I knew there was this vast mass of cheap, popular music books, many containing what used to be called ‘national songs’, dating back to the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th. I decided a book needed to be written, and wrote it. I can’t wait for it to make its entry into the world!
You probably have to be Glaswegian to know this old chestnut:-
‘Heh, does this tram go to the Palais?’
‘Naw – it cannae dance!’
Well, the tram has my sympathy, as I can’t either. ‘Himself’ and I each have two left feet, when it comes to tripping the light fantastic. Indeed, his mother used to wonder how someone so musical could be such a hopeless dancer. On the other hand, I realised I disliked the activity as a small child at a party for preschoolers, when a well-intentioned parent tried to make me dance the Twist. I remember the discomfort and embarrassment to this day.
We must have been terrible disappointments. After all, dancing was in the Fyfe’s blood:
Great Grandfather, a stonemason, played bass up in Fyvie for winter dances
My Grandpa-in-law went to dance classes in Turriff as a boy
Mother-in-law was Miss Milligan’s first dance pianist at Jordanhill Teacher Training College, before Jean Milligan even set up the Scottish Country Dancing Society. Later, after a lifetime accompanying Scottish country dance in Newcastle, she got a certificate of recognition from RSCDS at the St Andrews Summer School.
Meanwhile, my own Mum was a PE teacher like Miss Milligan, taught country dancing at a school in Whitstable, and even got my father to play for her on occasions.
I myself had a Saturday job as a ballet class piano accompanist. It felt a comfortable place to be.
So, it feels as though fate has caught up with me, when recent research into a dance accompanist led me to explore early digitised committee minutes on the RSCDS website (thanks, folks – this was really useful!). In Glasgow’s Mitchell Library yesterday, I learned some more, from a book I only discovered at the weekend. I thought the secondhand copy that I found online looked too expensive, but I am reassessing this opinion!
And here I am on a bus to Edinburgh in the pouring rain. I am hoping to see two rare books of reels and strathspeys connected with this one particular pianist who, it appears, was nothing if not a force of nature. A renowned accompanist, I read that when she and her band had to share the dances with other non country dance bands, they really didn’t know quite how to deal with her – they hadn’t encountered anyone like her!
It’s such a damp and dismal day, that I really hope the National Library of Scotland books are just stuffed with interesting paratext, to make the outing worth the effort!
A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880-1951
I’ve just heard I should get the proofs of my second monograph by the end of July.
It looks as though the start of semi-retirement is going to be action-packed, doesn’t it? You might almost think I’d planned it that way, but in truth, it’s just how things have worked out. Any planning was really no more than my thinking, ‘yes, that will probably work out rather nicely’.
I need to start thinking about indexing. Indeed, I have made a partial start, but so far only focusing on one aspect.
Let me just stop coughing and get this beastly flu-bug out of the way, and then I’ll roll my sleeves up!
For a number of years, I’ve given an annual talk to RCS students, about how different generations looked upon, collated and collected and published Scottish songs and tunes. The snappy, official title is ‘Transformations’, but when I was revising it for this year’s presentation, I decided to compile a list of all the people (and a few extra titles) that I would be mentioning. Forty of them! So, I’ve added a new, unofficial subtitle: Speed-Dating 40 Scottish Music Collectors in an Hour. Okay, not exacty forty people, but forty lines in the list. I was quite surprised. I would imagine the individuals themselves might have raised an eyebrow, too.
It was the last time I’d give a lecture as a Performing Arts Librarian. Admittedly, not the last time I hope to give a lecture as a researcher, but certainly the final one with a library hat on! The librarian accordingly played a tiny bit of Beethoven’s Johnnie Cope from memory, along with a few chords from Marjory Kennedy-Fraser’s Sleeps the Noon in the Deep Blue Sky (score open), and blithely announced that she saw no need to inflict her rendition of Debussy’s La Cathedrale Engloutie upon her audience for comparison.
More than anything, the lecture epitomises me as a hybrid. I’m a librarian – I acquire and curate these resources. As a scholar, I contextualise them into cultural history. It wouldn’t be the same talk if I occupied only one of these roles.
The subject of my forthcoming monograph – amateur music making and Scottish national identity – only actually got a brief mention. But it was there. Maybe I’ll need to do a more extensive revision at some point!
Reaching the end of my recent cataloguing project – the gift of a number of books of old Scottish music – I must confess I left what looked like the most miscellaneous, worn, unbound pieces until last. Late on Friday afternoon, I had observed that one such piece had a pencil note at the head – ‘Music for The Gentle Shepherd, Foulis edition, 1788’. Now, this is a famous ballad opera by Allan Ramsay. It was so popular that my colleague Brianna Robertson-Kirkland writes that there were 86 editions of TheGentle Shepherd, 66 of them the ballad opera. Initially, the songs only indicated the name of the tune to use, and different editions have more or less songs. The 1788 edition contains a full vocal score of the songs, and that’s what we’ve got. My guess is that the last owner bought the 18 pages which someone had previously separated from the back of the larger original volume.
I haven’t made a study of it myself, but I do recognise the opera and its songs as very significant in the history of Scottish music – and this edition has particular importance. So, if this gathering of pages was so important, it would benefit from a decent catalogue entry.
The pages are numbered 1-18. With no title-page, still less a cover, to give me further clues, it wasn’t a task for 4.30 on a Friday afternoon, but it very definitely was one for a Monday morning.
A bit of digging around soon found me another library’s catalogue record of Ramsay’s ballad opera in that very edition – a particularly significant edition, because it’s the most lavish, quite apart from having the complete vocal score section. RCS lecturer Brianna Robertson-Kirkland has researched the work in detail and written an article about it, which is on one of her class reading-lists. Dr David McGuinness, with whom I worked on the HMS.Scot AHRC-funded project a few years ago, has also recently published a book about it, with Steve Newman.
The new Edinburgh Edition of The Gentle Shepherd
But the catalogue record didn’t exactly fit my purpose, because what I had in my hand was the appendix at the end of the book, containing all the songs. We didn’t have the text of the ballad opera at all.
No problem – I downloaded the catalogue record and adapted it to reflect what we did have. I made sure the words ‘Scottish songs’ appeared in the catalogue record, and I indexed every one of those songs. The appendix is only eighteen pages long – it wasn’t that arduous a task. I’m really happy that we’ve been given this, because – even though it’s fragile and will have to be handled with extreme care – it means the students will now be able to see the music that Brianna has written about, and lectures about. (It still needs a nice stout card folder, and a secure storage space – but they’ll be sorted out soon.)
Informed Cataloguing
There’s one strange thing, though. It appears no other cataloguer has catalogued each song in The Gentle Shepherd – not in Jisc Library Hub, at any rate. Well, although we at RCS might not have the whole magnificent text, a title page or a cover, we HAVE now got a catalogue record which indexes all the songs. Hooray!
Contents:-
The wawking of the fauld (1st line: My Peggy is a young thing)
Fy gar rub her o’er wi’ strae (1st line: Dear Roger, if your Jenny geck)
Polwart on the Green (1st line: The dorty will repent)
O dear mother, what shall I do (1st line; O dear Peggy, love’s beguiling)
How can I be sad on my wedding day (1st line: How shall I be sad when a husband I hae?)
Nansy’s to the green-wood gane (1st line: I yield, dear lassie)
Cauld kail in Aberdeen (1st Line : Cauld be the rebels cast)
Mucking o’ Geordie’s byre (1st line: The laird, wha in riches)
Carle, an’ the king come (1st line: Peggy, now the king’s come)
The yellow-hair’d laddie (1st line: When first my dear ladie gade to the green hill)
Kirk wad let me be (1st line: Duty, and part of reason)
Woe’s my heart that we shou’d sunder (1st line: Speak on, speak thus)
Tweed Side (1st line: When hope was quite sunk in despair)
Bush aboon Traquair (1st line: At setting day and rising morn)
The bonny grey-ey’d morn
Corn-Riggs (1st line: My Patie is a lover gay)
I struggled to explain to my family just how gratifying I find this. But I think it’s really important not only that Brianna’s students can see which songs are in Foulis’s edition of The Gentle Shepherd, but also, anyone looking for one of those song titles will be able to see that it was one of the songs used in the famous ballad opera.
The Gentle Shepherd / Allan Ramsay ; edited by Steve Newman, David McGuinness.
As a matter of interest, we do also have some items going back to the era when Cedric Thorpe Davie put on a performance of the opera. Anyone checking our catalogue will spot those too!
The Gentle Shepherd: a pastoral comedy / by Allan Ramsay ; abridged and adapted for performance at Edinburgh International Festival by Robert Kemp [bound photocopy, 47 p.]
I accepted a generous donation of old books to the Library a couple of weeks ago. This presented me, personally, with a bit of a problem because our offices, furniture and contents are being moved around, and I had proudly emptied most of my shelves in readiness. There will be fewer shelves in the other office. And now I had two shelves full of old Scottish music – right up my street – which needed cataloguing.
Most vital priority – get them done before I retire from the Library.
Almost as vital – to get them done before the move on Thursday next week!
Of course, the lovely thing is that they’re books I’ve encountered in various research contexts … the PhD; the Bass Culture project (https://HMS.Scot); the book chapter on subscriptions; and my own forthcoming monograph.
I catalogued like crazy on Thursday and Friday. I’ve catalogued Sammelbande (personal bound volumes) of songs, piano music and fiddle tunes. I’ve shown colleagues books signed by George Thomson. I’ve indexed Gow’s strathspeys and reels. And yesterday I blogged about James Davie and his Caledonian Repository.
But I’ve also just enjoyed handling the music, because sometimes one finds some endearingly human evidence of the scores being used, even to the point of needing mending. It’s quite touching to ponder how much a piece had been used, before it actually needed stitching – here, along a line where the edge of the printer’s block had originally left a dent in the paper:-
Stitched on one side, pasted on the other!
I’ve smiled at Georgian ladies’ stitched repairs to much-loved pieces, noticed with amusement a handful of early Mozart Allan books (yes, including some strathspeys and reels) in a fin-de-siecle Sammelband which had seen better days; spotted piano fingerings pencilled in; and best of all, found a tartan ribbon in a volume dedicated to the Duke of Sussex – his personal copy, which was first sold out of the family’s possession in 1844. His library was dispersed after he died in straitened financial circumstances:-
Nine Scots Songs and three Duetts, newly arranged with a harp or piano forte accompaniment / by P. Anthony Corri
This book has the Duke’s family crest on a label pasted inside, and the outer cover is embossed with ‘A F’ (Augustus Frederick), reflecting the monogram on the title page.
The Duke of Sussex’s mongramAugustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (1773-1843)
The tartan endpapers and tartan ribbon between pp.30-31 are a perfect illustration of what I have written about in a chapter on tartanry in my forthcoming monograph. Everyone – whether nobility or commoner – liked a bit of tartan on or inside their Scottish song books, and here, someone even found a bit of tartan ribbon to use as a bookmark.
I have just a few of those books left to catalogue now. There’s an intriguing one without a cover or title page, waiting for 9 am on Monday …! Hopefully, I’ll end up with an empty bookcase again.
Few people in Glasgow knew that I had an unfinished first PhD guiltily lurking in my past, when I announced I wanted to do a PhD. It would actually be my second attempt. I’m told that someone (an academic?) asked that memorable and somewhat hurtful question, ‘What does a librarian want with a PhD, anyway?’
Chained to the shelves – Wimborne Minster Chained Library (Wikipedia)
I realised with a jolt, yesterday morning, that I would be retiring from librarianship exactly fifteen years to the day, since I submitted my thesis to the University of Glasgow. I never managed to cease being a librarian in order to become a full-time academic, because I had family responsibilities in Glasgow, and the chances of a full career-change without relocation were limited, to say the least. However, if I entered librarianship with the unfulfilled expectation of soon having a PhD from Exeter, and the aspiration to become a scholar-librarian …. well, I did achieve the latter aspiration. After getting the Glasgow PhD, I became partially seconded to research three years later, and I’ll continue as a part-time researcher when I’m unshackled from the library shelves.
I don’t know who it was that queried whether a librarian actually needed a PhD, more than twenty years ago. It’s probably a good thing I don’t know! However, if I could show that individual how I’ve just spent my afternoon, then maybe they’d begin to understand.
The other day, an academic colleague said they were putting a student in touch with me, to advise them about resources for a project. This afternoon, I was working from home as a librarian, so I decided to spend the time finding suitable resources for my enquirer. I had in mind a lever-arch file from my own research activities, that I knew was in my study-alcove.
Subject Specialist
[Scottish] ResearchFish
The more I thought about the query, the more things I thought of suggesting. I looked at my own monograph, for a start, along with a couple of essay collections that I’ve contributed to. I compiled a list, mostly but not entirely from the library catalogue. (I tweaked a few catalogue entries whilst I was at it. What does an academic want with a library qualification?, one might ask!) I The family balefully eyed the dining-room table that they were hoping to eat off, as I moved aside the ancient and modern books that were gaily strewn across its surface. However, I’m fairly content that I’ve done my preparation to help with the query. I’ve also enjoyed an afternoon in the company of old friends – the compilers, authors and editors of all those books!
A Value-Added Librarian
Listen, I wouldn’t have known any of those resources if I hadn’t done that PhD. I wouldn’t have known what the arguments were. I wouldn’t have known how nineteenth and early twentieth century song-collectors viewed their collections, nor the metaphors they used to describe them, nor which collections might be of particular interest. I wouldn’t subsequently have collaborated on The Historical Music of Scotland database. And if I hadn’t gone on researching, I wouldn’t have known about some of the more recent materials, either.
I kennt his faither! (A Scot knows what that means)
There might have been times when others wondered who I thought I was, but I am absolutely certain that it has come in useful!
I’ve linked to this on my Publications page as a permanent record, but if you’re interested, you can see my talk on YouTube now:-
Engagement activity: RCS Exchange Talk, Monday 29 January 2024: ‘From Magic Lantern to Microphone: the Scottish Music Publishers and Pedagogues inspiring Hearts and Minds through Song’ – YouTube recording
George Alexander Lee published this ‘Scottish song’ in America with A. Fleetwood in New York ca. 1830, whilst this London publication by Alex. Lee & Lee is estimated at 1832 by the National Library of Scotland.
I’ve been wondering how old the expression ‘Bonnie Scotland’ actually is – certainly, this song is sixty years older than the alleged instance in the novel cited on LiveBreatheScotland.com. (I did a search and found ‘bonnie’ but not ‘bonnie Scotland’, so I won’t perpetuate the apparent fallacy by naming the book.)
Has anyone encountered the expression prior to 1830? A friend has suggested the date would be consistent with the years between George IV’s trip to Scotland and before Victoria and Albert’s later acquisition of Balmoral.
National Pride and Expats: Scottish themed songs in the Diaspora
A bit of early morning Googling does suggest that the phrase has been popular with visitors and nostalgic expats. Am I right in reaching this conclusion? The fact that the ostensibly Scottish song was first published in New York and London, not Edinburgh or Glasgow – would appear to bear this out. The song appears in Scottish publications a couple of decades later.
In the Lester S Levy Collection at Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries and University Museums
For your enjoyment, here’s a Victor recording of 1912, from the Library of Congress. (My understanding is that it is now in the public domain.)
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 