Scottish voices

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Summary

Scotland is famed for its striking physical beauty and its turbulent history of human habitation. It is also a land whose people have long excelled in the arts of traditional singing and storytelli...

Scotland is famed for its striking physical beauty and its turbulent history of human habitation. It is also a land whose people have long excelled in the arts of traditional singing and storytelling, as well as in various forms of instrumental music. The Scottish Voices Collection seeks to preserve these voices for future generations. The collection derives chiefly from fieldwork undertaken in the 1980s and early 1990s by Professor John D. Niles while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. The collection includes over 200 audio selections and over 50 video selections documenting the art of traditional singers, storytellers and musicians. In addition, over 350 photographs provide images of singers, storytellers, musicians, and speakers, as well as of regional festivals, local Highland Games, landscapes, wildlife, townscapes, and rural settlement patterns, thus casting light on the larger cultural ecology within which Scottish vernacular art forms have flourished. Most of the recordings comprised in the Collection document the oral traditions of Scottish Travellers: members of an ethnic minority who, like the Romani of other parts of the Eurasian continent, have traditionally pursued a semi-nomadic way of life at the fringes of settled society, often despised or persecuted yet still the possessors of a treasure-trove of stories and songs that have helped them maintain their cultural identity over time.

Among the individual people of Scottish Traveller heritage whose voices are featured here, often in intimate domestic settings, is Duncan Williamson of Argyll and Fife, viewed by many as the finest storyteller of his generation. Among other featured singers or storytellers are Betsy Whyte of Angus and Perthshire, author of the pair of much-loved memoirs The Yellow on the Broom and Red Rowans and Wild Honey; Stanley Robertson of Aberdeen, a brilliant tradition-bearer and the author of several books of stories told in his colorful Traveller idiom; Lizzie Higgins, arguably the most outstanding vocalist of her generation in the Scots language tradition; Elizabeth Stewart of Aberdeenshire, a singer and instrumentalist with a vast repertory of songs from the North East of Scotland; Jane Turriff, an outstanding representative of the domestic singing traditions of Aberdeenshire; and Belle Stewart, matriarch of the celebrated Perthshire family of singers, storytellers, and pipers known as the Stewarts of Blair. The voices of non-Travellers too are featured here, among them Charlie Lamb of Dundee, a stellar singer of songs composed in his Scots regional dialect; Adam McNaughtan of Glasgow, one of Scotland's leading singer-songwriters and a major figure on the Folk Revival scene; and Angus Henderson, a bilingual English- and Gaelic-speaking raconteur who for many years worked as a blacksmith in the town of Tobermory, on the Isle of Mull. Filling out the collection are recordings of skilled musicians performing pieces on fiddle, accordion, bagpipes, clarsach, hammered dulcimer, harmonica, tin whistle, and Jew's harp. Among these is the stellar accordionist Calum MacLean of the town of Tobermory, Mull, where many interviews were conducted focusing on changes and continuities affecting life in the Inner Hebrides.

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