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 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 individual persons while also documenting 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 included here 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.

Specially featured among the people of Scottish Traveller heritage whose voices are preserved here, often as recorded 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 are featured here too, 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. Another highlight is a sustained set of performances on accordion by the celebrated musician and composer Bobby MacLeod, also from Tobermory.

A focus of special interest is the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, where many interviews with residents were conducted in 1993 focusing on changes and continuities affecting the life of that region.

The Scottish Voices collection is intended as a complement to Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches, a much larger and more comprehensive web resource documenting Scotland's rich oral heritage, maintained through a partnership of the School of Scottish Studies of the University of Edinburgh, The National Trust for Scotland, and the BBC. Included in Tobar an Dualchais are several dozen recordings that were recorded by Professor Niles in 1986 but that are absent from Scottish Voices for the sake of avoiding duplication.

The original audio and video recordings from which the present selections are excerpted are housed in the Archive of Folk Culture of the American Folklife Center, the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Welcome to Scottish Voices! I hope you enjoy browsing the collection and making use of its contents as suits your aims and interests.

John D. Niles

April 2024

Professor John D. Niles was the Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin - Madison until his retirement in 2011. Niles had taught previously at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and, for two and a half decades, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also Professor Emeritus. He is the author or editor of some twenty books in his fields of expertise, among them Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition (1983); Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (1999); and most recently Webspinner: Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller (2022). Many of the songs and stories included in his book Webspinner are available for listening via Scottish Voices.

Acknowledgments

The fieldwork on which the Scottish Voices collection is based was sponsored in part by the University of California Research Expeditions Program, through which a number of volunteers assisted Professor Niles in his fieldwork in the summers of 1986, 1988, and 1993. Additional funding was provided by the Committee on Research of the University of California, Berkeley, while special help in the field was provided in 1986 by Niles’s project assistant Holly Tannen. The work of mastering and digitizing Niles’s original field recordings was undertaken first by the Sound Archives of the University of California, Berkeley, and later by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center. Among other members of that Center's staff, Jesse Henderson, Steven Dast, and Karen Rattunde have provided invaluable support and assistance. Kaitlin Fyfe, lecturer in film at Central Washington University, served as Niles's project assistant in the project's late stages.

Among the many individual people who have helped this project along through their personal backing or expertise are the late Dr. Alan Bruford, folklorist and longtime archivist at the University of Edinburgh; Dr. John Shaw of the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies of the University of Edinburgh; Dr. Thomas McKean, director of the Elphinstone Institute, Aberdeen; Dr. Ian Russell, past director of the Elphinstone Institute; Dr. Linda Williamson, Duncan Williamson's widow and his longtime collaborator in storytelling publications; Peter Shepheard, singer and musician and the owner of Springthyme Records, Fife; the late Dr. Sheila Douglas, singer and folklorist, Sheila's late husband Andrew Douglas; Margaret Bennett, Gaelic singer and folklorist; Peter Knapman of Bearsden, Glasgow, an expert in traditional Scottish dance music; Ann McKenzie, Georgia Satchell, Hugh and Elizabeth MacPhail, and the late Murray and Elizabeth Normand, all of the Isle of Mull, with their exceptional knowledge of that island's people and events; and individual staff members of the Mull Museum in Tobermory; the Iona Community of Iona and Glasgow; and the School of Scottish Studies Archive and Library, the University of Edinburgh. I am deeply indebted to them all.