THE 20th C FOLK SONG REVIVAL
CONTINUITY AND CHANGE, SONGS FOR CAMP AND CEILIDH

Before 1961 there was a continuity of singing in the Gaeltacht, within the Traveller community, and in Aberdeenshire there were bothy ballad singing events. But in the cities of Scotland traditional Scots and Gaelic songs were heard only in house and campfire ceilidhs and the very occasional concerts. There were very few recordings of traditional Gaelic and Scots song in the 1950s. Alan Lomax’s 1955 ‘Scottish Folk Songs’ LP was a dash around the country’s songs, and albums featured singers Isla Cameron and Isobel Sutherland. Field recordings by Alan Lomax, Hamish Henderson and others were squirreled away in the archive of Edinburgh University’s School Of Scottish Studies, only available to academic researchers and a chosen few young singers.
The first contemporary printed sources for song lyrics were slim volumes that marked the songs favoured in the 1950s ceilidhs held in Bo’ness, They booklets were edited and published by Morris Blythman in the guise of the Glasgow Song Guild – ‘The Rebels Ceilidh Song Book and Patriot Songs for Camp & Ceilidh’. They held lyrics in Scots and Gaelic. A later also highly influential volume of Scots songs was made by Norman Buchan in 1962, ‘101 Scottish Songs’. Buchan had been inspired by the 1951 Peoples Festival Ceilidh.
Songs made by the 19th Century entitled makars were taught in school music classes in the 1940s and 1950s alongside ballads of Highland warfare and bucolic English songs collected and greatly popularised by Cecil Sharp. Most of these have since faded from singers’ repertoires, replaced by new favourites from Folk Revival singers of the 1960s.
Popular Gaelic women singers included Flora McNeil, sisters Kitty and Marietta Macleod, Anne Lorne Gillies and Dolina MacLennan, then Karen Matheson, Julie Fowlis and Catherine-Ann McPhee.

Performing singers of Scots song included Jeannie Robertson and Belle and Sheila Stewart, joined by Jean Redpath, Alison McMorland,
Ray Fisher, Sheena Wellington and Christine Kydd.

Folk clubs opened, then festivals organised by the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland featuring singing and instrumental competitions. Some Revival singers, Karine Polwart and Nancy Nicolson, eventually became makers, drawing from tradition, then moving on to their own songmaking, and occasionally like Barbara Dickson going further into ‘popular music’