Scottish Traditional Music

 mr inmate and I have been having a chat, over on the comments on Evensong: The Chair about Scottish traditional music, and I thought you might like to have mr ishmael's views on the subject, bearing in mind that he was a bit of a musicologist, possessed of an elephantine musical memory and was an accomplished guitar and piano player. The first document was a letter to a Scottish newspaper, published 2004, following the news that an earnest  collector of Scottish folk music was requesting Government funding to continue his work:

Sirs,

Aside, perhaps, from its influence on the transcendent, eclectic virtuosity of Robin Williamson and Mike Heron’s Incredible String Band, there is nothing exceptional about Scottish traditional music. Compared with that of, say, Mali, Java, Madagascar, Kazakhstan, let alone the entire Indian sub continent – all of which snatch a divine harmony from the very air – it is a joyless discord of relentlessly repetitive, skriking fiddles, manically flashy squeeze boxes, dull as ditchwater guitar-strumming, bitterly wailing pipes and interminable, lamentatious doggerel howling, the whole grim cacophony probably rendered tolerable only by the mass inebriation of its adherents.

It would be an enrichment of mankind’s musical heritage were this caterwauling never to be heard again and it comes as no surprise that one of your correspondents was reduced to paying slave wages to those employed in its promotion and preservation.

Although gathered and catalogued by archivists such as Cecil Sharpe in Britain and Alan Lomax in the United States, traditional, or folk, music survives as a result of people’s affection for it – as performers and audience- and not by the public funding of self-appointed cultural guardians; it is the amateur enthusiasm in the absence of subsidy which validates a folk tradition. If the noises venerated by Mr. M. and many others are as meaningful as they claim, they will, like the Delta blues, survive, prosper and gain new devotees; if they are not, they will wither and, in this manse at least, the Lord will be praised.

Ishmael Smith,

The Manse, Scottish Isles

 

Response by Dr.  S., 2004, Ayrshire

Dear Mr. Smith,

Bravo, sir! I greatly enjoyed your letter in The Herald recently. I thoroughly applaud the sentiments and greatly admire your courage in going public with such non–PC comments. Here, on the mainland and in Ayrshire in particular, one would expect a public flogging for such remarks – which is why I haven’t responded to you through the newspaper!

I am a calligrapher and am always on the lookout for suitable text with which to practice my art. Please accept the enclosed token – a far from perfect result of half-an-hour at my computer and an hour’s embellishment – as a mark of respect. It is good to know that there are other people out there with a firm grasp on reality.

Maybe there are other sacred cows to which you may care to take your sacrificial sword!

 

 

IS THERE A CELTIC CONNECTION?  OR IS IT JUST MORE MARKETING? (11/03/2012)

For some years, now, BBC2 has been running a series of Transatlantic Session in which a basic band of vaguely traditional Scottish-Irish musicians joins forces with some visiting American dignitaries of the genre - some of them are quite magical but they are grown increasingly tedious;

 

 smirking, beardy fiddlers, manic pipers and an absolutely intolerable lap slide guitar player who, regardless of suitability or taste ladles his syrupy tones over absolutely everything, join ensemble with some long-tressed Kentucky singerbabe, just as doggone purty as a picture, 

 

 or a guitar-flailing Tennessean loon sporting a snuffler's beard, the whole cloying confection intercut with commercial ethnobabble about the Music and the Roots and about NoBarriers. Fucking horseshit, really, although it has been worth looking at just in case the late Kate McGarrigle

 or Mad Maestro Paul Brady - surely a cousin of Marty Kneecaps -

 

 or some such transcendent musical jewel made a brief, sparkling appearance.

The redeeming feature of this long-running series is that there is never an appearance by gibbering hobgoblin Jools Holland and his assorted headshrinkers and necromancers; that, in itself on a BBC2 music show, is a kindness.

No, laydeezangennulmen, don't laugh, I really can sing. And I have extremely eclectic musical tastes.

The loose underpinning of these jamborees is the supposed connection between (white) United States music and Scotland, the best part of England - y'know, nationalism. Scotland's great influence on the world, the ethnic cleansing of the US by murderous Scots, Paddies, Germans and all the Bible thumping riff-raff of Europe, of which Scotland and Ireland appear to be so proud. Sioux, Arapaho, Navajo, Cherokee, Iriqouis and Inuit, Celtic bandits have slaughtered them by the thousand, stole their lands, desecrated their sites, raped their women and children; Ah, but Jasus, the music. And sure the people was starvin' at home, so they were, so why not take stuff from the Redskins, now, dem being Godless heathen savages an all, so there are.

Alongside all this tedium there is an international marketing opportunity, or should I say grassroots movement, as people all over the world discover their Celtic connection and in the true spirit of traditional musicians everywhere, sign recording contracts and hope fervently for a cross-over, number one platinum album.

 I got in trouble - and a little acclaim - up here a while back for publicly  lambasting  the rapacious juggernaut arts movement in Scotland.  Here, and especially  so the further North you go, any smirking wee Fiona sawing at a tuneless fiddle is a maestro-in waiting;  any sourfaced crow singing unaccompanied in Gaelic  a fifteen-verse dirge about hanging or murder or betrayal - some Fathomless Grievance Blues - anyone, in fact, who, lacking taste or modesty, gets up and makes a noise in front of others deserves public subsidy, because, like the horsebeaters in BigFatPikeyWeddings, what they are doing is traditional.  Not while old people are cold, ventured I. And anyway, most of it is shite;  those awful accordions, Jesus fucking wept. And what is  good will survive and flourish without subsidy, like the Delta Blues.  Some were delighted at my heresy, others wounded deep in their morbid souls.
 

  I shrink, therefore, from Scottish traditional music, especially performed by professional ego-tripping ponces and slappers. And I retreat even further from the overseas varieties, from Canucks claiming some spurious ancestral connection to the  banks and  braes o' bonny Doon; from Kentuckians to Tennesseans blethering about Wicklow and Clare.  The only good things to come from that hillbilly region were the Everly Brothers and Dolly Parton.