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 written by John Lowe in the late 18th century, in which a bereaved Scottish girl has a visitation from her dead fiance’s ghost; it was written 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’:-
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.
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.
Whilst I had intended to conduct perhaps 50 interviews in connection with my Leng Medal Memories research, I haven’t amassed quite that many – but the interviews have generally been nearer to 30 minutes than the 15 minutes that I innocently projected, so I’ve probably got easily as many recorded minutes as I initially aimed for!
As I mentioned last week, I’ve been editing my interview transcriptions, and correcting any auto-correct infelicities. (Teams and TurboScribe both struggle a little with Scottish place-names and song titles.) One of my interviewees sang, ‘O Gin I were Whar’ Gadie Rins’ in the late 1960s. I knew the name of the song, but I couldn’t put a tune to it, so I Googled it. (As you do!) Spellings vary – as you’ll see.
Well, I found Kenneth McKellar singing it with a small classical chamber ensemble. (Lovely bassoon part, I must say.) The YouTube version was a 1995 Lismore remastered recording. I haven’t tried to establish the original date, though I believe it was recorded for the BBC in the late 1950s or early 1960s. But this setting was so delicate and precise that it was hard to imagine a youngster of eleven or twelve singing it quite like this. Quite apart from the fact that the Leng Medal competition has always been unaccompanied!
My next dip into YouTube found tutor Irene Ross talking about it and then singing it, with a ukelele, for Feis Rois followers. This is livelier and more authentic, but perhaps just a wee bit more ‘folky’ than might have been performed at a music competition by children of my own generation. But I could be wrong!
However, if the folk sound is what you’re looking for, then that interpretation is itself quite sedate compared to an invigorating 1999 recording by the Old Blind Dogs! Actually, I love this – one of my great frustrations in life is that I’ve been so embedded in the more classical side of music-making that I can only enjoy listening to this and would have huge difficulty trying to sing or play in anything like this idiom. I’d love to – but I can’t!
Oh well, I have to get back to these transcriptions, so I’ll stop here for now. Energised, you might say!
Image: Stanley Howe / Upstream Gadie Burn, from Wikimedia.
My Leng Medal Memories research is funded by an Athenaeum Award from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
The advertisements in this little poetry booklet would be called ‘paratext’ by book historians. Paratext is anything around the text that forms the main body of a book. So the title page, index, contents pages, a preface or introduction – or advertisements for other publications – all count as paratext. It tells us more about the motivation of a publisher, what else they were publishing around the same time, and what they thought their readers would be interested in.
This was how John Leng & Co., of Dundee and Fleet Street, London, advertised their new booklet in The Forfar Herald on Friday 20 January 1905:-
“THE SONGS OF Burns.—Messrs John Leng & Co., Ltd., have in their latest penny booklet, entitled The Songs of Burns, published what should be specially attractive to many at this time of the year, in view of the approaching anniversary of Burns’ birthday. Most of the well-known songs are included, and an alphabetical table of contents is also printed. It is a good pennyworth.”
That one penny (one-twelfth of today’s modern 5p and equating to about 55p using the Bank of England’s Inflation Calculator), was certainly affordable! The Songs of Burns was sensibly and conveniently published just before Burns’ Day – 48 pages including an index and a full page advertisement for another of their publications.
It’s just a book of verses – no music. It was intended to be a companion to an earlier collection, The People’s Penny Burns (‘a splendid selection from the poems of Scotland’s national bard’), the same size and price.
No surprises as to the contents, then, but what caught my eye was actually the column advertisements. The publishers wasted no opportunity to advertise other publications that the reader might find interesting! Skimming through them enables us to profile the readership very clearly: largely women, concerned with feeding, clothing and amusing their families, and looking after the household pets. ‘Aunt Kate’ was the branding John Leng used for many such publications – a homely and mature voice that readers could trust.
Meanwhile, women are advised that their menfolk should buy a booklet on effective reading, writing and debating. Of all the advertisements in this particular booklet, that’s the only ad for a title specifically aimed at men:-
How to read, write, and debate …
We have no wi-fi today, so I’m going to stop here for now. When I return, we’ll have a paratextual wander through the 48 pages of John Leng’s The Songs of Burns, and I’ll show you how Leng did their advertising!
(Contextual note: If you’re not well up on newspaper publishing history, I should explain that D C Thomson later acquired John Leng & Co. Ltd, so there’s a direct lineage to today’s The People’s Friend, Sunday Post and Scots Magazine. The People’sFriend goes back a very long way.)
Yesterday morning’s organ music just had to be topical. To our small but enthusiastic congregation’s approval, I included ‘Flower of Scotland’, ‘Loch Lomond’, ‘Caledonia’, ‘500 miles’, ‘Highland Cathedral’ (not really Scottish, but much-loved all the same), and I managed something along the lines of ‘Never Stopped Dreaming’, the new World Cup anthem by Skerryvore.
Just a quick post today – I realised that I do actually possess all three of the Scottish song books that have been awarded to Leng Gold medallists over the years. They make a pleasing display!
Mozart Allan’s Morven was awarded for many years. First published in 1890, it lived on for an incredibly long time, and is still valued by those who own it. I have spoken with winners a little younger than myself, who still have their copy of this book. (I have a hunch that Mozart Allan’s sister Euphemia may have had a hand in this publication. (See my recent RMA Research Chronicle article for more on this!*)
The next book prize was a Paterson book, J. Michael Diack’s Scottish Orpheus Collection, which actually goes back to 1922. (There had in fact been an earlier edition, resulting in Diack’s book being called the New Scottish Orpheus in some imprints.)
And lastly came Royal Scottish Academy of Music graduate Wilma Paterson and artist/author Alasdair Gray’s collaboration, their lavish Songs of Scotland (Mainstream Publishing, 1996), which is certainly amongst the most artistically pleasing modern collections that I’ve seen. Early winners of this one got a signed copy.
New Page about the Leng Medal Memories project
I’ve just made a new ‘Leng Medal Memories‘ page for this website – do take a look.
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 