1930 to invite John to visit Harvard College, but to his regret John did not go. “I wis pretty busy, I’d a lot o’ farmin to do.” [Henderson,Alias MacAlias]

Blanche Wood

Gaelic & Lowland Singers

GAELTACHT RECORDINGS

This section needs much more knowledge than the website editor has. Any Gael like to contribute?

Alan Lomax recorded very extensively in the Hebrides - Balivanish, Daliburgh, Earsay, Garrygall, Onich, Skye, Iochdar, Snishval and Uig.

He recorded women waulking cloth, other work songs, wonderful solo singing of big songs from the young Flora MacNeill, the older Calum Johnston and his sister Annie of Barra, schoolchildren in Garrynamonie, and much more.

In her introduction to the Rounder album Women At Work In The Western Isles Margaret Bennett says "All the singers on this CD are women from the islands of South Uist, Benbecula, Barrra and Lewis and from Moidart on the mainland." The names include Kitty and Marietta MacLeod, Kate Nicholson, Mary MacNeil, Marrie Gillies, Annie Johnston, Catherine MacKellaig, Marion Galbraith, Catriona A MacMillan, Fanny MacIsaac, Effie Monk, Mary Morrison, Mrs Archie MacLeod, Mrs A J MacLellan, Penny Morrison, Mrs Sandy MacNeil and Mary Johnston.

Gaelic singers on the Rounder World Library of Folk & Primitve Music, Scotland, include Annie Nicholson, Rena Maclean, Kitty MacLeod, John MacLeod, John MacInnes, Kate Nicholson, Annie Johnston, Allan MacDonald, Calum Johnston, Fannie MacIsaac, Mary Morrison, Iain Murray, Penny Morrison and Flora MacNeill.

Garrynamonie schoolchildren, South Uist
Garrynamonie, now spelled Gearraidh Na Monadh, is a mile from the south coast of the Outer Hebridean island of South Uist, the birthplace of the Jacobite heroine Flora Macdonald. The school
was demolished in the late 1990s, but the schoolhouse is still in use. The confident “choir” singing of the children, and their strong Gaelic accents, lead to an initial suspicion that their four songs in standard English were taught to them in school, but closer listening identifies the unclear and illogical textual variations that are a hallmark of oral learning — from child to child. One of the singers, Annie McInnes nee MacLellan, explained that the songs were “action songs — that must have been brought into the islands during the war, when a lot of young people came in. We were Gaelic speakers, and we probably didn’t know what we were singing.” Kate MacPhee taught the choir and was an inspirational teacher, “A lovely person, she wrote plays in Gaelic.”
Three 1951 pupils at the school have been contacted, and none has a recollection of Lomax’s visit. The school might seem isolated and distant to city dwellers, but Lomax would have been one among
many visitors brought by Calum MacLean, whose brother was the poet Sorley MacLean.

LOWLAND RECORDINGS

Lomax recorded many songs from the singing of Hamish Henderson, and also from professional performers Ewan MacColl and Isla Cameron

In Glasgow Morris Blythman aka Thurso Berwick sang Lomax newSangs O The Stane. Enoch Kent and Josh MacRae also sang.

In Edinburgh schoolteacher and children's lore collector Docky Ritchie talked in detail about the songs and games he was collecting, and brought his prize informant Peggy MacGillveray along.

In 1953 Lomax made a special trip to Newtongrange to record coal miners' songs from Annie Cosgrove, Bob Holland and another unidentified singer. See the websitehttp://www.colliertracks.webs.com/ for details about these recordings.

Morris Blythman

Glasgow school teacher Morris Blythman sang for Lomax songs newly made by him about the Xmas 1950 lifting and return to Scotland of the Stone of Destiny. He wrote songs and poetry under the name Thurso Berwick. He wrote, organised others to write and sing, and published Scots political song. He was one of the three architects of the Scottish Folk Revival, and was also a considerable poet in Scots. His best known songs include ‘Coronation Coronach’ aka ‘The Scottish Breakaway’, ‘Sky High Joe’ and ‘Lucky Wee Prince Chairlie’, but through the Glasgow Song Guild he contributed to many other Holy Loch and Republican songs.

Peggie MacGillivray

Pupil at Norton Park School, Edinburgh Edinburgh-born Margaret Hunter MacGillivray, now
Margaret Currie, was 15 years old on July 12, 1951, when Alan Lomax recorded her. A wonderful
informant and performer, she is melodic and confident in performance and articulate and clear in her
accounts of how the songs were used.

Norton Park schoolchildren, Edinburgh
Included in Lomax's recordings are some of the songs (with the same texts and tunes) heard in the film The Singing Street, in all probability sung by substantially the same group of girls. James T. Ritchie noted that the female singers for the film were Peggy MacGillivray, Audrey Fraser, Harriet Sandison, Joan Grant, Hazel Agnew, Marjorie Lock, and Laura Gardner. (Boys called Williamson, Smith, Peffers, and Stewart also sang for the film but were not recorded by Lomax.)
However, the names of Christine Halloway, Mary Gray, and Emma Thomson are employed in the songs and perhaps they participated. All the singers on this disc are female, aged 12–15 years and were
recorded on an unknown date in 1951. The Norton Park School lay on the border between the city of Edinburgh and its port of Leith, next to the Easter Road football ground, home of the Hibernian Football Club. The building is considered of “architectural worth”, and has been converted for use by community groups. These songs would not have been learned at Norton Park, but at nearby primary schools, such as Ferrier St., which the informants attended between the ages of 5–11.

Dr James T. R. Ritchie (1908–98)
The major collector of the songs, games, and stories of Edinburgh schoolchildren, Dr. James “Docky”Ritchie was a much-loved and respected teacher and gifted communicator. His film, The Singing Street, with its astonishingly evocative 1951 scenes of Edinburgh children at play, was made with a group of colleagues, the Norton Park Group, a few months before Lomax interviewed him. The famous documentary filmmaker John Grierson called it “the best amateur film I ever saw.”12 Ritchie also produced several highly acclaimed radio programs and two books, which have been republished recently by Mercat Press.

Musicians Page

Musicians that Alan Lomax recorded

Lomax recorded three of Scotland's finest pipers - PM Willy Ross, PM John Burgess, PM John MacDonald. Ross talks of being taught to play by both his parents.

There are recordings of Hector MacAndrew playing fiddle, and of Jimmy Shand playing solo accordian and in a duo with Sidney Chalmers.

Poet Norman McCaig plays pibroch on fiddle.

Some Lomax tracks in the School of Scottish Studies archives were previously copied by him from BBC tapes.

For example, busker Joe Cadona playing wonderful panpipe and drum, Annie Shand Scott and her country dance band, Edinburgh children singing as they play in the street, and Willie Hunter of Shetland playing in a guitar & fiddle grouping.

A CULTURAL EXPLOSION
Alan Lomax was collecting in Edinburgh in August 1951, so he was able to preserve for Scotland the recording of a legendary concert, important because it alerted astonished city folk to the living continuing richness of Scotland's traditional song heritage. The 1951 Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh was a key event that heralded, generated and vitalised the Scottish Folk Revival of the 1960s.
Norman Buchan: As I went into the Oddfellows Hall the bloody place was packed, feet were going, and it was Jimmy MacBeath singing “The Gallant Forty-Twa.” Hamish had assembled these people. Jessie Murray sang “Skippin’ Barfit Through The Heather”; … Flora MacNeil was singing “The Silver Whistle [Có Sheinneas An Fhideag Airgid]” - beautiful! I’d never heard anything like this. John Strachan was singing about forty verses of a ballad… An amazing night for people who’d never heard them before! It swept me off my feet completely.
Hamish Henderson: What made this inaugural People’s Festival ceilidh so important was the fact that this was the first time such a masterly group of authentic traditional musicians and ballad-singers from rural Scotland had sung together to a city audience; the result was a veritable cultural explosion, for a number of the ‘folk’ virtuosi of the future were present in the audience.
Neil McCallum: The beauty of the evening was probably due to the fact that the Gaelic and Lallans singers were operating in the true folk tradition, singing music that was unscored and also, if I may use the word, untitivated. Though the ceilidh was public it remained intimate owing to the smallness of the hall.

ALAN LOMAX IN SCOTLAND IN 1951
Alan Lomax had come to Scotland in June 1951 expecting to “give Scotland a modest corner on the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music album titled English Folk Songs.” Lomax had already met and collected songs from singer, songwriter, actor and playwright Ewan MacColl. He and director Joan Littlewood were the “leading figures” of Theatre Workshop. MacColl had in turn met Hamish Henderson through Theatre Workshop’s visits to Edinburgh. MacColl alerted Henderson:
“There is a character wandering around this sceptred isle at the moment yclept Alan Lomax. He is a Texan and none the worse for that, he is also just about the most important name in American folksong circles.” MacColl asked Henderson to help with singers and songs, warning that “it would be fatal if the ‘folksy’ boys were to cash in.” Lomax and MacColl were co-operating in various ways. Indeed, they planned to write together a “ballad opera based on the folk music of Britain,” to be set “on Kendal Moor, near Manchester, during the Industrial Revolution.”
The astonishing harvest that Lomax garnered in Highland and Lowland Scotland in 1951 is still being distilled and bottled. He donated copies of the 25 hours of recordings to the University of Edinburgh, to become the cornerstone of the sound archives of the School of Scottish Studies. Henderson was his guide for much of the trip, and in 1951 Lomax wrote expressing appreciation:
I’ve been travelling the roads of the world, hitting the high places and low places, the rough and the smooth, for about twenty years, recording folksongs and ballads from all sorts of people, but I have never had such kind and warm-hearted treatment from anywhere as from the people of Scotland… It makes all kinds of difference when you’re a long way from home, to be treated like you were a member of the family.
Lomax recalled in a 1994 Radio Scotland McGregor’s Folk programme, “It was a fantastic experience, because instead of going along the road and talking about ballad theory, I went along the road and he sang every inch of the way.” Henderson’s comment was more barbed. “Lomax’s tape recorder was called a Magnecorder, and it was a colossal uncouth beast of a thing. It came in two huge halves. I found myself not really so much a guide as a coolie for him.”

1951 Ceilidh Performers

Mrs Budge

Attempts to identify or trace this Lowlands young woman, a friend of Hamish Henderson, have been fruitless. There are 26 Budges in the current Edinburgh telephone directory.

John Burgess

He lived in Easter Ross in Northern Scotland. “John D Burgess is a phenomenon in the world of piping. At the age of four he began to take an interest in playing… His rise was meteoric. From an infant prodigy he became the boy genius…” In 1950, in his first appearance aged 16, he won Gold Medals for his playing in piobaireachd competitions in Oban and Inverness, “An achievement never before dreamed of and never likely to be equalled.” [Seamus MacNeill, 1976 record sleeve]

“The main things that set Burgess apart from his peers are his stunning technique, and the brisk speed that he takes a lot of the tunes at, even to this day. A successful competitor … but mainly known as a 'showman' piper, a great player, but also a great storyteller and character.” [Dougie Pincock, by letter, 2002]

Hamish Henderson

Perthshire-born, Edinburgh-based Hamish Henderson, who was a collector of song and story, a discoverer of many key tradition bearers, a poet, songwriter, and towering figure in the Scottish folk revival was Alan Lomax’s guide and companion in Edinburgh and on his collecting trips in North-East Scotland.

Calum Johnston

Born 1891 on the Outer Hebridean isle of Barra, he worked as a draughtsman in Edinburgh, retired to Barra. He died suddenly in 1973 while piping the coffin of novelist Sir Compton Mackenzie to its grave in violent weather. Calum and his sister Annie “represented ... the cultured and educated Gaelic-speaking Highlander who could move in any society, but who has never forgotten or despised the Gaelic oral tradition which had been the ambience of his childhood.” [John Lorne Campbell]

Jimmy MacBeath

Flora MacNeil

Born on the isle of Barra at the southern end of the Outer Hebrides. When she moved to work in Edinburgh in 1947, “she was already a most accomplished traditional singer, with a repertoire more varied and more extensive than anyone else of her age.” Through her “own distinctive interpretations” and “highly assured technique” she became “one of the leading figures in the post-war revival of traditional Gaelic song.” [Dr John MacInnes] “It was in Edinburgh one June night in the house of Sorley MacLean, a poet, that Scotland really took hold of me. A blue-eyed girl from the Hebrides was singing.” This was Flora singing “Cairistiona.” [Lomax, 1957 BBC Radio]

Jessie Murray

John Strachan

Blanche Wood

Links & Recordings

For a good general account of Alan Lomax and his work use this link - Alan Lomax Wikipedia.

Two compilation LPs of Alan Lomax's collecting were issued in the 1950s:

'World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Volume III,Scotland', and 'Heather and Glen', recently issued on the cheapo EMBER CD label, ACRCD309.

The World Library album was reissued by US label Rounder.

They also issued 'Portrait' albums of Jeannie Robertson, John Strachan, Jimmie MacBeath and Davie Stewart,

and several compilation albums - a double CD of MacBeath and Stewart titled 'Two Gentlemen Of The Road', Scottish children's songs titled 'Singing In The Streets', women singing at work in the Western isles titled 'Gaelic Songs Of Scotland', and 'The 1951 People's Festival Ceilidh'.

Find out more at www.rounder.com

Alan Lomax Scottish material listing is here

http://research.culturalequity.org/get-audio-ix.do?ix=session&id=SC51&idType=abbrev&sortBy=abc

ALAN LOMAX IN NE SCOTLANDAbout Alan Lomax's 1951 collecting trip in the North East

Davie & Jimmy

Jimmy MacBeath

John Strachan

1951 Ceilidh Performers

Links & Recordings

ALAN LOMAX IN NE SCOTLAND
About Alan Lomax's 1951 collecting trip in the North East