Patriot Songs

Come along, come along, let us foot it out together
Come along, come along, be it fair or stormy weather
With the hills of home before us and the purple of the heather
Let us sing in happy chorus, Come along, come along
Uist Tramping Song, as sung by Margaret Kellock

In the later 1950s the third of the architects of the Scots Folk Song Revival came to the fore. Norman Buchan spoke, organised, formed the Reivers group, wrote and published. Scots folk performers began to appear on television, and another influential lyric booklet appeared, Patriot Songs.

One Hogmanay, at Glesca Fair
There was me, masel and sev’ral mair
We aa went aff tae hae a tear
And spend the nicht in Rothesay o
We wandered through the Broomielaw
Through wind and rain and sleet and snaw
And at forty meenits aifter twa
We got the length o Rothesay o
The Day We Went To Rothesay O, as sung by John McEvoy

There lived three brothers in merry Scotland, in merry Scotland there were three
And they did cast lots which of them should turn robber, turn robber, turn robber
Who should turn robber all on the salt sea
Henry Martin, traditional

Young Michael Grieve they’ve latten oot, Tan-tee-ree-orum
He wadna wear thir Karkee suit, he widna mak thir quorum
Thir bobbies taen him aff tae jile, Barlinnie, Saughton, aa in style
They’ll cry mair kilties up it’s true, but no if Scotland rises noo
Grieves Galorum, tune Soutar’s Feast, words Thurso Berwick

Ian Davison remembers, “I met Norman Buchan, when he gave a lecture [in 1957] in a ward meeting of the Labour Party in the Partick Burgh Hall. He had a connection with the school I was at, his son was there, and he gave a famous lecture there that is often referred to, as influential for a lot of later folksingers. The key moment at the ward meeting, a debating point, was when he invited us to look around the room, and said, "Do you notice that there's anything missing in this room?" The thing missing was electric plug points.
“He was saying that the normal expectation of political and community groups is that you meet and people talk at you, and you talk back at them. It's all talk. They don't think that you might want to play a track from a record, or show a picture that you've painted. There's no concept of culture in the politics. He was quite tight with the Weskers, who were pushing this down south, trying to organise theatre groups, and write left wing plays. Which my father and mother had done with amateur and semi professional groups long before that, but in a more old fashioned way.
“It was Norman Buchan who made me realise that others were thinking the same thing, that politics was bloody boring, the way it was conducted, and it had to become more cultural. The power of the press, there ought to be not just left wing newspapers. There should be left wing magazines that were more entertaining than newspapers. “The Buchans were keen to promote song, and drama, and everything.” Ian Davison

By Clyde’s bonny banks as I sadly did wander, among the pit heaps as evening drew nigh
I spied a fair maiden all dressed in deep mourning. a weeping and wailing with many a sigh
The Blantyre Explosion, as sung by Rena Swankie

The Buchans gave support, encouragement and songs to young singers like Archie Fisher and the author, and ran influential folk concerts in Rutherglen. Buchan began a song column in the ‘Weekly Scotsman’, each week bringing to hungry youngsters the tune and lyric of an old song. He also began a folk song Ballads Club in the school where he taught, Rutherglen Academy; among his pupils who became Revival singers were Gordeanna McCulloch and Ann Neilson, who tells about the early days of the club later. The club was initially run by Buchan alone, then jointly by him and Ian Davison, then by Davison alone, then by Davison and Adam McNaughtan, and then by McNaughtan on his own.
Skiffle music had put guitars in the hands of young Britain. In January 1956 Lonnie Donegan and his Skiffle Group first entered the Hit Parade with ‘Rock Island Line’. Skiffle groups mushroomed around the land, singing a mixture of traditional American folk songs, blues and country songs in unison and strumming strings with a minimum of finesse and much enthusiasm. Donegan introduced songs of Woody Guthrie, and enthusiasts trailed Donegan’s US sources back home through recordings and printed sources, while also beginning to realise the wealth of traditional Scots song around them, and working out how to accompany songs with more than rhythmic chording. Alan Lomax and Ewan MacColl fed the kindling fire with recordings and BBC broadcasts. Pioneer performers on Scotland’s broadcast media were the Reivers group - Moyna Flanigan, Enoch Kent, Josh McRae, Rena Swankie, all playing guitars.

Oh, good morning til youse Glasgow boys, I’m glad to see youse well, for I’m just as self conceited as any tongue can tell.
Oh, I’ve got a situation, or-a-be-gob a fancy job, I can whisper I’ve the weekly wage of eighteen bob.
It’s a twelve-month now come Easter since I left Glenory town, along with my brother Barney for to mow the harvest down,
Ah, but now I wear a garnsey and around my waist a belt, for I’m gaffer o’er the boys that makes the hot asphalt.
Hot Asphalt

They were resident folk singers on Scottish Television’s ‘Jigtime’ programme. Norman Buchan was instrumental in obtaining this exposure and getting the four solo singers to present themselves as a group. On British national BBC TV, the ‘Tonight’ early evening programme featured two Scots duos. Robin Hall and Jimmy Macgregor, who were proteges of Morris Blythman, and brothers Rory and Alex McEwan. Sister and brother Ray and Archie Fisher sang on a local STV tea time television news programme.
Down in London Ewan MacColl and others were developing the concept of a folk club, then termed Ballads and Blues. MacColl came to Glasgow for a late 1950s Ballads and Blues concert in the Iona Community, where Josh McRae was cheered on by the local crowd but reportedly quietly dismissed by MacColl as a tartan cowboy. Out on the stairs Archie Fisher was getting instrumental tips from American Ralph Rinzler.
The Reivers disbanded after two years. The dangers of accepting what reference books assert is highlighted by what ‘The Great Scots Musicography’ has to say about the group, that the members were Macrae, Norman Buchan “and – it was thought - Ewan MacColl”. Flanagan had left earlier, then Kent emigrated to Canada, and Josh McRae became a solo singer again, and his several recordings had some chart success. He was a key member of the Glasgow Eskimos.
“Josh and Morris [Blythman] were twin souls, absolutely. They just complemented each other. Josh was not a songwriter, but he was a great interpreter of songs. He sang all the songs that Morris wrote and publicised them. And sometimes got punched on the jaw for it!” Marion Blythman
An initial political motivation for encouraging young people to investigate and adopt aspects of their own song culture had come in part from ex-members of the Communist Party. These had first taken an interest for ideological reasons of supporting indigenous culture rather than ‘commercial American pap’, but were seduced by the songs and music.

An as I cam in by Auchendoun, just a little wee bit frae the toon
Intae the Hielans I was bound tae view the Haughs o’ Cromdale
The Haughs o’ Cromdale, traditional

Along-side, or separately from the developing enthusiasm for traditional song, poets plied their wordskills to pound home political points. There is an ongoing tradition of creating topical political lyrics using popular tunes of the day or traditional airs, well shown in two 1956 cyclostyled issues of ‘The Rhyming Reasoner, A Journal of Indiscretion, edited by W. McGonagall, Elysian Fields, N.’ Mr McGonagall roundly lambasts his Communist Party comrades by first name or initial and bastes Party personalities, policies and actions from the inside, telling “Marxist stories that you’ve never heard before”.

From ‘The Rhyming Reasoner’
B. and K. were travellers, the greatest ever seen,
they travelled up to Windsor to see the Duke and Queen
The Duke now sells the ‘Worker’ every day along the Mall,
And the Queen is Party Organiser in the servants’ hall
The Comrades’ One-Day School, tune: The Darkies’ Sunday School
They passed a resolution tae gie the rebels hell,
An’ exorcised ‘The Reasoner’ wi’ candle, book and bell
Then up spake John an’ Edward, wi a voice as bold as brass,
“We don’t want your resolution, you can throw it in the grass”
The Ballad O ‘The Reasoner’, tune: The Ball of Kirriemuir

Around 1958 another chapbook-like booklet of song lyrics was published, dateable by the Preface mentions of the Reivers and skiffle music. Published by the Bo’ness Rebels Literary Society, ‘Patriot Songs for Camp and Ceilidh’ offers the lyrics of “35 ceilidh songs: Scots bothy ballads, industrial songs, patriotic and battle songs, songs of the sea and of our working loons, Irish songs and songs of bonnie lassies."
Why Camp? In the Preface, Hugh MacDonald writes that Scots and Irish songs learned from his parents “like a rudder and a fair wind” steered him into Fianna na-h-Alba (the League of Young Scots). “There a new world opened up. Around the Fianna campfires the history of our country, denied me at school, came sharply into focus in the songs we sang at the weekends.” Hugh Campbell
At the time troupes of young city folk like the Nomads of Chapter 2, a few toting guitars or other instruments, caught buses out to the countryside on a Friday after their work or school, hiked and camped or stayed in youth hostels or bothies, and returned refreshed on Sunday night.
The ‘Patriot Songs’ booklet bears no names of editors, but was surely the joint work of Willie Kellock and Morris Blythman. Many others are also named and thanked for help, and most of the songs are marked ‘as sung by’ a particular performer. The song list mixes old and new, traditional gems and Kennedy Fraser confections.

O Stuart was a Commissar in High Saint Andra’s Hoose, but a tinkle on the telephone frae Lizzie’s made him douce
‘Gae tak a sea-trip Jimmy lad, tae speir ma friens oot-bye, tak lollies fur the Auld Wives and lie-cake fur the Kye’
Whitehall, Blackhall, everybody come, join the Rocket-Racketeers and let them have their fun
Bring your Dumpy levels and Theodolites galore, if there’s nae room on the Machar - juist tak ower the Croft next door!
Bally Rocket, tune Johnson’s Motor Car or The Darkies’ Sunday School, words Uilleam Beag

A few of the other lyrics are also modern political songs. ‘The Scottish Volunteers’ and ‘Johnnie Destinie-O’ are both Thurso Berwick products, late ‘Sangs o the Stane’. In the first verse Blythman nails his heroes’ names to the mast, “Wallace, Muir and John Maclean, An him the yin that taen the stane”. Later on Blythman calls for the Fiery Cross to raise Scotland and resist conscription for foreign wars, “No a single Jock is gaen, To fecht a fecht that’s no oor ain”.
Uilleam Beag’s ‘The Ballad of Bally Rocket' makes fierce fun at length of the siting of a rocket testing range on South Uist, and the determined resistance, naming supporters and opponents of the plan. Some less immediate political songs are also there. ‘Erin Go Bragh’, ‘Scots Wha Hae’, the patriotic bragging of ‘The Thistle of Scotland’, and the overwrought ‘The Sons of Glencoe’.
Four of the ‘Patriot Songs’ are Irish, and three of these are political. Two ‘Patriot Songs’ are in Gaelic. Others are derived through the manipulations of Anglifiers from Gaelic song. One is that odd hybrid, the ‘Skye Boat Song’, words by late 19th Century Englishman Sir Harold Boulton, tune from a Gaelic rowing air.
The other songs are ‘traditional’ or national in nature. There are a couple about alcohol, with one interloper from American country music and one US reworking of an old ballad of Scots piracy. The booklet finishes with ‘Auld Lang Syne’, another song with multiple parentage.
Robert Burns wrote to George Thomson “The air is but mediocre; but the following song, the old song of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man’s singing; is enough to recommend any air.”The tune usually sung at New Year is not Burns’ ‘mediocre’ one, but another called ‘The Miller’s Wedding’, which was substituted when the song was printed in ‘The Scots Musical Museum’. In the 1990s Scots folk singers began with great pleasure to sing the song to the original tune Burns had found lacking in quality. Though Burns says the song had never been in print, in 1711 a ballad, ‘Old Lang Syne’ had been printed with substantially the same first verse and chorus, and other basic elements of the lyric have been traced in print and in various manuscripts, for example the following.

Should auld acquantence be forgot, and never thought upon
The flames of love extinguished and freely past and gone?
Is thy kind heart now grown so cold in that loving breast of thine
That thou canst never once reflect on old-lang-syne
Probably written by Sir Robert Ayton (1570-1638)