Why This Matters
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!
‘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
Music and Letters, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Apr., 1931), p.214, Review by ‘Sc.G.’
pleasant things remain. [Paterson.]
‘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.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 