Traditional Folk Music & Song is a new series of posts on Folk Radio that will take a closer look at Folk and Traditional Music over the ages. As well as dipping into traditional folk songs from Britain, Ireland and further afield, it will also look at some of the key players alongside memorable events that shaped the future of folk music.
In the latest Folk Show (Episode 120), there is a lovely recording of the Scottish Traveller and traditional singer Belle Stewart (the mother of Sheila Stewart) singing The Overgate, taken from Topic Records’ ‘The Voice of the People’ series (Volume 20 – There is a Man Upon the Farm – Working Men & Women in Song). It was recorded by Fred Kent at Blairgowrie, Perthshire, in 1976, and it was this recording that started my spiral back in time…
This wasn’t the first time that Belle was recorded singing that song. In 1954 she was recorded by Peter Kennedy, aided by the legendary poet, songwriter, and folklorist Hamish Henderson on the chorus. Hamish was an exceptional person; you only need to read what the late Scottish traveller and tradition bearer Sheila Stewart had to say about the man in Timothy Neat’s biography to realise how much he was loved:
“There’ll never be another Hamish Henderson, he was the Beinn Coul, We’d been persecuted, ridiculed all our lives – we trusted nobody – then Hamish comes in and, after just a few weeks, we completely and utterly trusted him. He had no fear of us. He fed us with a great sense of worth and made us citizens of Scotland…”
It was this same man who, a few years prior, in 1951, presided over the first Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh at Oddfellow’s Hall, an event that some call ‘the big bang’ as it is considered to have kick-started the modern Scottish Folk Revival. Folklorist Alan Lomax was on hand to record this incredible festival ‘for the people, by the people’, but more on that in a moment.
In Eberhard Bort’s book on the festival, Tis Sixty Years Since, he outlines how it introduced an urban, Lowland Scots audience to a treasure of songs – preserved in rural parts of Scotland, mainly by the Travellers…He later adds:
In the same year, the School of Scottish Studies was founded at the University of Edinburgh, and the collecting of Alan Lomax, Calum Maclean and Hamish Henderson formed the corner stone of the School’s ever-enlarging archive of ballads, songs and stories. Sixty years later, most of the archive has gone online as part of Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches project. This project, part-funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, has seen 11,500 hours of recordings digitised, from the School of Scottish Studies, but also from the BBC and from the Canna Collection. The range is amazing – going back to a time over hundred years ago, when wax cylinders were the latest in recording technology, there are among the more than 15,000 recordings “bothy ballads, love songs, children’s rhymes, laments and songs composed by village poets along with fairy stories and tales of ghosts and kelpies.”
Of course, while this event may be regarded as the big bang, it wasn’t the beginning. As Bort states: There were tradition bearers and collectors before Jeannie Robertson and Hamish Henderson. In the 1930s, John Lorne Campbell (1906-1996) and Margaret Fay Shaw (1903-2004) carried their Ediphone around the Outer Hebrides, moving on to the Presto Disc recorder and Webster wire equipment, later to the Grundig Tape Recorder and a Phillips Portable Recorder, collecting way over 1500 songs and 350 folk tales from the people of the Southern Isles – the collection is still stored at Canna House.
“The national consciousness is stirring; if we act promptly and boldly, we can make the folk-song revival a powerful component part of the Scottish Renaissance.” Hamish Henderson
Ironically, Alan Lomax’s presence in Britain to carry out work relating to his ongoing 40-disc anthology of world music (for Colombia Records) meant he was well away from Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts – folk singers and their peers were prime targets. Sadly, it was this very mindset that he was escaping from that would eventually bring an end to the festival.
In 1952, the festival had to contend with accusations (apparently by two ladies on the festival committee) of Communist Party propaganda; Ewan MacColl’s The Travellers seemed to be the main focus. “The result was that in December 1952, the Scottish TUC placed the festival on its long list of proscribed organisations and withdrew its support for future festivals. Two weeks later the Scottish Labour Party declared that association with the festival was incompatible with membership of the Labour Party…” The 1953 festival went ahead, thanks to fundraising and well-wishers, but as Hamish Henderson said, “not long after the 1953 Festival there was an outbreak of ludicrous McCarthyism in the Labour Party itself, and the People’s Festival was banned.”
In September last year, following the 70th Anniversary of the Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh, the good folks behind the Lomax Digital Archive covered the festival in a lengthy podcast from which their notes state:
August 30, 2021, is the 70-year anniversary of the 1951 Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh, the seminal event that heralded and generated the Scottish Folk Revival of the 1960s. Alan Lomax was on hand to record it in the Oddfellows Hall, and thus able to preserve a document of a legendary concert that alerted the astonished urban audience to the continuing vitality of Scotland’s rich heritage of traditional song. People in the rich folk culture of the Gaelic-speaking West, or speaking the Doric accent of the North East, still held and sang their vibrant old ballads and songs of work, but the Central Belt city folk thought the songs entombed in old books. Until the Ceilidh.
This podcast presents the (near) entirety* of Alan Lomax’s recordings of the event. This audio is considerably inconsistent volume-wise, as quiet singers were typically received with thunderous applause (for which Lomax kept his finger on the fader of his recording machine). And it is presented here raw (unmastered), so headphone-users, be warned! The episode functions as an audio accompaniment to the Lomax Digital Archive’s new exhibit, curated by folklorist Ewan McVicar, which annotates the Ceilidh program song-by-song, and pairs more recent interpretations of those songs by revival singers in Scotland and further afield. We’re pleased to say that two new recordings have been provided exclusively for the exhibit, by the fine singers Christine Kidd and Alasdair Roberts (who is also a guitarist/composer extraordinaire).
*We omit the lengthy vote of thanks given in Gaelic by the Rev. Duncan. Also, note that some performances/commentaries were truncated by tape running out, and that Lomax missed recording the introductory piping by James Burgess.
You can read more about the anniversary of this event at the Culture Equity website here, where there are some great recordings and background on some of the singers present, including Jimmy McBeath, who had apparently told Hamish this would be his last performance…his swan song. It also explores some of the roots of these old songs and how they have been sensitively reinterpreted over time.
More soon.