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.
It takes place from tomorrow, Thursday 12 to Saturday 14 June 2025, and is organised under the aegis of the University’s Theatrical Voice Research Centre.
My talk’s entitled, ‘Comparing the Career Trajectories of Two Scottish Singers: Flora Woodman and Robert Wilson‘.Â
The Gowns! The Kilts!
I could write plenty about their concert attire alone (think lace, diamonds and fluted frocks, or smart kilts and jackets) – but obviously, I can only just brush past that particular clothes rail, considering the more significant observations that I’m also making.
Boosey’s Ballads
Today, I’d like to share some audio that won’t be making it into my talk. Let’s call it ‘extra content’. I’ve recorded some of the Boosey-published ballads that Flora performed at their Royal Albert Hall concerts. Since I’m not a trained singer, I’ve done my best to convey an impression solely on the piano. (I’m not going to start singing here!) I also highlight some of the themes in these songs – captured hearts, broken hearts, the joys of spring and of youth. It’s surprising what you find, if you really look.
They wondered where I was in the Uni Library this morning – I was off looking at old magazines in the National Library of Scotland!
Queuing for 10 am!
High Fidelity
EMI tape recorderPerfected in PlasticBaird’s High Fidelity
I did find a couple of book reviews and an advert, which is what I was looking for. But I was also drawn to other adverts for long-playing records, tape recorders and plastic recorders! Here we are today, with our phones, mics, streaming services and laptops, whilst a wooden recorder is much more eco-friendly, not to mention authentic. But in post-war Britain, all this shiny new stuff was the last word in modernity!
As for a record that held four times as much music as a 78? Who wouldn’t want such an innovation?!
Oh, and I spotted another ‘innovation’: folk songs with guitar chords. The times they certainly were a-changing. (And this was a decade before Bob Dylan’s song!)
Anyway, I filled in a couple of gaps in my knowledge by ploughing through eightyears‘ worth of bound, unindexed magazines (we forget how amazing digitised journals are!), and answered another question with a microfilmed reel (urgh, old technology!) of another journal. To think that microfilms were comparatively modern when I was a postgrad the first time round. Today, I used a shiny new microfilm reader – very techie – but it’s still a linear way of storing data. Luckily, I found what I was looking for towards the end of the first reel.
And had a thoroughly modern iced latte before heading back to the Uni Library!
Here’s a little curiosity that I came across last autumn. It’s published by Thomas Nelson, yes, but I’m not entirely sure why I bought it. I certainly didn’t know what I was getting!
The title should have given me a clue, but it wasn’t enough to tell the whole story:-
A RURAL SIGHT READER
Being an Amalgamation of “Eyes Right!”
and “Look Ahead!”
Okay, you might say, so there were clearly two earlier books. Correct, there were. But the amalgamation was performed by having “Eyes Right!” (the simpler sight-reading book) on all the left-hand pages, and “Look Ahead!” on all the right-hand pages, until just past halfway through the book. The rest is all ‘Look Ahead” material.
You might ask why? The answer is quite simple. A teacher in a small rural school in those days might have a wide age-range in one class, so they could hand out one set of books (are you with me?) and have two age-groups use it at the same time. The idea was that the older children would follow along when the young ones were sight-reading, and vice versa.
The one thing they could not do, was sing together simultaneously. That absolutely would not work. (Opposite pages might have different time signatures, and or different keys – they were completely unrelated.) Ah well, it was a nice idea. The publishers went on printing it from 1937 until 1948, when His Majesty’s Inspector for Music pleaded with them to reprint it, suggesting that a different title might make it more saleable. There was still a need for it, he insisted. (I have since discovered that he was the unnamed author of this miserable little book!)
It was not reprinted. The publisher’s sales reps reported adverse comments and little customer interest. Looking inside, I’m not surprised. Apart from the first page of ‘Look Ahead’, which patriotically contains the National Anthem with the right rhythm followed by various odd permutations, they aren’t even recogniseable tunes, just abstract little melodies to familiarise the pupils with the ups-and-downs and simple rhythms of notated music. Functional to a fault.
[Discreetly yawning …]
And my copy – look closely at the image at the top – was a publishers’ sample copy. It may never even have been used. But the little singing child image was used again on the front and title pages of two other titles – E Fosbrooke Allen’s A First Song Book, and a much more popular book – Desmond MacMahon’s New National and Folk Song Book vols. 1 and 2. (Possibly elsewhere too – I haven’t seen enough titles to be able to say.)
Whilst I admire the laudable desire to have every child leaving school musically as well as functionally literate, the Rural Sight-Reader is a truly dull and uninspiring little offering. I imagine the children wriggling and kicking under the desk until it was playtime, or time for something more appealing!
I would dearly love to trace a child, or children, who sang from these books. I think these books were aimed at children probably between eight to twelve years old, so the oldest children were born circa 1936-1946.
Well, I have! Five people have reached out to me already – one of them a prize-winning singer. However, it appears I underestimated this title’s longevity. I guessed,
I don’t know how long the books would have remained in use, but my guess is that they’d probably have fallen to bits by the late 1950s. In that case, the youngest users would have been born round about 1950. And that would make them baby-boomers, but several years older than me
I got that wrong! Two (as I predicted) are a bit older than me. Two a little younger. And the very youngest tells me they were at school in the 1980s – still singing from Nelson’s Scots Song Book.
Four are Scots. But the other (one of those a little bit younger than me) was in …
South Wales! (Now I’m curious to know – any more distant sightings, anyone?)
I’ve also, tonight, been gifted a copy of Book 4. I got home and sat down at the piano straight away! What an exciting present. And I can play away to my heart’s content, since it’s all in the name of research.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m researching some Scottish song books published by Thomas Nelson between 1948-1952. There were four books in total, and they were intended for school classroom use.
I would dearly love to trace a child, or children, who sang from these books. I think these books were aimed at children probably between eight to twelve years old, so the oldest children were born circa 1936-1946.
I don’t know how long the books would have remained in use, but my guess is that they’d probably have fallen to bits by the late 1950s. In that case, the youngest users would have been born round about 1950. And that would make them baby-boomers, but several years older than me.
So, if you have elderly Scottish relatives aged between 74 and 90, please do show them these images. Can they remember singing from these books at school?
And does Granny remember her teacher playing the piano for class singing lessons? There were bigger, more substantial teachers’ books to go with these little booklets. The teachers’ books had the piano accompaniments as well as the words and tune melodies. Only a few libraries still have them. I consider myself lucky to have tracked down my Pupil’s Edition Book 2!
Library copies of teachers’ books on an archival cushion
How to Assess whether a Song Book was Aligned with Contemporary Tastes
There were once four books of Scottish songs in a mini-series: just under 100 songs, all told. They weren’t much advertised, and few copies are now extant. If they were intended mainly for school use, then I need to know to what extent their contents were standard Scottish song repertoire for their day. (Each generation has its favourites, noticeably different from the previous ones.)
Now then, I spent a very long time indexing song books as a librarian; that library catalogue is now a reference resource in its own right. Last night, I listed the contents of those four books, and next, I shall look each song up in our RCS library catalogue. I’ll end up with two figures for each song:-
How many times the song is listed altogether: a high figure means popularity over a long period.
How many times the song is listed between 1930-1970: this will be a shorter range of numbers. If it’s as high as, say, five hits, then it was popular amongst quite a few compilers over that 40 years. If it’s not in any other books between 1930-1970, then it’s either old-fashioned, or a more obscure ‘rarity’ from less well-known or very old collections.
And THEN, I can look up the rare ones in the National Library of Scotland’s Digital Gallery.
This is the only accurate way of ascertaining whether the contents themselves might have been off-putting to the very audiences that they were meant to attract. I hope that’s not the case, because the compilers were well-placed, indeed ideally-placed to know exactly what went down well with school children. Nonetheless, I want hard evidence, and comparing the repertoire with two significant sets of data – the RCS more standard books, and NLS rare books – seems to me a pretty good way of doing it.
I enjoy writing this blog, because it helps me clarify in my mind what the big issues are that I am addressing. Writing for a wide audience, which may or may not have exactly the same scholarly interest in the topic as I do, is a good way of reminding myself to write accessibly, and hopefully interestingly, about the things which occupy my thoughts as I pursue my research. Do I succeed? You tell me!
Sadly, this is the last issue of History Scotland, but I’m very pleased to have an article published there. I have really enjoyed writing this, and I think my idea of comparing two very different Scottish singers has actually come together rather well. I wanted to write about Robert Wilson, but I didn’t want to go over the same ground that has already been covered. I also wanted to write about Flora Woodman – but would anyone remember her? Then came the inspiration: what if I wrote about them both, two almost contemporary but very different celebrities, and then I could compare them. This hadn’t been done before! And it worked – the piece almost wrote itself.
Karen E McAulay, ‘The ‘Scottish Soprano’ and the ‘Voice of Scotland’: the Importance of Nationality to Flora Woodman and Robert Wilson’, History Scotland Vol.25 no.1 (Spring 2025), 74-81
If your public library has e-magazines, you’ll be able to read it online. Glasgow Life certainly has it!
Flora Woodman – photo and compliments, 25th October 1924
Leisure and Pleasure – Everyday life in Second World War Scotland
I don’t often sign up to webinars, but something so closely aligned to my own current research was irresistible.
The History Scotland webinar series is promoted by the History Department at the University of Dundee. The guest speaker today was Dr Michelle Moffat of Manchester Metropolitan University.
And what did I learn? Leisure pursuits didn’t stop in wartime, especially going to the cinema. This is worth knowing. (However, I must be careful not to assume things were exactly the same everywhere. It makes me wonder about central London, for example, where people might have felt more threatened. )
There was also interesting detail about rationing and food shortages, and discussion about how much people in Scotland felt the war was ‘their’ war. (I suspect anyone who had relatives fighting overseas would very much have felt indirectly part of it.)
And a reminder about the Mass Observation Archive. I had forgotten about this, but it’s a crucial resource – I’m going to check it out with some questions that I hope it might help with!
You can tell I’ve spent too long in the late nineteenth century – in the research sense, that is. Dizzy with excitement at the thought of seeing a silent movie – yes, it might actually come to pass, albeit not for a few months – I was almost deliriously pleased to discover that one of my research interests made British Pathe ‘shorts’ during the Second World War. My aim is to contrast two singing careers, started only a decade apart – and here’s the first contrast. One began their career during the First World War and the silent movie era. The other made British Pathe shorts during the Second.
We think we’re so advanced, with our internet and our AI, electric cars and digital sound … but anyone born in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century might have been amazed by their own advances in technology. A fin-de-siecle child treated to a magic lantern show, might have sung along to hymn or Scottish song texts projected on a magic lantern screen, the singing led by whichever grown-up had been co-opted in to help. When silent film came along, any music would be provided by a cinema pianist or a small ‘orchestra’ – possibly no more than a piano trio. What you heard would partly depend on who was playing and the bundle of music they’d brought with them.
But when the children became adults, they would would find themselves listening to the wireless or going out to ‘talking’ movies. Watching, in adulthood, a short film performance by a contemporary star vocalist would have been unimaginable a decade earlier.
However, I must still cool my heels as I wait to see if (and when) the silent movie that I need to see, can be converted into a modern format. Meanwhile, I’m trapped in the nineteenth century with the printed novel that gave rise to the movie. As I read, I wonder how they managed to condense the story into a couple of hours, and then convey the whole plot by wordless gestures.
‘LUCERNA is an online resource on the magic lantern, an early slide projector invented in the 17th century.
‘For more than 350 years the magic lantern has represented and fed into every aspect of human life and every part of the world. It is still used today, both in its original form and through direct descendants like the modern data projector.
‘LUCERNA includes details of slide sets, slide images, readings and other texts related to slide sets, lantern hardware, people and organisations involved in lantern history, and much more.’
Why do collectors collect things? Especially old things. The link with the past? The feeling that in some remote way, there’s a virtual thread linking you and an earlier era, or a particular individual?
As I’ve mentioned, I’m writing a long article about some late Victorian/Edwardian Scottish women musicians. It’s virtually finished. But there’s one more thing to do.
I have a single 78 rpm shellac recording of one of these women, whose reputation was not inconsiderable in her day. She played in London. She and her ‘orchestra ‘ made a handful of recordings. But I have no means of playing this precious artefact. I’ve tried to beg or borrow an old gramophone (or newer technology) to no avail, so eventually I bought a record player on Amazon.
All this because I wanted to know what instruments were in her band, a century ago! My article is incomplete without this detail.
PetronellaThere’s an anecdote about a whisky-filled teacup rattling on a piano edge whilst she played …!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 