Alec Finlay: the ‘Pocket Harry Lauder’

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

This blog post is an edited excerpt from the research Exchange Talk I gave at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on 11 November 2024.

Inside the song-book, The Glories of Scotland, the foreword was followed by a full-page signed photo of a popular Scottish singer and comedian, Alec Finlay. The University of Glasgow’s Scottish Theatre Archive, characterises the latter as, ‘The pocket Harry Lauder’, and ‘Scotland’s gentleman’, describing his comedy as, ‘delightful, couthie and kindly’.

His was an international variety act; significantly, he toured America in late 1950.

If he was known as the ‘pocket Harry Lauder’, it was for a logical reason: a colleague of mine pointed out that Finlay, who clearly modelled his act on the variety superstar, Harry Lauder, even went so far as dressing like him, ‘wiggly stick’ and all.

Harry Lauder, from Wikiwand.com

A song is linked to the signed photograph of Alec Finlay at the front of the book. The photo is captioned ‘Scotland’s own comedian’, with Finlay in typical pose, full Highland dress, wiggly stick, and a blurred Scottish vista behind him. Beneath the photo, and alongside his signature, is the name of a song, ‘Let Scotland flourish’, composed and sung by Alec Finlay.

Sure enough, opposite a picture of Edinburgh’s Princes Street supplied by the Scottish Tourist Board, page 71 bears the words of the chorus – not the music, just the lyrics!:-

‘Let Scotland flourish / In all the years to be / The land that I was born in / Will aye be dear to me / Caledonia I adore you / Tho’ I travel the wide world o’er / My home is where my heart lies / Scotland ever more.’

It’s there, ‘by kind permission of Alec Finlay’, and it was written and composed by Bill McDonnell and Alec Finlay. At the foot of the page, we read that the ‘complete words, music and Solfa are available for 2/- from all music-sellers.’ It was published by Mozart Allan – who also published The Glories of Scotland.  The British cover appears at the top of this blog post.  (There was another for the overseas edition. )

‘Let Scotland flourish’ is a typical Scottish waltz of the era.  Finlay was a hit in America in 1950; and  selling the song as a single piece of music would make commercial sense.

In the recording of the song, published by Scottish Clan Records in New York, Finlay sings in the broad Scottish brogue that contemporary American listeners would have expected to hear.

YouTube audio – enjoy!

Dr Karen McAulay Exchange Talk and Book Launch at RCS, Glasgow 11 Nov 2024

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Looking forward to my Exchange Talk and Book Launch next Monday, I made a wee promotional video! Maybe I’ll see you there, if you’re in/around Glasgow.

Click to Book tickets

Click for The book’s details

Francis George Scott – Would he make it into your Music Case?

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

This post was originally written for the Whittaker Live library blog in July 2023.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about the Scottish song settings by Francis George Scott (1880-1958).  Opinions seemed to be divided about his output, but this composer – who for most of his career taught music at Jordanhill Teacher Training College in Glasgow – arranged and composed dozens and dozens of songs.  He worked […]

Francis George Scott – Would he make it into your Music Case?

The Sweetest Words (to an Author)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I just received an email containing the sweetest words!

“We will proceed with the final production and notify you when the book is delivered from our end.”

Does this mean – the End is Nigh?! (As far as my second monograph goes, at any rate!)

A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880–1951

Not long now!

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!

Meddle the Thistle Wha Daur! (Old Poem, New Thistle)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Thistle against a white wall with graffiti reading ;'Vibe'

Our neighbours have a high white wall. There’s a tall thistle growing there, and some young joker has scrawled above it, ‘VIBE’. I don’t know if they were consciously referencing the metaphor of a prickly thistle to represent Scottish, and most particularly, Glaswegian identity, but – hey, they wrote it directly right above that thistle, so who knows? I took a photo anyway – it was too good an opportunity to miss.

Every time I walk down the road or get into my car, there it is, and every time it reminds me of a poem by one of ‘my’ Scottish song-writers. He published his book of poems in 1894, and it’s well out of copyright, so I can share it with you. Just look at that last verse – there’s a proud, very nationalist Scot for you!

“I’m a Scot and I carena’ wha’ kens it, Juist meddle the thistle wha’ daur,

They’ll maybe get mair than they wantit, An Scotia be little the waur …”

To be honest, I’m more interested in the poet for his work as an Edinburgh music teacher, than as a poet or local historian, but it’s all part and parcel of who he was. Two different musicians set this song to music – one was really pretty uninspiring, but the other one’s not too bad! (Well… musically competent, not remotely ‘Scottish’ sounding, nor particularly memorable, but competent.)

The poet-teacher gets a significant mention in my forthcoming book, especially his views about children singing Scottish songs.

I have just sent the manuscript back to the editor with my own amendments to the copy-editing, so watch this space! Now to turn back to the question of the second index … which I drafted a few weeks ago, but which now needs fine-tuning before I get the proofs back to link my index-terms to the publisher’s page numbers!

Image by Ralph from Pixabay

Speed-Dating 40 Scottish Music Collectors in an Hour

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

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.

The song-books are all in the library. (Yes, including Blackie’s Scottish Song: its Wealth, Wisdom and Social Significance, 1889, and a modern reprint of Chambers’ The Songs of Scotland prior to Burns, with the Tunes, originally 1862.)

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!

Ramsay’s ‘The Gentle Shepherd’ Songs

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

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  The Gentle 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)
  • By the delicious warmness of thy mouth
  • Happy Clown (1st line: Hid from himself)
  • Leith Wynd (1st line: Were I assur’d)
  • O’er Bogie (1st line: Weel, I agree ye’re sure o’ me)
  • 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.

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!

Material Evidence of Use: Music that was Loved

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

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

Whittaker Library catalogue entry

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 mongram
Augustus 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.

What does a Librarian want with a PhD, anyway?

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

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!

‘Repugnant to Modern Feelings of Propriety’? The Most Beautiful Scottish Song

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

I’ve started listening to another Audible book, but it’ll take a while for me to finish it. To take a break from listening, I sidled over to the piano and played a one-eyed rendition of my favourite song.

Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament (Baloo, my Boy)

My Song Gems (Scots), edited by James Wood and Learmont Drysdale (London: Vincent Music Co., 1908), is a nice big score that sits comfortably on the piano stand. This song is arranged by Finlay Dun, a Victorian arranger. As I squinted at the words, they didn’t look like what I remembered hearing sung from Cedric Thorpe Davie and George McVicar’s The Oxford Scottish Song Book (1969). What was going on? I suspected Davie and McVicar had taken their words from George Farquhar Graham and James Wood’s mid-Victorian Songs of Scotland. ‘You’ll see’, I told my bemused son. ‘The words will have been too smutty for Victorian ears, so Graham and Wood changed them.’

Davie used their words – which were perfectly acceptable for a collection intended both for classroom and adult use – but his musical setting is updated.

A Deserted Mother and Child

Graham and Wood’s collection revealed in the footnotes that it was an old ballad collected by Bishop Percy. However, Graham said that …

The Old Ballad, though poetically meritorious, is so coarse in most of its stanzas as to be repugnant to modern feelings of propriety. We have, therefore, adopted only the first stanza of it, the additional stanzas here given having been written by a friend of the Publisher.

Songs of Scotland (Edinburgh: Wood & Co., 1850), Vol.2, pp.30-31

Percy’s original version is in the National Library of Scotland’s Digital Gallery (Reliques of Ancient Poetry, 1767). Today, the lyrics are inoffensive!

And here’s the Cedric Thorpe Davie setting using Graham and Wood’s sanitized words:-

Kathleen McKellar Ferguson sings the Oxford Scottish Song Book version, divinely, here on YouTube

The Song Gems (Scots) version is in modern English and the text has been partially rewritten again –  it falls halfway between the original and the sanitized words! And the musical arrangement? Straight from Graham and Wood’s collection.

Percy, verse 3: Smile not as thy father did, to cozen maids, nay God forbid / Bot yett I feire, thou wilt gae neire Thy fatheris hart, and face to beire.

Wood and Drysdale, verse 2: Smile not as thy father did, to cozen maids, may God forbid / For in thine eye his look I see, The tempting look that ruin’d me …

Olde English or modern, take your pick!

As for Graham and Wood, or Thorpe and McVicar? Not a ruinous smile to be be seen! The lady may have been deserted, but no hint that she had first been seduced!