Dr Karen McAulay explores the history of Scottish music collecting, publishing and national identity from the 18th to 20th centuries. Research Fellow at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, author of two Routledge monographs.
I was playing through some of the songs in Song Gems (Scots) last night. My attention was taken by a song here entitled ‘Mary in Heaven’, set to a tune called ‘Mary’s Dream’. This is a Scottish song – nothing whatsoever to do with the Annunciation in the Biblical New Testament. Rather, it’s a song by John Lowe, in which a bereaved Scottish Mary has a visitation from her dead fiance’s ghost, and it was written in the late 18th century for a real person whose fiance had died. You can look it up – there are numerous instances of it in old Scottish song books. Antiquarian John Glen’s collection, now in the National Library of Scotland – and digitised – holds plenty of copies. As well as collecting and writing about Scottish songs, Glen was a friend of the compilers of Song Gems (Scots).
Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum ,Vol.1
It was in James Johnson’ Scots Musical Museum, and George Farquhar Graham included it in his Songs of Scotland, published by John Wood (latterly by Bayley & Ferguson as The Popular Songs and Melodies of Scotland).
Suffice to say, I fell in love with this tune! It begins in the minor, goes into the relative major and back, and dallies with the submediant in the second half – it’s beautifully constructed. But how could I use it? I worked out the meter, and after a bit of digging, found the words of an old hymn in the same meter, which were eminently suitable for an introit. I’ve added sparing choral harmonies, and obviously it won’t have soloistic ornamention. But I’m still quite pleased with the results.
And so it shall come about that ‘Mary in Heaven’ will most acceptably be sung in a Presbyterian church …
Here’s Anita Rosati’s gorgeous April 2026 recording of ‘Mary’s Dream’:-
Ah, holidays! The sun shines, whole empty days lie ahead of me, and what do I do?
As I said before, I enjoy more of my favourite creative activities, then I’m drawn back – again – to my research. Specifically, to James Easson, the Dundee music supervisor. He doesn’t seem to have had children, but I’ve spoken to a few people who do still remember him. As one of the compilers of the Nelson’s Scots Song Book series, I’m naturally interested in him as a person, and his career.
Knowing which school he attended, I had a little search on eBay again the other day. I found a school annual report from a year or two after he would probably have left. I looked with interest, because I absolutely love ephemera. (It could be in my genes – one of my uncles, a graphic artist, collected labels and tins, long before there was an internet, just because he loved their typefaces and designs.) Anyway, I examined the images carefully – they had been generously provided – made a couple of notes and moved on. It was too expensive for something which wasn’t likely to tell me anything about James Easson.
I had, however, favourited it. eBay duly reminded me that I’d looked at it. Did I want to look again?
I looked. It was still too expensive.
A couple of days later, eBay shrewdly suggested that I might be interested to know that the vendor was willing to sell it at a discount. Uh-oh! I looked at the images again. There were plenty, but the page numbers showed that there were plenty more that I couldn’t see. I could see the cost of private music lessons. What else was I not seeing? I couldn’t bear not to know!
The thing is, even if it has no mention whatsoever of James Easson – and I think it’s unlikely, because I’m guessing he might have left school before the age of 18 – it certainly will give me a profile of the school that he (and that other publisher’s senior editor, who is no part of the story at all) attended. What if there’s more about music? Or choirs, or orchestras? Or something else that I can’t predict?!
I hesitated. The bottom line is always, will I kick myself if I let this offer go by me? (I have a painting by Carlo Volti, for this very reason. I couldn’t not have it!) Finally, I bargained with myself. I’d make a lower offer. If it was declined, then I wouldn’t get it.
Really?! Why on earth did she get that?!
But it worked. I’m getting that school annual report! One day in the future – hopefully long in the future – my sons will be clearing through my effects, and one will say to the others, ‘Why on earth did she …. ?’
Unfortunately, semi-retirement and working-from-home mean that when I’m on holiday, nothing much changes except that I have even more time to spend not-working at home. And Scotland hasn’t even offered sunshine for me to tidy up the garden!
A week into my ‘holiday’, I’ve baked. I’ve knitted socks. I’ve booked a couple of days away. But eventually, bored with my own company – and an excess of companionable but essentially unsatisfying daytime TV – I crept back to my laptop. What could I do? Aha, there had been an interesting comment from one Nelson’s Scots Song Book compiler to his editor, that has been intriguing me for a while. It looks as though Nelson’s weren’t the compilers’ first choice. Clearly, a good vacation activity would be to find out more about the firm that they had initially considered.
So I did. Of course, I’ll never know if the other firm wasn’t interested, or if the compilers decided that for some reason, it wasn’t going to work out. But I now know who the managing director was, who the chief editor was, and what else they published that was remotely music- or Scottish-culture-related. Apart from a commissioned Burns song collection and a couple of dance books, I recognised two modern, contemporary names published by this other firm – but neither were Scottish, nor had anything to do with Scottish culture.
What use this is to me, I cannot fathom, because – as I’ve just said – Easson and Wiseman contracted to produce their series with Nelson!
My fingers twitched to acquire eBay copies of the somewhat unrelated titles that had piqued my interest, but truly, I can’t really justify it. I might just see if I can see copies in Glasgow’s Mitchell Library, although that begins to feel like a work-related wild goose chase, not a holiday treat. (I did order a contemporary book-trade commemorative volume that I thought might contain useful background material …)
‘Old School Tie’?
Back I returned to the managing director and chief editor. There was just one interesting lead left to follow. And … I discovered that, believe it or not, James Easson and the chief editor had attended the same secondary school – a highly-esteemed, fee-paying Academy. (Much later, it became state-funded.)
With five years between them, I suspect they wouldn’t have known each other. Their families lived in completely opposite directions, so it’s hard to imagine their paths could have crossed much until adulthood. All it tells me is that they both benefited from a thoroughly good education. One went on to attain music diplomas; the other, academic degrees.
I didn’t trace any musical threads in the chief editor’s timeline. I couldn’t find any interaction with Herbert Wiseman, either. Of course, just because I didn’t find anything, doesn’t mean there wasn’t some connection that I didn’t manage to turn up. But even I know when to concede that I’ve found nothing of interest!
I’m not a Luddite, and I fully appreciate that AI can do truly remarkable things – but I don’t entirely trust AI. It gets things wrong. It disrespects the concept of intellectual property. And it has the capacity to perpetuate fallacies – attributed and unattributed – on a scale which gives me misgivings for the work of future scholars.
To my horror, I found a tiny example of this today. I had trusted a Google AI summary. Yes, I know – it was reprehensible, and I should have known better. It was when I was writing my posting about ‘Durisdeer’.
Correct
Kenneth McKellar did indeed sing it – you saw the YouTube video that I shared.
Incorrect
Now then, a recording of a modern Scottish song by Kenneth McKellar was certainly used over the opening credits of a film in 1963. However, that modern Scottish song was not ‘Durisdeer’, which as we know, was a Victorian creation by Lady John Scott. Google’s AI summary put two and two together and made five. I was somewhat alarmed to discover that by repeating this fallacy, my blog post was now highlighted as an authoritative statement about it.
I have now corrected my earlier posting about ‘Durisdeer’, ensuring that I have not perpetuated the hallucination connecting the man-and-the song, with the man-and-a-different-song-and-a film. As attractive and appealing as the hallucination was, it was just plain wrong.
Yes, I’m on holiday! So I’ll keep this brief, but I have to share this: the postie has just delivered my author’s copy of Print and Tourism: Travel-Related Publications from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century / ed. Catherine Armstrong and Elaine Jackson.
My contribution is Chapter 8, The Glories of Scotland in Picture and Song: Jumping on the Festival of Britain Bandwagon (pp.187 – 205). It enabled me to write more about this Mozart Allan publication than I was able to justify in last year’s monograph about Scottish music publishers. I’m very happy indeed to have this chapter in Vol.7 of the Printing History and Culture series.
As a librarian, I would occasionally read articles about reminiscence therapy – when you assemble a collection of assorted ‘things from earlier days’, whether books or household objects, as conversation starters for groups of older people. I only worked in public libraries for three years, and I suspect it was before ‘reminiscence therapy’ was a thing; but later, I would read these articles with interest and think what a lovely idea it was. More recently, I’ve read about how people have strong, mostly positive memories of music they enjoyed in their twenties, when life was fresh and exciting and it felt as though they had the world at their feet.
I have never had the opportunity to organise any activities like this – though I did begin to realise last year, that people also seem to enjoy remembering their school music and singing lessons!
As I review my Leng Medal Memories interviews, watching the video recordings and correcting the transcriptions, I realise that my interviewees often thanked me for this opportunity to relive their memories of singing Scots songs for the Leng silver and gold Medal competitions. In turn, I feel privileged to be ‘there’ with them as they open a window into the past, allowing me a glimpse of the children that they were, and the memories that were still with them. I’ve been showed medals, certificates and prize books. We’ve looked at the little Nelson’s Scots Song Books that school children often used. We’ve talked about teachers they remember, songs that they chose or were encouraged to sing, and a whole range of emotions from fear and anxiety, to immense pride.
Annual Leave
I still have a few transcriptions to review, but I have annual leave coming up, so if I do anything with the transcriptions during that time, it will be with coffee and a biscuit beside me, and a determination not to squander my entire ‘holiday’ at my desk! If I don’t use my vacation allocation, I lose it, and that would never, ever do!
I can’t NOT blog for a whole month. Neither can I really blog ahead, setting timers for it to go live, apart from this present posting. I like to think that anyone returning to this blog will always find something new to read, but I never know what I’ll feel inspired to write about!
Anyway, this is my explanation, if there are fewer postings during the month of July: I’m trying to be on holiday!
My Leng Medal Memories research is funded by an Athenaeum Award from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Forgive me for boasting, but this is exciting! I’ve just discovered that my second monograph came out in paperback on 21 May 2026, just over 18 months after the hardback and digital versions. This is really good news, because it makes it much, much more affordable for individual scholars.
Late Victorian Scotland had a flourishing music publishing trade, evidenced by the survival of a plethora of vocal scores and dance tune books; and whether informing us what people actually sang and played at home, danced to, or enjoyed in choirs, or reminding us of the impact of emigration from Britain for both emigrants and their families left behind, examining this neglected repertoire provides an insight into Scottish musical culture and is a valuable addition to the broader social history of Scotland.
The decline of the music trade by the mid-twentieth century is attributable to various factors, some external, but others due to the conservative and perhaps somewhat parochial nature of the publishers’ output. What survives bears witness to the importance of domestic and amateur music-making in ordinary lives between 1880 and 1950. Much of the music is now little more than a historical artefact. Nonetheless, Karen E. McAulay shows that the nature of the music, the song and fiddle tune books’ contents, the paratext around the collections, its packaging, marketing and dissemination all document the social history of an era whose everyday music has often been dismissed as not significant or, indeed, properly ‘old’ enough to merit consideration.
The book will be valuable for academics as well as folk musicians and those interested in the social and musical history of Scotland and the British Isles.
It’s important always to bear in mind the wide range of music that can be described as Scottish. It’s certainly not just folksy-sounding songs from farm workers of long ago! Styles have changed, and tastes varied over the centuries. And as I demonstrate here, different types and classes of people made contributions of a more or less lasting kind.
One Single Song
It’s so easy to go chasing after red herrings! This time it was a single song, and I only looked it up because I didn’t recognise the title. I think I’ll stop with what I’ve found out – quite enough for my purposes.
Lady John Scott (1810–1900)
Going through the Leng Gold Medal shortleets (Scots for ‘shortlists’) – I several times encountered a song that I hadn’t any recollection of seeing before: Lady John Scott’s ‘Durisdeer’.
Lady John Scott – born Alicia Ann Spottiswoode – was born in Berwickshire, now referred to as the Scottish Borders. She was a composer and poet, and enthusiastic about Scottish heritage – indeed she was the first female Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
Ought I to have known more about her? Arguably not. She’s famous for one particular song, ‘Annie Laurie’, out of those that have actually been published. In fact, the Scottish Poetry Library website says that she ‘rewrote’ the words to ‘Annie Laurie’.
‘Durisdeer’
We’ll meet nae mair at sunset, when the weary day is done …
Opening lines of ‘Durisdeer’, by Lady John Scott
I was, in fact, wrong about not having encountered ‘Durisdeer’ before, though, because it’s in a couple of song-books in the Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Since I indexed most of the Scottish song books in the library – an activity which certainly paid off, because it means that ‘my’ Scottish song index is constantly, and universally available – it follows that I have almost certainly indexed those two instances of ‘Durisdeer’. However, I would have had no reason at the time to have noticed this particular song, which appears to have been published once in London by Lonsdale, ca.1850 (the Whittaker Library hasn’t got that one), and then by Glasgow and London firm Paterson ca.1910 in Lady John Scott’s Thirty Songs, and again by Paterson in the New Scottish Orpheus Vol.3 in 1937. The Thirty Songs must also have been reissued ca.1930-31, for I found a review of it in Music and Letters, April 1931. (More of that anon!)
Significantly, the person at the head of Paterson’s was John Michael Diack, who was a teacher at the Glasgow Athenaeum School of Music and later became Superintendent of Music for Glasgow, as well as being Paterson’s editor. (He gets several mentions in my Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity, now available in paperback). Diack’s inclusion of this song in two Scottish song compilations (the one by Lady John Scott herself, and the New Scottish Orpheus) would also have helped bring it both to music teachers’ and to singers’ attention.
Kenneth McKellar popularised it in the late 1950s. Probably as a result of this, it began to appear in music festivals! I found it in the Leng Gold Medal shortleets from 1968 onwards – it could have been sung before that, but detailed records only survive from 1967 onwards. It was also sung in the nearby Arbroath Musical Festival in 1959, and in Perthshire festivals in the 1950-60s. I’m sure it must have been sung in a number of music festivals, but I’ve done enough searching!
Kenneth McKellar sings ‘Durisdeer’
‘Durisdeer’ is a pretty piece. It’s named after the place by that name, has Scottish lyrics, and is by a Scottish woman composer, but it’s not what you’d call a ‘traditional’ folk song. Whilst it undeniably is Scottish, it doesn’t sound very Scottish, apart from the use of Scottish dialect and a gapped melodic outline at the midway and final cadences of this two-verse song.
Mind you, I have mused and written often enough about what actually counts as Scottish, concluding that a bit like beauty, Scottishness is in the eye (ear) of the beholder.
Anyway, back (briefly) to the review of Lady John Scott’s Thirty Songs. This reassures me that, for all ‘Durisdeer’ is tuneful enough, I don’t need to feel too bad about not having known it:-
Lady John Scott: Songs (including Annie Laurie). She wrote the tune and fabricated the words of one immortal thing. This volume shows that as long as she stuck to Scots sentiments things went well. There is nothing here to equal ‘Annie Laurie,’ but still some pleasant things remain. [Paterson.]
Music and Letters, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Apr., 1931), p.214, Review by ‘Sc.G.’
‘Sc.G.’ was Scott Goddard (1895-1965), a music critic and Walford Davies’ assistant at Temple Church. He had studied at the Royal College of Music. I don’t know about the other 28 songs in the book. If, like ‘Durisdeer’, they’re ‘pleasant things’ rather than an ‘immortal thing’, then at least Goddard and I agree!
(The Scottish Orpheus Vol.3 is still available, now distributed by Novello.)
My Leng Medal Memories research is funded by an Athenaeum Award from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
It’s fair enough to say that I find spreadsheets endlessly fascinating, although I don’t use them for number-crunching. However, they’re invaluable for comparing data. In fact, I discovered this before I even knew the word, ‘spreadsheet’, since I did some repertoire comparison for my Masters research degree on mediaeval English plainsong uses at the University of Exeter in 1979-80. It was a 60K-word Masters thesis – I’d intended to continue it to doctoral level, but decided instead to write it up as a Masters then changed subject for the PhD. (And that became my first doctoral attempt, the one that never got finished.)
Computer printout from my Masters thesis, 1980
This was before the era of personal computers. My data was tabulated manually on a very long roll of kitchen shelf-lining paper, which opened out the full length of the Music departmental library in ‘Knightley’ on Streatham Drive. I compared post-Pentecostal Alleluias and sequences from various English liturgical manuscripts, along with pieces of plainsong from an Augustinian burial rite, now in Shrewsbury public school library. That’s nearly as much as you need to know about my Masters!
Just a Roll of Paper!
Computer Science? Yes, Indeed!
However, one other interesting fact is that I was the first music postgrad to involve the Computer Science department in my repertoire analysis. I filled in cards – or forms, can’t remember which – which were input by the computer scientists to arrive at statistics as to how much different categories of plainsong correlated in terms of repertoire, across different monastic orders and geographic locations.
Karen Elisabeth Manley, English mediaeval liturgies and their plainsong. Exeter, 1980.
The Magical Microsoft Excel
Since my second incarnation as a musicologist in the present century, I’m sure you can imagine how exciting it has been to be able to compare repertoires of Scottish song in a variety of different contexts. But this time I can save my spreadsheets safely – they’re much more portable and more readily manipulable.
In the context of my Leng Medal research, my ‘cup truly overfloweth’ this week, since I’ve seen lists of songs sung, enabling me to see how tastes have changed over the past sixty or so years. I’ve been comparing what was sung, against a few different song books available at particular times. Obviously, I can’t compare ALL the songs against ALL the song books that exist – I would surely go insane! Indeed, I couldn’t even capture ALL the data for every single year over that period – I simply didn’t have time. But carefully judged snapshots are certainly giving me food for thought. I’ve had endless fun today, producing charts and tables to examine the data in different ways.
The Most Popular Songs sung by Leng Gold Medal Finalists
Oh, did you think I was going to tell you which they were? Sorry, not at the moment – I need to keep specifics for when I write my research up later! It’s certainly interesting, though.
I only picked nine different years for close examination. Suffice to say, they have given me plenty of hard data to set my oral history interviews in context.
And not a roll of shelf-lining paper in sight nowadays!
My Leng Medal Memories research is funded by an Athenaeum Award from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Yesterday being Sunday – and Scotland isn’t out of the World Cup yet – I dug deep to find some more thematically appropriate music to play on the organ. I’m pleased to report that it IS possible to play, ‘Yes, Sir, I can Boogie’ in a sedate, dignified manner. Challenging, but possible. Likewise ‘Scotland The Brave’. After those, a calmer ‘The Rowan Tree’ and an organ setting of ‘Amazing Grace’ completed the World Cup set.
But AFTER the service … although I nominally stuck with a Scottish titled march, absolutely no-one would have known or recognised it. It was an indulgence of my research interests, I’m afraid! I played a piece of music by Edward E Harper. So … it was
composed by an Englishman,
who briefly lived in Scotland.
His tune was called a Scots March (it doesn’t sound Scottish) –
and it was in a collection published by Bayley and Ferguson, a Scottish publisher.
The composer himself had emigrated to Canada by this stage. I don’t know when he composed it.
It gets more complicated.
The copy I own was sold in AUSTRALIA,
and taken to California by a talented scientist at the start of his career.
I repatriated it through eBay, so today the not-exactly ‘Scots March’ was played by an Englishwoman in Scotland, not that far from where the English composer was once organist …
I have a problem now. Just supposing Scotland beats Brazil? I can find any number of traditional tunes, but what would I play as an outgoing voluntary?!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 