INTRODUCTION

This site gathers together information from diverse sources on Scotland’s women singers and song makers, and Scottish songs that feature women. I have looked at the topic from differing angles, from the earliest lyrics up till 1960. Gaelic women songmakers, Scots ballads and songs and the ‘collectors’ who had them printed, Scots re-makers of traditional songs into art songs, the move from print to sound recordings, the Traveller singers, women in Scottish song lyrics and a strand of songs using the tune known as ‘For Aa That’, plus a postscript about women in the Folk Revival.

This website includes links to online recordings of ballads and songs, but mostly not by the singers and makers I have written about, and often the sung texts are different from the printed texts, because through the Folk Process songs were often learned orally and changed in transmission. Also I have for space reasons not given full texts of songs, only samples to offer a taste.

I have told in more detail about a few key figures – Gaelic collectors Frances Tolmie and Amy Murray, art song makers Grisell Baillie, Lady Nairne and Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser, Scots folk diva Jeannie Robertson, and maker of songs about work Mary Brooksbank.
Chan eil Gàidhlig agam [there is no Gaelic at me], so I have only shared here a little of the deep knowledge of Gaelic women about the riches of Scottish Gaelic song, the song makers and the collectors.

The term ‘collectors’ usually refers to the people, either amateur enthusiasts or professional academics, who have hoovered up songs from various singers, earlier in writing, later in sound recordings. In the 19th and early 20th Centuries they edited, commented on and published some of the songs they gathered. Later they made sound recordings of the singers and made these available in different academic formats. These kinds of collectors would refer to the singers who gave them the materials they wanted in such terms as ‘old women’, ‘informants’, ‘contributors’, ‘source singers’. Sometimes their sources had written down lyrics they wanted to retain, and then allowed the academics to work from and cream off from their manuscripts. In this book I want to give more status to the singers and manuscript makers, and use more respectful terminology.
Social collectors’ [Francis Tolmie, Amelia and Jane Harris] were and are women and men who learned and wrote down songs from people among whom they lived. Eventually some of them shared their song manuscripts with ‘editorial collectors’.
‘Editorial collectors’ [William Motherwell, Gavin Greig] gathered songs by finding singers, and turning some of their gatherings into book form, and the rest into archives held by university and other libraries.
‘Academic collectors’ [Jessie P Findlay, F J Child] had no direct contact with singers, but drew on the ‘editorial’ books and the work of ‘editorial collectors’ to create specialist articles and books on selected research themes.
‘Performer collectors’ [Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, Anne Lorne Gillies] gathered songs from singers and from publications, performed them and eventually compiled their own books.

Over centuries Scots-speaking women have also learned and preserved ballads and songs, and a succession of men from Sir Walter Scott in the Borders in the 1790s to Kenneth Goldstein in Buchan in 1960 have come calling on them, wanting to ‘collect’ and benefit from publishing what the women singers have generously shared with them. Scott’s term ‘Ballad Raids’ shows something of the effective appropriation and sense of acquired ownership by collectors of traditional material. First they made books, then tape recordings, and now online presentations. The earlier ‘editorial collectors’ shared with readers little or nothing about the singers except sometimes their names, in more recent times a little more was told, and eventually the ‘editorial collectors’ became more and more interested in the singers, their stories, their repertoires and lives.
Meanwhile some singers who sought more songs than those immediately socially around them mined the editorial publications and recordings to create their own store of songs and repertoire.

The themes of the songs sung and made by Scots women vary from those of men makers, preferring topics of love, courtship, seduction, abandonment, reconciliation, died for love or killed through jealousy. Almost half of the songs found in Aberdeenshire by Greig and Duncan in the early 20th Century were ballads and songs on such themes.

In this site I seldom give full texts of song, but selections to give flavour of language and approach. For Gaelic translations I give my source each time. For those who want to see more fine translations from Gaelic Dr Anne Lorne Gillies is the major source. One element I have not sought to include in the lyrics are the refrain lines that so often support the singer’s delivery in both Scots and Gaelic. The refrain turns passive listeners into active assistants in social gatherings or public performances, or in Gaelic waulking songs that support the hard communal work of shrinking tweed cloth.

Jessie P Findlay, author of the last book to focus strongly on Scots women songmakers, ‘The Spindle-Side Of Scottish Song’, puzzled over a characteristic element of many Scots and Gaelic songs. ‘In Scottish song, for example, one is sometimes startled and puzzled by a jingle of uncouth sounds occurring at the end of each stanza and known as the burden or owercome of the song. Extravagant though these sounds are, they yet possess a haunting property which it is difficult to define. Even when not a ‘jingle’ of vocables, songs often have a line which repeats exactly or very nearly at the close of each verse.’

In the ballads chapter and elsewhere I have not included those vocables, or repetitions in lyrics. Not have I followed the usual form of printing ballad verses as four short lines, but for reasons of space I have reduced each stanza to two lines.

The above women, and the singers of songs in these button links, are identified and told about in detail, later in the text.

They Sang Bonny

Scottish Women Singers & Songmakers, & Songs about Scots Women