WHEN YELLOW’S ON THE BROOM - THE TRAVELLER SINGERS

The singing of traditional ballads and songs was known by the settled and the traveller folk who lived there to be alive and strong across Northern Scotland. Several traveller women singers became central in preserving and sharing traditional Scots songs, in ways that inspired and shared their repertoires with the young urban singers who created what came the Scottish Folk Song Revival.
Jeannie Robertson and her daughter Lizzie Higgins of Aberdeen, Belle and Sheila Stewart of Blairgowrie, and Elizabeth Stewart of Fetterangus began to perform in folk clubs then in folk festivals locally, nationally, then internationally, and to feature on commercial recordings. Jane Turriff was another fine Fetterangus traveller singer. Folklorist Peter Cooke assisted traveller Betsy Whyte to write two autobiographical books.
Having observed Alan Lomax’s use of recording equipment, Henderson through his subsequent collecting work in the School of Scottish Studies became crucial in bringing to the knowledge of settled folk the role of Scottish travellers in preserving old Scots ballads and songs. In the 1960s Folk Song Revival young enthusiasts learned the songs and went on to share their knowledge.
One of Henderson's key ‘discoveries’ was Jeannie Robertson in 1953 [see next chapter]. In the following year Henderson asked Blairgowrie newspaper journalist Maurice Lindsay to try and find the maker of the song ‘The Berryfields Of Blair’, about the annual harvesting of local fruit fields, when folk came from all over Scotland to harvest strawberries and raspberries.
‘With a portable tape recorder Hamish lent me from the School of Scottish Studies I went in search of singers and as it was Berrytime the campsites were full of travellers. Within a few days I was overwhelmed by the wealth of the material. So many singers, so many songs. I sent Hamish an urgent message urging him to come and join me.’ [At Hame Wi’ Freedom]
Henderson later described the collecting of songs in the fields ‘like holding a tin-can under the Niagara Falls. In a single session you can hear everything from ancient Ossianic hero-tales to caustic pop-song parodies’, plus ‘tantalising fragments of a rare Child ballad’ or ‘a Gaelic tinker love lament’. [Alias MacAlias]

BELLE STEWART [1906-1997] – THE QUEEN AMANG THE HEATHER
Fleming had located Belle Stewart, the matriarch of a clan of travellers living in and around Blairgowrie. Belle’s repertoire included only a few classic ballads, but her versions were fine ones. She also sang broadsides, traditional songs, music hall songs, bothy ballads, Irish songs, and more ‘mak-ye-up’ songs of her own compositions.

THE BERRYFIELDS O BLAIR
When berry time comes roond each year Blair’s population’s swelling
There’s every kind of picker there and every kind o dwellin
There’s tents and huts and caravans, there’s bothies and there’s bivvies
And shelters made wi tattie-bags and dug-outs made wi divvies
There’s travellers fae the Western Isles, fae Arran, Mull and Skye
Fae Harris, Lewis and Kyles o Bute, they come their luck to try
There’s families pickin for one purse, and some who pick alane
There’s men who share and share alike wi wives wha’s no their ain.

Her daughters Sheila and Cathie were also ‘striking singers’, and the three and Belle’s piper husband Alex began touring widely to perform in the developing folk clubs and festivals of the 1960s. Sheila became celebrated for her singing of ballads, and wrote several books, including a biography of her mother, titled The Queen Amang The Heather’, a song Belle had become strongly associated with.
Singers Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger documented the folklore of the Stewarts of Blairgowrie in ‘Till Doomsday In The Afternoon’. The above photograph is we think by Vic Smith.

JANE TURRIFF OF FETTERANGUS [1915-2013]
‘Jane Turriff was in the front rank amongst the very finest. Jane became part of [a great traveller family] heritage and even as a girl was recognised as an outstanding singer in an extended family and community that had great number of such talents. She also took to instruments like many of her family and she played piano, accordion and, her greatest love, the harmonium (or was it an American organ?).
‘Jane was first recorded at her home in Fetterangus in 1955 by Hamish Henderson and these established her name amongst ethnomusicologists as one of the greats. Soon after the foundation of The Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland in 1966, the wonderful festivals in Blairgowrie and then Kinross began and Jane and her husband Cameron Turriff were regular invited guests and a generation of young enthusiasts was able to meet and enjoy all the finest that the Scots tradition had to offer.’
From Vic Smith’s obituary of Jane Turriff in the Mustrad website.

CHRISTINA STEWART OF FETTERANGUS
Christina and husband Donald were Jane Turriff's parents. Jane said 'God ma mind gings back tae ma mither. Now, ah heard anither song and I says "When did ah hear 'at, 'ats my Mam's sang again". I aye think of my Mum, an my sister's the same in Aberdeen. Ma Mum was a very very hard workin womamn an singin wis her life. She never thought that she wis singin well, not like whit we think nowadays. She never got away nowhere, there wis no festivals at that time. They had a lot o hard work. But they were always happy, always this singin, singin. I'd be listenin tae ma Mum when all the rest o the family 's all out playin. All that big long songs I learned from her.'
Drawn from the notes of the Jane Turriff CD Singin Is Ma Life

LUCY STEWART OF FETTERANGUS [1901-1982] and KENNETH GOLDSTEIN, COLLECTOR
In 1959 American scholar Kennie Goldstein came to spend a year in Scotland. He was inspired to develop his academic folklorist career by an LP compilation disc made by Alan Lomax, a sampler with the jovial title 'World Library of Folk and Primitive Music Vol 3 : Scotland'.
Goldstein was then guided by Hamish Henderson to settle for a year in Strichen in Buchan. [Neat gives an interesting account of Goldstein’s and Henderson’s interactions in Volume 2 of his biography of Henderson.] Goldstein recorded several fine women singers, including Christina Stewart and Jane Turriff of Fetterangus, and Helen Scott and Emily Sinclair of New Pitsligo, and gave copies of his 1960 recordings to the School of Scottish Studies archive, so they can be heard on the Tobar an Dualchais website.
Henderson had recorded a few items from Lucy Stewart in 1955, But Goldstein spent months in the Gaval Street Fetterangus prefab house of Lucy Stewart and her young nieces Elizabeth and Jane, recording ballads, songs, stories, children’s games and rhymes, riddles, and much more. He found that Lucy was a ‘major tradition-bearer’ of ‘absolute artistry’, and recorded 175 ballads and songs from her, commenting that ‘her tunes were always so well shaped’. ‘She was the only member of her family who was unable to read music or play any instrument’ though her sister Jean led a well-respected and popular traditional dance band, and her niece Elizabeth was a gifted pianist.
Lucy’s and Jean’s mother was ‘Auld Betty’, Elizabeth Townsley, from a prominent English Gypsy family. She had married Lucy’s father Auld Jimmsy when aged 14, and brought songs with her. They had 14 children, so when out camping in summer they needed two bow tents. Auld Betty would go out with a pack crammed with ‘clothin, beddin an household bits’, then barter at the farms for foodstuffs, or for clothes and rags for her large rag-store. Lucy too when younger had like many travellers driven her cairtie round the countryside collecting clothing and rags to be brought home, sorted and sold.
Lucy was an impressive singer who only sang within her house, never on a public stage, but Elizabeth learned many of Lucy’s songs and became an impressive singer and performer of ballads. Elizabeth penned in Scots, with the assistance of singers Alison MacMorland and Geordie Macintyre, a superb account of her family’s history and traditional culture, ‘Up Yon Wide And Lonely Glen’.

On returning home to the USA Goldstein wrote a handbook for the guidance of beginning collectors, and recorded a great deal in the USA and Canada, while editing a raft of commercial discs. Nearly all Goldstein’s rich 1960 recordings in Buchan can be heard on line in the Tobar an Dualchais website. One of the songs sung to him by Lucy, full of fine detail and charm, became a staple of the Folksong Revival in Scotland, with one text alteration. Where Lucy sang ‘laddie o and sing laddie aye’, singers learning it created the rhyme by singing ‘laddie aye and sing laddie o, the ploughman laddies are aa the go’.

THE PLOOMAN LADDIES
Doon yonder den there’s a ploughman lad, an some summer’s day he’ll be aa my ain
An sing laddie o, an sing laddie aye, the plooman laddies are aa the go
I love his teeth an I love his skin, I love the very cairt he hurls in
Doon yonder den I could hae gotten a millert, bit the smell o dust wid hae deen me ill
Doon yonder den I could hae gotten a merchant, bit aa his things werena worth a groat
It’s ilka time I gyang tae the stack I hear his wheep gie the ither crack
I see him comin fae yonder toon, wi aa his ribbons hingin roon an roon
And noo she’s gotten her plooman lad, as bare as iver he left the ploo

ARTHUR ARGO, COLLECTOR AND ANIMATEUR
In 1960 Arthur Argo, cub reporter for the Aberdeen Press & Journal, went to interview Goldstein, and announced himself to be the great grandson of Gavin Grieg. Argo went out with Goldstein and wrote a series of articles about the living singing and song heritage of the North-East. Arthur caught the song collecting bug, borrowed a tape recorder and went to be a crucial figure in the Scottish Folk Song Revival. He met Lucy and her family, wrote about them and several other women singers in his articles, [see Arthur Argo Collects 1960] and recorded interesting versions of songs for the School of Scottish Studies archives.