Malcolm MacWatt – Skail
Independent – 2020
The title an old Scots word meaning to disperse, scatter and sail over water, this three-track EP, his third release this year, is the result of the Scottish singer-songwriter finding himself stuck in London lockdown and wishing he could be amid the open air and countryside of his native Morayshire.
While filling the hours in isolation by reading, he came across an article about the Appalachian Trail, which runs from Georgia up the east coast of America to Maine and which, following the identification of geological links going back millions of years, now includes the Scottish Highlands. Driven to explore the connections between Scottish emigration to the New World in the 18th Century, the result, on which he plays all instruments, was a meeting of traditional Scottish and Americana that he describes as Old Crow Medicine Show jamming with The Corries.
It kicks off with The Crofter and The Cherokee, a song that connects the Highland Clearances of the mid-to-late 18th century with the Trail of Tears, the forced relocations of some 60,000 Cherokee Nation from their ancestral homelands to the designated Indian Territory to the west of the Mississippi River. Sung in the voice of a Georgia native tracing his family’s hardships and roots along the Appalachian Trail and across to Scotland, it’s a slow and steady, blues and folk coloured number with the fiddle emblemising Scotland and banjo and resonator guitar representing America.
Picking up the pace with strummed acoustic guitar and a jaunty chorus, there’s a more traditional Scottish folk air to The Widow and The Cruel Sea which relates the story of a young woman who loses her fisherman husband at sea and, resolving to escape the constrained life of a Highland widow, marries her brother-in-law. Using “the gifts that God gave me to keep him sweet as a man can be”, she eventually embarks on a new life in Portland, albeit on that sees the death of her child.
The final number is the banjo dappled and bodhran beat Appalachian flavoured Old World Rules and Empire Takes. Set against the War of Independence and sung in the voice of a Highlander serving under the British flag, the song references the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina, where, led by Major Patrick Ferguson from Aberdeenshire, the loyalist militia was defeated by the settlers, many of whom would have been of Scottish descent, ending on the poignant image of the slain Ferguson, “Scottish blood in American clay”. A perfectly self-contained release that further underscores MacWatt’s skill as a storyteller as well as a musician, check it out on Bandcamp and work back through his other fine, country-infused releases on the site too.
https://www.malcolmmacwatt.com/