Scottish Songs Today: Airing my Opinions!

Yesterday was a bit unusual. I gave a talk about research using library resources – nothing unusual there. Then I sorted out arrangements for the Exchange Talk I’m giving online from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on 29th January.  It’s all about how new educational and technological innovations affected the Scottish music publishing industry ca.1880-1951.

We’ll come back to the phone-call that I so nearly mistook for a cold call (luckily, I didn’t!), and then I finalised details for another lecture in the spring. this time about Scottish song books over an even longer era.

FOUR ‘appearances’ (or arrangements for appearances) in one day? Librarians don’t often get that.  But as it happens, only the first of them was really library related.  I wrote an article about my hybrid role, over the weekend, and yesterday simply underlined the truth of it.

The ‘cold call’ turned out to be from the BBC! Just before 7 am today, I was a guest of BBC Radio Scotland for their Good Morning Scotland programme, talking about the top ten most popular Scottish songs in Visit Scotland’s recent survey. You should have seen me last night, surrounded by song-books much more recent than my usual fare! I needed to get an idea of the chronology of that ‘top ten’. I now have a beautiful document, halfway between a mind-map and a spreadsheet, which I stared at until I had memorised an overview of what I might find myself talking about.

Here’s a link where the programme can be replayed. My bit is from 53:01 to 1:00:09.

The Evening Times published the top-ten list last night. One Burns song (‘My heart’s in the Highlands’), and one by Walter Scott – ‘Scots wha’ ha’e’. Visit Scotland’s recent survey rest were much more modern, but almost all combined a catchy tune and a humorous ‘story’.

Visit Scotland’s recent survey as reported in the Evening Times.