SINGERS AND COLLECTORS - MOVING FROM PRINT TO SOUND RECORDING

Sound recordings began to be made by visiting Americans. James Madison Carpenter in 1929-31 took a small Dictaphone machine all around Britain and recorded thousands of ballads, sea shanties and songs, sometimes giving more than basic information singers and their songs.

MRS WATSON GRAY OF FOCHABERS
Mrs Gray sang Carpenter unique versions of two now very well-known and widely sung ballads. ‘The Bonny Earl Of Moray’ and ‘Willie Mackintosh’. She had learned many ballads including ‘The Bonny Earl Of Moray’ when living in Glenlivet 50 years before. Both of her texts had extra verses telling more of their stories. Ian A Olsen comments that her ‘Bonny Earl’ extra verses tell that the Earl was slain in his bed, while historians state he was cut down outside a house besieged and set on fire by his enemy Huntly. Olsen points out that a detailed contemporary death portrait of Moray shows wounds that support his being killed in bed.
Mrs Gray got' Willie Mackintosh aka The Burnin O Auchendoun' from a relative living near the ruins of Auchindoun Castle. The ballad is widely sung by current traditional singers, their source being a recorded version by Ewan MacColl.

THE BONNY EARL OF MORAY
He’s ben an ben, an ben tae his bed, an wi a sharp rapier he stabbit him dead
The lady cam doon the stair, wringin her hands, ‘He’s slain the Earl O Moray, the flor o Scotland’
But Huntly lap on his horse, rade to the king. ‘Ye’re welcome hame, Huntly, an whaur hae ye been?’
‘Where hae ye been, an hoo hae ye sped?’ ‘I’ve killed the Earl of Moray dead in his bed’
There follow the usual five verses that begin Ye Hielans and ye Lowlans, whaur hae ye been?

WILLIE MACKINTOSH
Mrs Gray’s verses vary the text but follow the well-known narrative of ‘Willie Macintosh’ aka ‘The Burning Of Auchindoun’. Willie is asked where he is going, tells he goes to burn down Auchindoun Castle, is warned that Huntly will pursue and punish him, but the Castle burns. Mrs Gray’s extra verses then ask
O bonnie Willie Mackintosh, whaur hae ye left yer men
I left them in the Steplermunth tae feed the Cabrach swine
Macintosh was on a guid grey mare, she wantit half the tail
An he rade on tae Inverness wi nane ane bit himself
The Steplar Burn crossing is half-way between Auchindoun and The Cabrach glen, where Macintosh had first gathered his followers. Another version of the ballad says he left them in the Burn ‘sleepin in their shoon’. The verse about the Cabrach swine is said to have been sung by Cabrach women as they worked.

BELL DUNCAN OF FORGUE – ‘THE GREATEST BALLAD SINGER OF ALL TIME’
Carpenter wrote in detail about Bell Duncan [1849-1934] of Lambhill in the parish of Forgue. He gave her the above soubriquet and said she gave him 300 songs in 1929-30, including 65 Child ballads with tunes. Julia Bishop queries his figures, and suggests that Bell ‘knew over 200 songs and ballads’. [My account here draws heavily on Julia Bishop’s research, shared in her chapter about Bell in ‘Folk Song, Tradition, Revival and Re-Creation’].
When Carpenter first called on Bell in her ‘peasant’s cottage with its sway-backed stone roof, its smoking chimney winter and summer’ she was ‘busied about her noon-day meal – a kettle of golden turnips suspended by means of an iron crane over as glowing peat fire.’ She gave him ‘one dour look from her piercing blue eyes’ and turned back to the kettle. Luckily, her daughter with whom she lived persuaded her to see him.
Carpenter said ‘I wondered whether you knew any ballads.’
‘Weel, I might. I might know some.’ The next day Carpenter brought his typewriter and began typing ballad titles.
‘I’d said “Do you know so-and-so?” And she’d say "Aye." ‘Before I knew it I had three or four pages full of titles. And I thought to myself, "Well, this woman is certainly crazy."' He typed 400 seven-stanza pages, and got the tune for each.
Bishop says Bell ‘seems to have sung mainly in private domestic contexts, while working at the water mill, the spinning wheel and the loom’. Carpenter wrote that ’her songs were remarkably well balanced between comedy and tragedy. Yet despite her not inconsiderable repertoire of “high-kilted” ballads, she was true to Anglo-Saxon tradition in preferring the tragic ending’.

BINNORIE
There wis twa sisters lived in a boor, Binnorie aye, oh Binnorie
And the youngest was the fairest floor, she’s the bonnie Mullart’s lass o Binnorie
He’s courted the eldest wi ribbons and rings, but he courted the youngest wi far better things
Oh dear sister, we may tak a walk, tae hear the blackbirds whistle oer their notes
*There wis nane ane kent her by her yellow hair, bit the mullart laddie kent her by the ring that he gae her
Mony an ane wis there at her oot-takin, but the bonnie mullart laddie dee’t at her green grave makin

ALAN LOMAX ROARS ROUND SCOTLAND
The USA’s best known folklore collector Alan Lomax lived and recorded in Britain from 1951 to 1957. He would at times contradict himself in his vivid accounts of meeting and recording singers in the radio programmes he made for the BBC. Twenty hours of his 1951 recordings of Gaelic and Scots song became the foundation of the School of Scottish Studies sound archives, and were followed by thousands of hours of taped song, story, tune and biographical information by many collectors, pre-eminently Hamish Henderson, who had been Lomax’s guide and tape recorder carrier.
Many of the songs Lomax recorded were functional to accompany women working, and eminent Gaelic scholar, researcher and singer Margaret Bennett edited together a CD of some of these recordings, ‘Gaelic Songs Of Scotland, Women at Work In the Western Isles’. Waulking songs to support a team beating the woven tweed cloth to shrink it, spinning and weaving and milking songs, and tending the cattle at the summer shielings. A highlight of Lomax’s1951 collecting from women was in the Gaeltacht when he heard the full-throated vigour of waulking songs. A young David Attenborough made his first TV series about Lomax’s 1951 work. Lomax brought a group of island women to London by plane to sing, spending the whole series travel budget on one programme.
A seminal event recorded by Lomax in 1951 was the first Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh, when Gaels and Scots singers amazed the urban audience who had not known about the vigorous survival of traditional song in the Hebrides and the North East. The women singers were Gael Flora MacNeil of Barra, ballad singer Jessie Murray of Portnockie, and Jessie’s young niece Blanche Wood.
Flora MacNeil ‘was already a most accomplished traditional singer, with a repertoire more varied and more extensive than anyone else of her age. She became “one of the leading figures in the post-war revival of traditional Gaelic song”. [Dr John MacInnes]

Mo Gun Geal Og (My Fair Young Love]
You took from me everything I had in a war on your behalf / It is not cattle or sheep that I mourn but my spouse / since the day I was left alone, with nothing in the world but my shift.
Co Siod Thall Air Sraid No H-Rala? (Who is that yonder on the swan’s road?)
Who is that yonder on the swan’s road? / It is they, Clan MacNeil of Barra / What, my dear, is on your minds? / Looking for more land. My! If I were dividing the land / Rum, Eigg and Canna would be yours / Muck for your stallions / Colonsay for your white sheep.

Jessie Murray recorded fine versions of old ballads for Lomax and Henderson. A fishwife who trudged from door to door with a basket of fish or shellfish, she was not known as a singer in her native Portnockie. The 1951 Ceilidh was only public performance she ever gave.
As I wis waukin doon yon hill, It was on a summer evening
It was there I spied a bonny lass skippin barfit throu the heather
Eh, bit she was neatly dressed, she neither needed hat nor feather
She was the queen amang them aa, skippin barfit throu the heather
In Scotland I was born and bred, in Scotland I was dwellin
I fell in love with a pretty fair maid, and her name was Barbara Alleen
I courted her for seven long year till I could coort no longer
I fell seek and very seek and ah sent for Barbara Allen

18 year old Blanche Wood sang songs of place her aunt had taught her. Blanche and her sister later formed a singing act that toured working men’s clubs in Scotland and England, singing ‘more modern songs’.
O lang may every K-nocker here, an ivery wan abroad, live tae see the Sanny Hole an clim the auld Reid Road
Tae walk aroon the Tronachs an tae dook in Bogan’s Pot, tae live an dee amang the braes o Green Castle port

I’m a young bonny lassie, though my fortune’s been bad, since I fell in love with a young sailor lad
I’ve been courted too early, by night and by day, but the lad I loe dearly has gone far away

Later in the 1950s Lomax also recorded some hours of traveller singer Jeannie Robertson, but mostly as interview – including a lengthy reading of his own future in cards.