MAJOR SCOTS WOMEN ART SONG MAKERS

LADY [later BARONESS] CAROLINE NAIRNE (1766-1845)
A prolific and very popular maker, Nairne took a tight grip of many traditional songs and squeezed them to make watered down pious versions of older songs, Jacobite lyrics and more. She took her hint from Robert Burns, when in 1787 she ‘remarked the successful efforts of the Ayrshire poet in adapting new words to tunes which had been linked to verses degrading and impure’. [Rogers]
Like her predecessor titled lady lyricists, Lady Nairne chose anonymity, and when having to acknowledge her work she signed as B.B. – Mrs Bogan of Bogan. She presented this persona of a dumpy countrywoman when she called on her music publisher, Robert Purdie of Edinburgh, who with R A Smith published six octavo volumes of the Scottish Minstrel. In the 1824 last volume the editors commented on her ‘delicacy which shrinks from all observation’. Smith inserted Burns’ ‘Willie Brewed A Peck Of Malt’, into the ‘Minstrel’. Mrs Bogan protested at this unsuitable celebration of alcohol and other ’sheer abominations’ of Burns. Her own lyrics savoured more of watered-down milk. Where Burns used the old marching tune played by the Scottish soldiers of Joan or Arc to celebrate the victory of Bannockburn, Lady Nairne used the tune lugubriously for her thoroughly depressing best known song, ‘The Land O The Leal’.

THE LAND 0’ THE LEAL
I’m westin’ awa’, John, like snaw-wreaths in thaw, John
I’m wearin’ awa to the land o’ the leal
There’s nae sorrow there, John, there’s neither cauld nor care, John
The day is aye fair in the land o’ the leal
Our bonnie bairn’s there, John. She was baith gude and fair, John
And oh we grudged her sair to the land o’ the leal

One or two of her Jacobite lyrics have more spirit, reflecting the staunch support of her family for the ousted Stuarts. She had been born in the Auld House at Gask in Perthshire, where Prince Charlie had stayed on his flight from Culloden field, and where the white Stuart rose is still cultivated.

WILL YE NO COME BACK AGAIN?
Bonnie Charlie’s noo awa’, safely ower the friendly main
Many a heart will break in twa, should he ne er come back again
Will ye no come back again. will ye no come back again
Better lo’ed ye canna be, will ye no come back again

CHARLIE IS MY DARLING
T’was on a Monday morning right early in the year
When Charlie came to our toon, the young Chevalier
Oh, Charlie is my darling, my darling, my darling
Charlie is my darling, the young Chevalier
As he came marching up the street the pipes played loud and clear
And aa the folk came running out to meet the Chevalier

Her ‘Laird Of Cockpen’was a specific rescue of the tune from a most indelicate little song.

THE LAIRD O ’ COCKPEN
The Laird o’ Cockpen he’s proud and he’s great, his mind is ta’en up wi’ the things o’ the State
He wanted a wife his braw hoose to keep, but favour wi’ wooin’ was fashious to seek
Doon by the dyke-side a lady did dwell, at his table-head he thought she’d look well
M‘Clish’s ae dochter o’ Clavers ha’-Lee, a penniless lass wi’ a lang pedigree
He powders his wig, puts on fine clothes, ring and sword and cocked hat – who could refuse him? Four verses later he leaves sighing, but in two more verses that were later tacked on she takes him, and the last two lines contain a neat joke –she ‘sits in the ha’ like a weel-tappit hen but as there’s nae chickens appeared at Cockpen’.
The original small song she guts would fit chronologically after the marriage.
O when she come ben she bobbit fu law, o when she come ben she bobbit fu law
O when she come ben she kissed Cockpen, and syne she denied she did it at aa
And was na Cockpen right saucy withaa, and was na Cockpen right saucy withaa
In leavin the dochter o a lord and kissin a collier lassie an aa

HUNTINGOWER
Mrs Bogan emasculated another fine old ballad. The original begins
When ye gang awa’ Jamie, far across the sea, laddie;
When ye gang to Germany, what will ye send to me, laddie?
The rather obnoxious soldier makes promises, then tests the girl by lying that he has a wife and three bairns. When he tells the truth she dries her tears then says she is not good enough for him because she is poor, but he tells her he is rich, so that’s all right. Lady Nairne strips out all this narrative, leaving only some lovers’ chit-chat.
However, the songmaker redeemed herself somewhat with the fine lyric she made to an air by fiddler Neil Gow that incorporates the peel of the bells
of St Andrew’s church in Edinburgh, and tells of the fishwives of Newhaven selling the catch made by their fisher husbands.

CALLER HERRIN
Wha’ll buy my caller herrin’, they’re bonnie fish and halesome farin’
Wha’ll buy my caller herrin’ new drawn frae the Forth
When ye were sleepin’ on your pillows, dreamed ye aught o’ our puir fellows
Darkling as they faced the billows, aa to fill the woven willows?
Buy my caller herrin’ new drawn frae the Forth

LADY JOHN SCOTT (1810-1900)
The title ‘Thirty Songs by Lady John Scott’ (1910, Edinburgh) shows a vigorous maker of lyrics and tunes for them, yet she is only remembered for heavily reworking a traditional song, and for finding a very interesting Jacobite version of an internationally known Scots lyric on an Edinburgh street.
Born Alicia Anne Spottiswoode of Spottiswoode, near Lauder in the Borders, Margaret Warrender says she was ‘Jacobite to the backbone’, with a grandfather who was out with Prince Charles Stuart.
‘She was slight and graceful, her small head was beautifully set on her long neck’, her skin ‘kept its peach-like bloom and soft pink colouring’. Warrender tells us much more about her appearance, character and social skills, but at last turns to music. Lady John played harp and sang well. ‘She was always making tunes, or recalling the old ones’ that were told to her in the cottages around her home.
She found a 16 line text for ‘Annie Laurie’ in Alan Cunningham’s 1825 ‘Songs Of Scotland’, and said she ‘left the first verse almost as she found it, altered the second, and wrote the third, and composed the air’. Her third verse is highflown.
Like dew on the gowan lying in the fa o her fairy feet, an like winds in summer sighing, her voice is low and sweet
Her voice is low and sweet, she’s aa the world to me, and for bonny Annie Laurie I’d lay me doon and dee
She had created her ‘Annie Laurie’ tune first for ‘an absurd ballad originally Norwegian, I believe, called ‘Kempie Kaye’. I took a fancy to the words of "Annie Laurie" and thought they would go well to the tune’. She changed the lyric ‘only for my own amusement’ but others heard her sing it. ‘I accordingly wrote it down for them’.
In ‘Vagabond Songs And Ballads’ Robert Ford prints the well-known three verses of ‘Loch Lomond’, ‘which has recently enjoyed a vogue in the highest circles’, and recounts the belief that this is a fragment of an old ballad that says the ‘low road’ was the journey to his grave in his home land of a ghostly young man who had been hanged at Carlisle for the 1745 Jacobite cause.
Ford then gives seven verses ‘picked up’ by Lady Scott from an street singer in Edinburgh city. The lyric is a conversation with a ‘bonny May’ who has dreamed that her beloved’s ‘heart’s bluid was red on the heather’. The last two verses are
Oh, he’ll gang the hie road an I’ll gang the low, but I’ll be in Heaven afore him
For my bed is prepared in the mossy graveyard, mang the hazels o green Inverarnan
The thistle shall bloom, an the King hae his ain, an fond lovers meet in the gloaming
An I an my true love will yet meet again far abune the bonnie banks o Loch Lomond
Her other songs vary in topic. Lament, dirge, pleasure for ‘The Comin O The Spring’, and sadness recalling ‘When We First Rade Doon Ettrick’. She set tunes to Robert Herrick’s ‘Her Eyes The Glow-worm Lend Thee’ and to ‘Sir Bertram, A Liddesdale Ballad’. As usual for the time her songs were published anonymously.

MARY MACPHERSON
Big Mary MacPherson of the Songs
The most honoured woman maker of Gaelic songs, Mairi Mhor ‘nan Oran’, Big Mary McPherson ‘Of The Songs’, Mary [1828-1898] was a laundress, who made Gaelic songs of strife and life. GilIies quotes John MacInnes about Mairi’s ‘abundant emotional vitality’ her ‘intense, passionate affection for her native Skye’ and ‘the poetry she began writing in her fifties, with its ‘sharp feel of immediate experience while at the same time conveying the pressure of contemporary events’.
Gillies says that during the 1880s campaign to oppose oppressive landlordism in the West and the Isles, Mairi was ‘one of the most powerful propaganda weapons the crafting movement had’. It was only after her husband’s early death in 1871, leaving her with four children to support, that ‘she suddenly broke out in song’ when sorrow and anger at ‘certain miscarriages of justice in her own case roused her Highland spirit to frenzy point’. Mairi had been imprisoned in Inverness for 42 days , charged with the theft of clothing from the English army captain’s wife she was nursing.
Freed, she went to Glasgow, trained as a nurse and gaining a diploma in obstetrics, and made frequent trips back to Skye to recite or sing her compositions at crofters’ gatherings, supporting and fuelling the political victories of crofter candidates. Though she never learned to write, she dictated eight or nine thousand lines of poetry and song for publication in 1891. She is said to have taken another woman along with her when travelling to make tunes for her lyrics.

NUAIR BHA MI OG [When I Was Young]
Early I wakened with little sorrow on a May morning in Ose. The cattle were lowing as they gathered and the sun rising on Leac-an-Storr. The rays
ere beaming on the flanks of the mountains, covering over night’s gloom hastily, and up above me the lively lark sang, reminding me of when I was
young.
From Celtic Lyrics Corner

MARJORIE KENNEDY-FRASER (1857-1930) [AS AN ART SONG MAKER]
Scot Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser controversially turned traditional Gaelic songs into Anglicised art songs. She was a very influential singer, music teacher, composer, ‘performer collector’ and arranger of Gaelic songs. Her reputation has been severely challenged in more recent years. Her family, led by her father David Kennedy, were all performers, touring throughout the British Empire, with Margaret his accompanist from the age of twelve.
She eventually settled in Edinburgh where she taught amongst others Ethel Bassin, who said ‘My contemporaries were immensely stimulated by her and her teaching’. After collecting Gaelic songs in Barra [see my account of her as a collector] she began performing ‘a few well-known [Gaelic] songs and choruses’, asked others for translations, and when she could not get them she was obliged to write ‘English words of her own’ and perform them with piano accompaniment to non-Gael concert-goers, often inflating and adding to the original tunes and dramatizing her performance.
Eventually she collaborated with Gaelic scholar Rev. Kenneth MacLeod who translated lyrics to English and they made stilted ‘Celtic Twilight’ translations that became internationally popular.
She received much praise for her efforts, including in 1930 an award from An Comunn Gaidhealach. She was more recently criticised heavily by Gaels for having both changed the songs she collected, and then profited from singing and publishing them. Anne Lorne Gillies is kinder and more generous than some Gaels about Kennedy-Fraser, ‘Her collection “Songs of the Hebrides” is a curate’s egg in which the authentic is infuriatingly difficult to disentangle from the romanticised ramblings and re-inventings’.
Dr Gillies also gives the waulking song ‘Beinn a’Cheathaich – The Misty Mountain’, which Kennedy-Fraser turned into an overly-dramatic favourite song of the Folk Song revival. Gillies says, ‘Her version of this song, is called ‘Kishmul’s Galley’ – a ponderous barque, operatic in range and romantic in concept, bearing only the most tenuous similarity to the dancing birlinn of ‘Beinn a’Cheathaich’

BEINN A CHEATHAICH
I saw a wonderful sight, the Clan MacNeill’s ship passed by, away from MacLean country towards joyful Kisimul where the feasting takes place, drinking wine from night today. The piping of the tall lovely drone, the sweet harp being tuned alongside, russet silk being worn by the ladies.
From Celtic Lyrics Corner

KISHMUL’S GALLEY
High on the Ben a Heeah on a day of days,
Seaward I gazed, watching Kishmul’s galley sailing
Bravely gainst wind and tide they brought her to
Neath Kishmul’s walls, Kishmul’s castle of ancient glory.
Here’s red wine, And feast for heroes, and harping too
Gillies adds, ‘But Mrs Kennedy-Fraser cannot be allowed to shoulder all the blame for her ‘Hebridean’ songs’, which she suggests should be renamed ‘Songs of the Hybrides’. ‘She was after all being advised by the Revd. Kenneth Macleod – her translator and annotator - a Gaelic-speaking man from the Island of Eigg who should have known better’.
An art-song version of ‘Gradh geal mo chridh – Fair love of my heart’ was created by Kennedy-Fraser as the very popular ‘An Eriskay Love Song’. Her ‘version changes the music considerably and the sentiments almost beyond recognition’. This and other songs made by her, e.g. ‘The Cockle Gatherer’ and ‘I Left My Baby Lying here’, were taught in school music classes throughout Britain.
In various volumes of ‘Songs Of The Hebrides’ from 1909 on are 212 songs with piano accompaniment, and 120 unaccompanied tunes, some with words, in her introductions. 26 of the items originated with Frances Tolmie.