I was surprised, last night, to realise that I hadn’t blogged about William Moodie on this blog. The explanation turns out to be very simple: I blogged about him on Whittaker Live, the library blog that I ran for a couple of decades before I retired from the Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Click here to read all about him!

Why He Matters

• He was a music teacher at Glasgow Normal School – the forerunner of Jordanhill Teacher Training College.
• He did the first service of song for Wee Davie, a moral tale by a Glasgow minister, Revd. Norman McLeod – and this ‘service of song’ was Bayley & Ferguson’s first known music publication.
• Services of song were often accompanied by magic lantern show. You could argue that this was early ‘audiovisual’ media – projected pictures to watch whilst a story was read and hymns or songs were sung.