SONGMAKERS AND SINGERS, SONG MAKING AND SINGING

Some readers may expect this chapter to concentrate on the well known professional performing interpreters of Scottish political song, but this book’s business is more with the makers and making of the songs, the groupings and the settings where the songs were made and sung. The preceding chapters have told in part a chronological story up until 1999, in part the background and history of various kinds of Scots political song. This chapter goes into more detail, often in their own words, about many of the key people and their approaches and values.

ARTHUR ARGO

“Arthur’s biggest contribution was I think that he understood that the folk songs of the North East were gold. They weren’t just about the North East, there was a global context. He understood that songs [American] Jean Ritchie sang were a direct link back to Scotland, none of us knew that. Arthur went to America, I think he met Dylan. He brought over Doc Watson, Brownie and Sonnie. He understood the different threads and the international links. [Englishman] Bert Lloyd also understood this, but it was great to have Arthur, one of our ain loons, who understood this. He started an agency, he got Aly Bain doon frae Shetland. Politically, he was left when he talked to me but because he was a journalist, for the Press and Journal, he stepped back.” Danny Couper

MORRIS BLYTHMAN

“It’s a simple fact that Morris Blythman was one of the people who changed the whole course of my life, and it’s no exaggeration to say that Scottish music would not be the same without the influence he exerted. His work lives and continues to change and grow.” Jimmie Macgregor
The author’s own interest in Scots political song originates in the coincidence that at the age of 14 I encountered Morris Blythman as a schoolteacher. In issue 32 of ‘Chapman’ magazine, in his long and excellently illustrated article ’Songs For A Scottish Republic’, Adam McNaughtan analyses Blythman’s songmaking closely. He notes that Blythman, other than ‘occasional’ songs for social events, wrote only three non-political songs.“The songs are ephemeral and were never regarded otherwise by their author. My pleasure [in the ‘Sangs o’ the Stane’] depends not solely on the songwriter’s art but also on my familiarity with the events and people dealt with. And it is here that the songs remain important even when they cease to be sung. For they express opinions and attitudes which are satisfactorily recorded nowhere else; they convey better than any other source the moods of the time: the Scottish glee at English discomfiture over the Stane; the exuberance of the Anti-Polaris campaigners. In the songs of Morris Blythman we can hear the voice of the people.” Adam McNaughtan

ERIC BOGLE

My first political stirrings were back in the CND days, we all went on the marches. The Eskimo songs made us feel more unified. That’s the purpose they serve, and the context. I started off in Peebles, which wasn’t a terribly political hotbed. But like a lot of young Scots when the Yanks put Polaris submarines in the Holy Loch I began to take more notice of what was going on. ‘We Shall Overcome’ - we owned those songs because we all sang them together.
The people I met through the songs, not so much the songs themselves, helped develop my political thinking and awareness. The songs themselves, a few lines make you think, but the discussions with people and the books that people recommend, they really get you thinking. The songs led me to the people.
People always seem to shove labels on everything. I’ve always thought of myself as a songwriter, not left, right, centrist, Scottish, Irish, Venusian. That people feel a sense of possession is a compliment in a way, that it speaks to them on a few levels, so they feel a sense of ownership.
When I’ve written the songs and sent them out into the wide world, I’ve never felt greatly possessive about them. Generally I don’t mind how people arrange them. Every version is valid within its own musical genre. The first impetuses to write songs were political and social, other influences came in later on. The bulk of my thrust is still, if not overtly political comment, certainly some social comment contained in a lot of them.
But I’ve tried not to be the haranguing type of songwriter, who hits people over the heid with the same message in every verse. I aim to leave enough room for people to make up their own minds. I write narrative songs. I’m not that good on descriptive ones. I can get into the skin of a thing better in narrative form. What I say is important to me. Whether it becomes important to anybody else is another point. Often the songs are a way of trying to explain to myself what is happening.
I never think of myself in terms of whether I write country, folk, whatever. My first love was of political song, not traditional Scottish song which I had dismissed holus bolus because it was shoved down our throat at school. I never made a conscious attempt to develop my own style, I wrote songs about what I felt strongly about, or what amused me. Life is about timing. My songs came along at the right time, at some other time they probably would not have had the effect they have. There was a hiatus between the rise of pop music that swamped everything else, and was good fun, then became big business and pissed people off, hence punk. Lots of folk turned from that to songs like mine with some sort of social comment and some sort of conscience. They were saying things that people wanted to say at that time, it was a matter of timing and luck. I’m not downgrading the quality of some of my songs.
This genre of music has no room for stars. The people who have gone before, the wealth of history and knowledge they have gifted to us is worth shouting about. We are just vessels, it’s a cliché, but the banner has been passed to us. We are keepers, trying to keep the flame alive, the banner aloft, some sense of bloody justice alive in the world, and add it on for the next generation. We write political songs, one of thousands who do it, just like the thousands before us who did it. We should be happy and proud to be part of that tradition. Australia is a very young country, we’re still forming our ethos, I am part of the forming process, of the bardic process, I’m contributing a bit and I like that, it’s a reward. Eric BogleI heard Eric Bogle's ‘Waltzing Matilda’ song sung by June Tabor at Inverness Festival, and there wasn't a dry eye in the place. Here we were all weeping about something we had never been part of. And I said to her, 'Where did you get that song?' She said 'I got it from a friend of the chap that wrote it'. And she never mentioned his name! I couldn't understand that.” Sheila Douglas

NORMAN AND JANEY BUCHAN

Norman Buchan was another of the three architects of the Scottish Folk Revival. Buchan’s writing of a song column in the ‘Weekly Scotsman’, then his editing of the books ‘101 Scottish Songs’ and ‘The Scottish Folksinger’, fuelled the repertoires of singers. Eventually Norman became an M.P. and Shadow Minister for the Arts, and Janey became an M.E.P. In 2001 Janey sponsored the creation of the Centre for Political Song in Glasgow Caledonian University.
The Buchans kept open house in Peel Street, Partick, Glasgow, for a stream of young singers seeking to learn songs from recordings and books. These included Archie Fisher, the author, and Ann Neilson.
“Norman Buchan was our English teacher. In about 1957 he put up notices saying he was going to have this Ballads Club, come along. I didn’t go to the first one, I had this terrible feeling he would fall flat on his face. He had sung in class, ‘The Dowie Dens of Yarrow’, which has a weird tune and we weren’t sure if it was right. Next day I asked the others in my class “What was it like?” “Oh, it was great, you should have been there!” “Yes, but what was it like?” “Oh, it was great, you should have been there!” So I had to go.
“We were given sheets with three songs on it. The first song on the first week was a ghastly American one, ‘Lollie Toodum’. “As I went out one morning to take the pleasant air”. I think the others were ‘Rothesay O’, and perhaps ‘The Worried Man Blues’, skiffle was going at the time, some of the others played guitars enough that we could access this material. We learned two or three new songs each week. Norman must have sung some of them to us. We had access to Room 16 every lunchtime, and practised there, sometimes Norman would play LPs or tapes to us. Eventually we put on a concert every Friday lunchtime, and occasionally Norman would take us out to a concert in a Women’s Guild or a literary society or something. Anybody who wanted to could come. In the early stages he would construct the programme, and introduce us, and through listening to the introductions we learned about the songs.
“Eventually we leaned how to construct a concert programme ourselves. Anybody who wanted to sing, sang. If they were not a good or competent singer they were encouraged into a small group to sing in unison. Everybody was valued, it was a very supportive and sharing community, we would roar our way through songs all lunch time, well away from the staffroom. Other staff would come in and do their special interests, Old Time Music Hall and others. Some of us went into Glasgow, to Collets, and bought the Rebel Ceilidh Song Books.
“We sang Sangs O The Stane and Holy Loch songs in Room 16, but not in concerts, we made a distinction. Gordeanna McCulloch came in to the Ballads Club later than me, she was in Fourth Year when I was in Sixth Year. Brian Miller was another Club member who is still singing. After Norman left to go into Parliament, the Ballads Club was taken on by Ian Davison, then Adam McNaughtan, who came as English teachers. Neither of them were pupils of Norman’s.
Janey was immensely supportive of Norman, and very hospitable when hordes of us were invited to descend on their house in Peel Street in Partick, or when I went to their house to listen to records and copy down lyrics. She never seemed to mind folk taking up residence in her front room.
“Later, she was very generous with her time and her money, keeping an eye out for something somebody would be interested in, buying books and not telling Norman how much they cost, and giving them to singers who would benefit from them. And she did most of the organising of many of the Glasgow 1950s Ballads and Blues concerts. She and Norman were a partnership, they each worked for the other.” Ann Neilson

The Centre for Political Song, to give it its full title, started in 2001. It was really the idea of Janey Buchan. We started to have contact with Janey in 1994 when after the death of her husband Norman, she contacted us about putting some of their books and records etc into the University, and that really started us on what became research collections.
“Janey’s was the first special collection we had. Being Janey and Norman, it was a very eclectic collection, but obviously centred on left-wing politics, activism, human rights, culture and song, mostly to do with the Left. Research collections then developed given that lead, and like attracts like. We soon built up a considerable collection of archives and books.
“Then in 2001 Janey, with whom we were working very closely over this period, came up with the idea of starting a centre for political song. She always said that she had become aware that the archives and libraries she visited everywhere she went, all had examples of political song being collected in one form or another. But there was no collection of political song per se and certainly no centre to promote research or particularly focus on political song.” John Powles
In August 2002, a sequence of eight concerts was devised by Janey Buchan, Adam McNaughtan and Anne Neilson, part of the Edinburgh International Festival, ‘Them and Us, Scottish Political Song’. The themes included Scabrous Song, Jacobites, Land, All Faiths And None, Freedom, McGinn, MacColl and Henderson, and Campaigns and Causes.

ROBERT BURNS

“By [the 1860s] a moving force in drawing crowds to events celebrating Burns appears to have been Burns-inspired Scottish nationalism… Thus in Glasgow in January 1877, when the waiting crowd gathering in sleet-showered George Square for the unveiling of the new Burns statue was entertained by what was described as ‘a party of vocalists’ who from a warehouse sang Burns’ songs, with the loudest cheers accorded to an anonymous woman who, at the top of her voice, sang ‘Scots Wha Hae’. Equally telling testimony to the same sentiment was the presence in 1896 in a procession in Dumfries of the centenary of Burns’ death, of an old Chartist flag, with the inscription ‘Scotland shall be free’, while another banner carried the uncompromising words, ‘Now’s the Time and Now’s the Hour’.” Professor Christopher A Whatley, in a book in preparation

DAVID CAMPBELL

The BBC tried to be even-handed, at the same time it took a very Presbyterian moral stance. Duncan Williamson said that some verses of his camping grounds song the BBC would not broadcast. The BBC is always interested in balance, I would see the balance being put is by making programmes with different voices, to indicate phenomenon. I remember talking to Hamish Henderson a long time ago, when I was working in BBC, he attacked me vigorously because the BBC consistently in Scotland ignored Scottish song – as if the whole of the Revival did not exist.
I got into trouble about choosing newsreaders who spoke entirely in RP. I said so in children’s educational radio, I criticised that voice. I was doing a schools programme called Scottish Magazine, for twelve year olds. There was a huge stramash. People responded with ‘don’t invade us with gutter English’ when dealing with a Scots dialect. It was a BBC attitude, are we being parochial and couthy and kailyard? There was a timidity, and a sense of inferiority. Burns was the token exception, twice a year – Burns Night and Hogmanay. You didn’t hear Hamish Henderson, a giant.
Stuart McGregor was a very passionate patriot, very politically aligned to Scotland’s culture and independence, a nationalist. He really initiated the Heretics idea. He talked to me in Milne’s Bar and asked me to come along, I read from ‘Scots Quair’. His idea was to give a voice to Scotland, its big poets, its developing ones, its singers and musicians, a cultural voice. Politics to me is to do with the people. It should not be aligned to parties, should be how you try to look after the people. Songs and stories re heart, all one family.
There were from time to time people with strong political views, Sorley MacLean had strong views, the Spanish Civil War occupied him hugely, he was a strong socialist. Largely speaking it was more the artistry, and to give a Scottish voice, which is a political statement. There were monthly meetings promoting Scottish voices, in the New Town Hotel. We would have a leading Scottish poet and an established musician, say Billy Connolly or Aly Bain, plus the ducklings – Liz Lochhead, Bernard McLaverty. We also ran Festival themes shows. Then often a ceilidh back at my flat. They ran from the beginning of the ‘70s. David Campbell

DANNY COUPER

An interesting thing, in the 80s the folk festivals was starting tae blossom, bands starting up, [older singers like] Willie Scott and Belle Stewart were not getting gigs. I was in Shetland wi Archie Fisher who was running Edinburgh Folk Festival. I said I’ll sponsor a concert, form a small committee, choose all unaccompanied singers. We’ll call it the Arthur Argo Memorial Concert. We ran it for ten years, people like Jane Turriff, English singers, singers from Ireland. Suddenly I got a feeling that some Revival performers wernae speekin tae me – what have ah done? It was all got to do with I’d not invited them to sing or play. I didn’t get a chance tae explain to them that this is what Arthur would have wanted, he was a collector as well as a singer and organiser. He would have wanted people to go up and just be able to sing. Professional folk performers, they do weekends and get big money for it, these unaccompanied singers do not, you surely canny get annoyed about it? Now the unaccompanied format happens at all festivals, though the old source singers have passed on.
Arthur Argo and Hamish Henderson made me aware about unaccompanied singing. Not just the singing. You can get songs out a book, words, melody, and anyone can sing a folk song, but ye canny get the style. That’s what Arthur appreciated. I remember talking to him aboot it. He explained it something like the visual arts and the performing arts. Visual arts you can go back a thousand years and see the work of artists, with the oral tradition you can not. Except for the travellers, because they have continuity and integrity in how they sing. So I tried to get as many travellers as possible singing in the Arthur Argo Memorial concerts. In the performance arts you can only go back so far. In workshops I say to singers ”Go back as far as you can, and listen.”
At Whitby I heard a young Irish gypsy guy, his singing was a cross between Joe Heaney and Margaret Barry. I sang ‘Doomsday in the Afternoon’, and told the story of John McCreadie making the song after hearing Belle Stewart’s answer to how long the travellers would be with us – “Til doomsday in the afternoon”. The Irish guy said ‘I’ve never heard that song”. I asked had he heard ‘Yella on the Broom’, and sang it to him.
These communities are still alive. His uncles and them in Ireland, it’s natural for them to sing like this. [Fife-based singer and collector] Pete Shepheard went into a pub in Appleby during the Horse Fair there, he took a chance and sang a really old ballad. A listener, an English traveller, named the family Pete had got it from. A lot of hope there yet. Danny Couper

IAN DAVISON

In 1957 I wrote my first song, and kept writing songs over a long period of time. Only a small number, although the years were so many that two or three songs a year becomes quite a lot of songs. That was part of a lifestyle for me that included song all the time, and also included politics all the time. I suppose in many ways I was integral to the folk movement, not as a famous personality, because I was involved in all the relevant ways. Some of them I valued more than others. For instance, the antiquarian thing always worried me, and I tried not to become an academic. I did a lot of studying, I always felt you should have that up your sleeve, so that people wouldn’t talk down to you, and they would have to take seriously what you were saying, you could say it in their language if necessary. I was very political all through and very proselytizing. So what profession would I go into? A teacher or a lecturer. It seems very organic to me, I didn’t have a moment when someone converted me to folk music, a question of osmosis more than intent. The reason why I never emerged as someone who could be fitted in one, I was in them all.
I always hankered after doing only the political work I found enjoyable, it’s a way of involving people, you can express and enjoy your politics, find new and creative ways of operating your political commitment. I was born and bred a political animal, born and bred a musical animal, and born at the time when a folk song revival or something like it was desperately required.
We didn't start writing songs enough at the right time, and we didn’t start a proper dance movement. If we had had the ceilidhing revival at that time, and a lot more songwriting we would have had a movement that would have been virtually unstoppable, like in Chile. On one hand I was accumulating and collecting political songs, and using a lot of them in school English lessons, and singing in concerts, at the level that I sang with my group.
There was also a trickle of songs I had written myself, in response to need. I first did that about 1971, ten years after the Polaris ships came into the Holy Loch, we decided to mark that important and unfortunate anniversary, and look for new ways to mark it. I started to write a few songs then. In the middle 70s I started writing again, because the focus came off Aldermaston as a march, and there was the first one to Faslane. I wrote and updated songs, as we did again in the 1980s. Because nobody else was doing it in the 1970s. In the 1980s you and I did it because there was a need for it. The peak of the peace movement was 1982, after that we were keeping it together, morale was important. If you don’t change the world in three years, you can feel it’s a waste of time.
I had retired from the Revival to be a political animal, but in the 80s I began writing songs hand over fist. The SCND Buskers had two purposes, fundraising and raising morale for people at marches and demonstrations. Ian Davison

BOB DYLAN

“He understood power of song, he was raised in an environment that meant he saw what popular song could be, how rock could be used. Before, pop song was just entertainment, but he saw it could be protest.” Stuart McHardy
I admire him still, he’s documented something over the years that no-one else has. An erudite, bright, informed person, never ‘the voice of a generation’, but a terrific gatekeeper for me. You entered the door he opened, and there was a cornucopia of things you’d not come across before, and also things you had come across before that took on additional provenance for you. There is something really generous in his artistry. His songs are full of references, reworkings of folk music melodies and sometimes references to the original meanings of original lyrics also. He is still writing prescient stuff, his take on things now as 68 years old, not ‘trapped in a haircut’ like some older artists.
“Dylan is not always a great craftsman, but art is the human being’s saving grace, when it flies. Without art the human being has not achieved a great deal. We have to be open to the art, to enabling and allowing the art to happen. But the craft still prevails, you must go back and tidy up, make it as strong as you can. I think that rules are appropriate in the craft, but utterly inappropriate in the art. There is nothing wrong with applying the rules you know and letting the art fly. When the art flies, the impetus is there, you often don’t know where it’s going to go.
“If you’ve got a list of things you want to achieve and hear, and you’ve worked out your four or six line format, and the list of things you want to get in by hook or by crook, that’s an excellent piece of craft, but there’s probably not much art in it. f it has art, it will touch people emotionally. And if politics means anything it’s an emotional as much as a pedantic response.” Rab Noakes

EURYDICE

“Eurydice will have been going for 21 years in 2010. The idea behind it initially was a night when women, (most of whom were involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in politics) could get away from the home and family and learn the songs they had often heard on demos etc. The songs sung covered a number of genres, more political in the earlier years than in the last six or so. Over the years Eurydice has lent its voice to, raised funds for and awareness of a number of causes - Oxfam, Amnesty International, Anti-Apartheid, Chernobyl - the list goes on.
“A lot of the stalwarts left, moved away, had other things happening in their lives etc. Recently the choir has been considerably involved with Asylum Seekers and singing at concerts to raise awareness. Work is also still done for the cause of peace and there's usually a gig every year for Amnesty.
“The choir had a broad range of material drawn from the Scots, English, Irish and American traditions, but also sang songs for fun - eg. "Sisters", Cole Porter's "Don't Fence Me In". The range of songs and traditions covered came from the fact that choir members came from "a' airts an' pairts" and we tried to encompass songs from as many cultures, places, traditions as we could. By far the most favourite song, in my opinion, was "Nkose Sikelele", particularly since the choir sang for Mandela that very wet day in George Square and in the concert hall afterwards. A memorable day indeed for everyone involved. Another song lustily sung was and still is of course Hamish's "Freedom Come-All-Ye".” Gordeanna McCulloch
They started as the Glasgow Socialist Women’s Choir – they have enough vocal power to raise the [Glasgow Green] Mayday marquee off its moorings. The name came about because they felt, ‘Well, we’re no the Orpheus Choir’.” From ‘One Singer One Song’ by Ewan McVicar.

ARCHIE FISHER

My induction into political song in the late 50’s was through blues and protest songs on American issues. At the time, I was not aware of any current British or Scottish material that would have been classed under the term of current protest. Jacobite ballads were going through their second retrospective phase … the first being when they were written in a romantic hindsight and then when they were rediscovered in the early stages of a new Scottish National awareness. It was hard in the atmosphere of the swinging 60s to find parallels to some of the extreme issues in the American songs and although many of the singers on the folksong Revival circuit sang British industrial ballads of mining, weaving and other industries, they too had a retro ‘bad old days’ context.
The retrieval of the Stone of Destiny spawned a batch of satirical and humorous ditties that amused our audiences and conjured up wry smiles but they were not the kind of stuff to set them all marching. The Polaris base on the Clyde was the tipping point for active and song protest …I nearly said ‘musical protest’ … but music was a mere carrier of the message as practically all of the songs were either parodies or set to familiar melodies to make them more easily remembered. Several highly reputable poets and writers became ‘jingle bards’ and kept us supplied with a steady flow of catchy and witty material.
The other wave of ‘wee songs’, mostly with a short shelf life, came in the 60’s, many with an anti-royalty tone and what nowadays might be described as a xenophobic attitude towards our southern neighbours who always took it on the chin …and why not … we were the ones complaining.
I’ve never been an ‘in your face’ political singer and anything I’ve written, either industrial or personal, would probably fit more into the description of songs of what is broadly called ‘the human condition’, perhaps better described as ‘the shared experience of a culture, society, or community’. Are they political with a small ’p’ ?
Specifically environmental songs had yet to emerge and the laconic remark from the late Alex Campbell about ‘never singing about the rain forest with ‘a chunk of mahogany and ebony round his neck’ rings true of the time. There’s a narrow line to walk in writing political songs. Some issues just won’t sing and they are obvious to most sensitive people. There were in the past, many examples of folksingers who could move between a traditional ballad about a battle to a contemporary antiwar song, or sing a whaling shanty followed by a ‘save the planet’ lyric without a flutter, but that was before political correctness overcorrected us all into a self conscious skid.
The death of the protest song has been regularly heralded over the last six decades and perhaps the fact that we are all much better informed politically may contribute to some songwriters’ reticence. The ‘canon’ of Scottish Political song had a silencer on it for a while. Notable exceptions are the new works of past and present members of Battlefield Band Brian McNeill and Alan Reid who look to the newsreels as well as the archives. Archie Fisher

DICK GAUGHAN
“He is from Leith near Edinburgh, and was brought up immersed in the musical traditions and culture of the Gaels, both Scots and Irish, which naturally, therefore, provide the foundation for everything he does. He has been a professional musician and singer since Jan 1970, and made his first solo album in 1971. Working mainly in the areas now known as ‘Folk’ or ‘Celtic’ music, he has recorded quite extensively since then in many countries and in various combinations. Has also worked as a session musician in a wide variety of musical styles.
“He was an early member of the band ‘Boys of the Lough’, made three ablums with the band, ‘Five Hand Reel’ and in the 1990s he founded and produced the short-lived but quite extraordinary ensemble Clan Alba. His natural instrument, and perhaps what he is happiest playing, is acoustic guitar. His greatest musical love is for the ancient traditional Scots ballads, and over the years he has recorded and performed many of these "Muckle Sangs", The great Scots Ballads are mostly of very great antiquity with some of the themes and motifs being traceable back thousands of years.” Dick Gaughan’s website
During my tenure at Edinburgh University Folksong Club Dick Gaughan was an apprentice plumber, and I don't think he had it in mind to be a professional singer. He was a superb ballad singer and was a frequent and welcome guest at Folk Soc and my house. Apparently I had some happy influence getting him paid and first recorded.” Abby Sale
Dick was not really doing what he is doing now in the late 1960s. He says it was not until Allende in Chile that he realised what he should be doing. Though he had a very short distance to travel. Dick asks why should he be that particular person who is identified as the political singer? It’s because he does it so well. He doesn't do guitar workshops now, because others won't stand up with him, it's just a cheap concert. Nowadays people are in awe of him, probably a pity, the show businessisation.” John Barrow
He is uncompromising in those areas where people need to be uncompromising. He never went seeking popularity, but because he was right he has become extremely popular. As a performer and as a writer I could sit and listen to him all night and be ready for more. His song ‘Do You Think that the Russians Want War?’ is a distillation, distilled into the title, which is the absolute, utter core.” Nancy Nicolson
“Some people say they are not sure about Dick, but he’s one of the few political singers around, talking straight. Some people are uncomfortable about that.” Eileen Penman

ROB GIBSON

During the period [of the 1950s] Gaelic and Scots stood alongside, in poetry books as well as the ‘Ceilidh Song Books’. Willie Kellock encapsulated the idea of merging both cultures. Activism was related to a much more direct culture of songs passed on by word of mouth, songs were a much greater part of demonstrations, meetings or afterwards in the pub. It was the pre-Television era, people got a greater understanding of the songs, by hearing them. The ‘Rebel Ceilidh Song Books’ and Buchan’s ‘101 Scottish Songs’, they set things in train, we went through an activist phase in the 50s and 60s, when we were singing Blythman’s and Jim McLean’s songs, and the Corries were spreading a similar range of Scottish song.
At Munlochy, what became a ten month vigil in a yurt and a small caravan was at a layby that had not been declassified outside a farm on which there were GM trials in 2000 and 2001. After the first trial and knowing where the second one would take place, the attempt to focus energies across the country onto this area by having this vigil brought a whole lot of different responses, some were the kind of people who wanted to cut the crops down, which some of them did eventually. There were others who got involved in the issue of how to stop by legal means the expansion of such crops in our country.
In order that we popularised these things, part of the process was that the local radio was involved, that people were writing letters and preparing for a conference eventually on the subject. In that process the object of poems and songs and logos for the vigil which were represented by the bumblebee, that can “fly for miles and spread GM pollen all the while”, to take a line from my song, we decided we would have some fundraising. At that, people started to write songs for the fundraising events.
Strange Fruits, around the time of Hallowe’en, was one of the first of those events. Local radio journalists were great at covering some of the music, so we decided to record some songs. We got together an EP with five songs to help raise money, called ‘Oil Seed Raped’, with the help of a recording studio at Auldearn who gave their services free as long as we paid for the discs. We sold several hundreds of them. It got to the stage that at Christmas the Inverness Courier newspaper said it was in the local Top Twenty.
It was great because the music was the basic traditional material, with some more modern twists added by some of the artists. We used traditional tunes, as I did with ‘Johnnie Cope’, and put new modern words aimed at the farmer Jamie Grant, who was planting the crops, no doubt for a well paid fee. I think that was the traditional and modern response, it inspires people, makes them laugh perhaps, brings in satire, and a message that things can be different.
Because the fact that this was very much a Parliamentary response, by the then Labour Lib Dem executive, they were obviously ‘looking at the precautionary principle’ by allowing these field trials to take place. I know that Robin Harper, Green MP, and others were playing the CD in places where they might be heard by people in power. This is one way to get through, beyond singing to a live audience, and also some tracks were played on Moray Firth Radio. We wrote the words for the ‘Munlochy Oil Seed Rape’ song, and used the tune ‘Johnnie Cope’. You can write new tunes, but sometimes the old ones are the best.
Andy Mitchell, now living in Portree, wrote an anti-nuclear song in the 1980s based on ‘Grannie’s Heilan Home’. His grannie lived on the seaboard at Balintore, Easter Ross. ‘Grannie’s Heilan Hame’ was at Embo just across the Firth. He used the tune to have a go about the fallout from Chernobyl but also the fallout from Dounreay. A very funny song that became a theme song for the campaign against nuclear dumping. “The heather bells are blowing a bonny bright yellow green”. It has a very pithy verse at the end, the council finally start to listen, the local MP gets down off his fence. I put the choruses onto a big card, and when we had an informal ceilidh we’d put up the card so people could sing the choruses. Rob Gibson

JOHN GREIG

In 1979 I lived in Frankfurt a.m. for about six months. It was there I heard the news that the Referendum had been lost. People I met all asked me how there could be a majority for the vote and it was lost? I had to admit that I did not understand that myself other than there had been a motion in the Westminster parliament that became known as the sixty percent rule. This ‘threw up’ questions for the UK constitutional democracy. When is a majority not a majority? If law underpins democracy, which law should apply, Scots or English? The questions cascaded down at the time and the one question that remained unanswered until years later was who proposed the sixty percent rule? Well it turned out to be surprise, surprise Robin Cook, Scottish Labour Party minister. Sic a parcel o rogues in a nation!
A few weeks later I wandered into a radical book shop/ record store in Frankfurt (called ‘2001’) and found a copy of a vinyl record on the American Folkways label called ‘Ding Dong Dollar’. This was a collection of songs written and sung by amongst others the said Morris Blythman. I had heard these songs while still at school and they were protesting against the then new American submarine base at Faslane on the Clyde. I cheered myself up with this album from the post referendum blues. I had never seen this record for sale in a shop in Scotland.
I returned from Frankfurt to find that the unthinkable was on the cards; the Tories were going to win the next election due to something called the Winter of Discontent (winter? It was a whole fifteen years). The English middleclass had had enough of the strikes and were going to vote in someone called Mrs Thatcher. Who? I thought.
In the mid 70s I met Raymond Ross. He was just starting to involve himself in the literature of the Scottish left. He set up a literature magazine called ‘Cencrastus’ that ran for twenty-five plus years. Raymond was lodging with Morris Blythman, who talked and lived and breathed politics and that was how I met him. Raymond used to be always thinking up spurious reasons to run events in support of the magazine – like Sorley MacLean’s birthday. I always ended up singing at them. At this point Ray and Morris were actively encouraging me. I knew the ‘Ding Dong Dollar’ repertoire. Morris would have us across in Glasgow at Harry McShane’s 90th birthday, singing to the tune of a Leadbelly song – “Harry will be 90 on the 7th of May”. The whole place would sing this like idiots – Morris had us all standing doing it! He loved Leadbelly tunes. Morris was always working on creating the Republic. John Greig

HAMISH HENDERSON

“Thinking back, I guess we all knew Hamish's politics, interests, personality flaws and genius. He was an overwhelming feller and I don't know of anyone who vaguely thought the less of him for any flaws. What we felt right up front were things like extreme generosity with his time and knowledge. Nearly anyone collecting in Scotland consulted him and he always came through with names, addresses, background, and in several cases I know of, basic glossary of Gaelic and Tinker Cant. In at least one case the beneficiary baldly claimed to have researched these things himself.
“Hamish would never again speak to someone who lied about these things or who stole credit for himself. Hamish didn't care overmuch about receiving credit, he just wouldn't tolerate someone stealing it. I think Hamish was the most painstakingly honest person I ever met. The generosity and honesty (in folk music but also in life) were the influence he had on me more than his politics. I can't speak for others.” Abby Sale
“Hamish is a wonderful figure to me, but not the propagandist that Morris Blythman or Norman Buchan were. He would not compromise re Scots linguistic difficulties, but the aesthetic results were wonderful - a joy to sing if you understand references – a coterie appeal, farfetched, making poetic demands on the listener.” Ian Davison
“I'm always surprised at Hamish’s ‘Men of Knoydart’, it takes a racist anti-English line. ‘The John Maclean March’ is too international. His structure is beautiful in ‘The Banks of Sicily’, but general as far as Scotland is concerned, people can read their own thing into it, it’s not specific enough for me. Was he Sky High Joe? I don't believe it, knowing him and talking with him. There were few songs from him in those days, never felt he had that oomph, I didn't see it. His songs require quality singing, his language is tremendous. I’m surprised he wrote so few, and so general. He was generous, ‘Knoydart’ is the only one that is quite strong.“ Jim McLean
“To hear Arthur Johnstone sing totally unaccompanied the ‘Freedom Come-All-Ye’, can just about move me to tears, no problem. It’s the conviction that the singer has.” John Powles
“Hamish to me is the huge figure that epitomised that idealism, making things more fair. The enormity of John Maclean going to prison and being force fed, but then the voice of people, “Great John Maclean has come back” and the streets of Glasgow are filled, huge rejoicing though he was tragically depleted by his treatment. Hamish’s great anthem of the ‘Freedom Come-All-Ye’ – stretching hands over the world very much like Burns. These songs have a quickening effect on people’s consciousness – can’t think they don’t shift people’s opinions.” David Campbell

ALISTAIR HULETT

I left Scotland for New Zealand with my family when I was nearly sixteen. We went there on the assisted passage scheme. I had discovered folk music a couple of years previously. First it was Dylan and the 'Folk Boom' protest thing, then I heard the Dubliners and that set me off in pursuit of a repertoire of songs from my own culture rather than adopting the American version of folk culture. By the time I got to New Zealand I was singing mainly Scots, Irish and English traditional folk songs, some American stuff, blues and country and also contemporary stuff by Dylan and MacColl, people like that. Really, anything that took my fancy, although I was still adopting different voices and styles of delivery for the different songs I sang, rather than making them my own, as I try to do now. At that time, nearly every folk singer I admired, both in Britain and in New Zealand, was either a Communist Party member or a fellow traveller. It seemed that way to me, anyway. Folk song and the folk scene was my introduction to socialist politics. I never actually joined a political party back then but politics and political campaigns were part and parcel of the scene in those days. You couldn't be in the folk circle and not be somehow drawn into the political nature of those times. Later, after my two years in New Zealand were up, that being one of the imposed conditions of assisted passage, I went over to Australia and it was exactly the same there. To be a folk singer was a political position in and of itself back in those days.
I lived in England for nearly two years when I got back from Oz in '96. I'd recorded an album in '95 with Dave Swarbrick and we came back together. My first taste of the folk scene here was down in England, and my strongest impression was how de-politicised the scene had become. In Australia I was playing with a very loud and abrasive punk folk band called Roaring Jack and I was used to expressing myself onstage in quite a politically strident way. Audiences in England seemed rather taken aback by it, I thought. Swarb always encouraged me to really go for it but I did begin toning my way of putting it across down a fair bit. You do when you can hear that sharp intake of breath all around you. Even so, it seems I was still much more politically outspoken than some of these audiences were accustomed to or thought was decent. I met a few kindred souls gigging round on the folk scene, Roy Bailey, Robb Johnson, people like that, but openly political, left wing folk music definitely was rather thin on the ground around the English folk clubs and festivals. That's not a criticism, just an observation. I love a lot of what I hear in England and don't for a second want to suggest that folk singers have a duty to be political or of the left. I do notice, though, that whereas it was once commonplace for most performers to be politically engaged, that is not the case at all nowadays. There are the notable exceptions of course, old timers with the fire still burning in their bellies and new kids coming through with the fire in their eyes. I just wish there were more of them.
In '98 I moved back up to Glasgow where I originally set out from and instantly fell in with a great crowd of politically engaged and motivated folk artists who were pretty much in the mould of the folk singers that first inpired me back in the sixties. I don't mean overtly political zealots, just your honest folk artists with a varied repertoire but a way of seeing traditional music that is rooted in a class analysis of society. People who stand in the tradition of the likes of Hamish Henderson, Ewan MacColl, Gordeanna McCulloch, The Exiles, Matt McGinn, Ray and Archie Fisher, Dick Gaughan, oh I could go on forever. I would rather listen these days to a traditional singer or a contemporary song that understands the social relations, the centuries of inequality and exploitation, that gave rise to this music, than to a left wing sermon set to music. Although I'll admit I've given a sermon or two in my time, but that's how I feel about it now. Of course, this is not the 1960s and 70s, it's not a comparable time of social upheaval and political unrest, but politics seems still to be part of the warp and weft of the folk scene here in Scotland in a way it's not down south right now.
I got involved in songwriting through necessity really. I was on the hippie trail back in the mid-seventies, living in the far north of Queensland, Australia. I was beachcombing, doing itinerant farm work and living in makeshift shelters. There wasn't any electricity and no canned music, so if we wanted new songs to sing we needed to make them up ourselves. I began writing a lot then. I'd had a few goes at it previously but this was my first real burst of sustained songmaking. Other musicians began doing my songs around the campfire network we had going and that really encouraged me to keep writing. It continued in much the same way when I went around India for a couple of years, before I got back to OZ just in time for the Punk War in the very late 70s and early 80s. I got a band going in '85 called Roaring Jack that was basically a punk version of the 60s folk groups I used to listen to. All the other guys involved were from a similar background and the folk music we knew and loved was political and class conscious. I really began songwriting in earnest then and many of the songs from that period are still in my repertoire today.

IAN MCCALMAN

It’s a misconception that groups who sing together have the same beliefs. Since I was fifteen I started thinking about inequalities in politics and how people were treated. Some great memorable songs that might look quite simple [may have been] written for a march, but they have lived on through their simplicity, and being catchy can have much more import than what I write. I'm much more social comment, the wagging finger. Hamish Henderson was the ‘Sandy Bell's Man’. He was always there, we’d see a lot of him and we'd all join in, an element of 'who the hell is Mandela' but you'd find out.
We dealt with images, because we performed more in foreign countries. Inspired songs deal in images. I’ve heard quite a few songs with too much information, so the message gets confused.
We don't preach just to the converted. We have to accept that our particular scene is dying. Youngsters who are going into rock are doing more with political song than the guys doing half full folk clubs. The McCalmans have built up our audience, and they have not yet died, and they’ll accept songs. We were singing a new song about family members not talking because of what happened in the miners’ strike in 1984. I can explain it to a Denmark or German audience, about old arguments in families. These songs are generally understood. I hear more new political songs in clubs than in the recording studio I run. I think, “That’s a good song, but we can't, don't need to sing them.” I write songs myself. If I write a song for a purpose, for someone else, I’m going to fail. I write songs for myself, as a therapy. I have a lot to write about.
Can songs change opinions? That is more likely to happen through me than through Dick Gaughan - he sings to like-minded people all the time. People come to hear us sing songs they know, then we give them something new. Some of my songs use the sugar-coated pill to draw people in.
Others do not. ‘The Lying Truth’ is a song of mine that says people have their own truth, it can be obscene, political, religious, but because they have their own truth they cannot accept others' truth. It was written out of sheer anger, about torture in Iraq. People say 'We do this because it is right'. The song is vicious, it pulls no punches. Ian McCalman

EWAN MACCOLL

Some would expect me to consider Ewan MacColl a Scottish political songwriter and examine his work in detail. He was certainly a gifted and committed political songwriter, and through his Scottish parentage would have been eligible to play sports for Scotland, but he was born and raised in Salford, and his work was on the national British stage – both theatrical, folk song singing, song making, teaching and developing the skills of younger singers. He sang many older Scottish songs with great power and a convincing accent.
Of his politically explicit songs I can think of only one that has any Scots language or reference – ‘Jamie Foyers’, where like Burns he took the first verse of an old song and made something glorious and new from it. MacColl and Peggy Seeger, together with BBC programme maker Charles Parker, created the radio series of ‘Radio Ballads’. His recorded work and collections of songs were very influential for young Scots singers. Ewan MacColl was his nom-de-plume, he was born Jimmy Miller.
“He thought somewhere in his head he was Scottish. He wrote mounds of stuff, a lot became very popular but it’s the singer songwriter, because people borrow his persona, rather than taking the song on. People took on his nanny goat voice. He was a fantastic writer, but I’m not a fan of his singing. He was very generalist, communist in approach. I sat and talked with him for two hours, when aged 21. He's talking, Peggy crocheting. He'd lose the point of what he was saying, she'd dig him in the ribs and tell him, he'd leap up to get a book down to make his point.
“I was a Scottish Nationalist Republican, I had a tartan tie on, McLean tartan. He got annoyed, ‘Look at this tartan’, I said ‘It is McLean tartan - Mr Miller’. Peggy had to hold him back. He stopped at the Jacobites re Scotland, wouldn't have anything to do with Republicanism.” Jim McLean

MATT MCGINN

“I took to Matt very quickly, when I met him in the Iona Community. He had straightforward songs like ‘Mambo’, but it struck me then his forté was humorous. I picked up gradually how serious he could be. I didn't realise he was writing quite soulful songs as well as very useful political songs.” Ian Davison
“I met Pete Seeger at Tonder [in Denmark], he was asking after Jeanetta McGinn, Matt’s wife. He knew and admired Matt. That’s hard for people to believe, but this god, Pete Seeger, looked up to Matt McGinn! We don't know the strength of who we have in Scotland.” Ian McCalman
“Politics seemed to seep out of Matt McGinn, there was no way you can say he wasn’t political, he was the one guy in the 1960s I'd call a political songwriter and singer.” John Barrow

STUART MCHARDY

I played about with [writing songs] back in the CND days, bits and pieces. You don't think about them beyond what you're doing, they’re for that period. You use them to attract people to meetings, as a social bond. Don't hold on to them. I wrote ‘ The Poll Tax Rap’ for the ‘Songs From Under the Poll Tax’ cassette. I would need the text to perform it now. “We all know what's going on, Just another Tory con etc”, with an electronic drum backing. That was not written for a march or event, but using a recording to get the word out, and ‘drum up support’. But all such schemes fall down when it comes to marketing, they become more a memento.
Another purpose of political song is as a form of education. ‘The Freedom Come-All-Ye’ - people say they don't understand words, then I explain a bit, and they say “I’m beginning to get it”. Hamish Henderson’s ‘D Day Dodgers’ kept cropping up in the 60s, it’s a good song. History is propaganda, spin, the party line. Popular song has taken the place of story.
How important was Bob Dylan? How long have you got? He understood the power of song, he was raised in an environment that meant he saw what popular song could be. He saw that rock could be protest. Before him pop song was entertainment. Dylan had ability, drive, genius. Is he still not political? He still comments on social conditions.
In Scotland we have the problem of inheritance of empire. There is pretence that Scottish history is like English history. In fact communitarianism defines your life, and it survives here, these ideas develop and are accepted here. Songs are one way of identifying our tribal element!
Burns is known as a songwriter here, to the rest of the world he is known as a poet - other than ‘Auld Lang Syne’. He accessed the voice and shared experience of people, the common thread of humanity that is close to our surface, so he was the antithesis of high poetry.
I was excited about CND, thousands of people marched in Glasgow, a few dozen of us did in Dundee. There were massive Glasgow marches against the Iraq war – not the same in Dundee. Marches are not organised by posters now, mobile phones etc are used. Community now has different forms, through the Internet songs can be swapped, videos shared. Stuart McHardy

GEORDIE MCINTYRE

I don't write a lot of songs, I'm not disciplined. When I went to the Glasgow Folk Club, there was no way I would write songs. Adam McNaughtan, Ian Davison and Dominic Behan were writing songs. But I read an argument in the press that The Pill was anti-life. Someone said “What's wrong with coitus interruptus?" I wasn't quite sure what that was, but when I did find out, I knew that the popular phrase for it was “Jumping off at Paisley”.
Matt McGinn had written a song about The Pill. I knocked off a few verses, pro the contraceptive pill, 'Don't jump off at Paisley', and sang it in the club. Hamish Imlach heard it, and recorded it on an album called ‘Murdered Ballads’. That was my first song. It was a wee political song, one line was "Remember your conscience is the boss”, very weak, but too much analysis leads to paralysis. Some songs need to be broken down line by line, and the more you look at a text the more you are likely to do it justice.
We are all trying to say the same thing differently. War is bad, peace is good - there are a million ways to express that. You can draw motifs and phrases from older songs. Some songs take three days, some three months, some thirty years. Songs on current issues must be got out, and so have to be squibs, for the occasion and the issue. I am one of the singers who write songs, I’m not a singer-songwriter - they only sing their own songs.
We sing songs that have to be listened to, not part of a percussive pulse for dancing to - those don't need to have any poetic merit, they're part of a sound package. ‘The Seven Men Of Knoydart’, The Peatbog Soldiers’, these are not knees-up songs. Having said that, when the Glasgow Song Guild was in its heyday, they wrote songs that were so clever, thoughtful and perceptive. They said, we want these songs to go out, we'll use good familiar tunes, whether for marching or concerts.
In about 2005 we were singing at Girvan Folk Festival. Just before we finished one song, this bloke stood up in the middle of a packed audience and said, “What the hell good are these songs you're singing? They've done nothing to improve the human condition, they've not prevented any wars." I could not ignore it, or say, "Caw canny, Jimmy, I'm in the middle of a song."
I stopped and winged it, and said, "It's perfectly true that so many political songs are by their nature idealistic. Maybe the writer would see themselves as part of the practical solution, but they are often dealing with ideals. Ideals very often come from dreamers. Hamish Henderson was a dreamer. The 'Brotherhood of Man' is a dream. Freddie Anderson was a dreamer. Without the dreamers, where would we be?"
The anti-war tribe is a tribe I happen to applaud. The songs are transparent, openly saying “This is the way I see it and how I hope you'll consider or reconsider seeing it”. I began to hear these songs when I was a radio mechanic. It was through folk song that I eventually went to University, expanding my horizons. I could see the songs in a wider perspective. They opened my eyes to many aspects of life. Geordie McIntyre

JIM MCLEAN

All my songs are political. Even the poetry I wrote way back as a child, in some SNP paper, when 15 or 16, was making the point that I wanted to make. I don't think I've written something that isn't political. People talk about my 'Glencoe' song. I like to make my point there that King William signed that order, so there is a point there too. Then when I used to do themed albums, with Alastair McDonald, I would write a song about Culloden. In my liner notes I would say this is not in praise of Bonnie Prince Charlie, he chose the graveyard for himself.
When I heard Morris Blythman’s ‘Coronation Coronach’, the words and tune hit me. And the Scottish language. I’m from Paisley, Glasgow has idioms, Paisley has language. In Glasgow they’d say “My belly's hurtin”, in Paisley “Ah've a pain in ma wame”. We sang Irish political songs [in early days] because we'd nothing for ourselves. My initial songs used Scots tunes - ‘Maggie's Waddin’, ‘NAB for Royalty’. I did this because few folkies could read music and I didn’t sing. I sometimes used American tunes. I liked Guthrie's songs, I first heard them through Josh McRae’s singing. They were strong, fighting the establishment. Josh and Nigel Denver were the two front singers on the ‘Ding Dong Dollar’ album. Josh was a lovely man, very honest, but Dylan was the killer for him politically. [McRae began to sing Dylan’s songs rather than his earlier repertoire.]
I realised what I wanted, a separate Scotland. Labour was always unionist. I wanted to bring out an album, with sleeve notes by MacDiarmid, nobody in Scotland would touch it. I went to Major Minor in London for my first album, in London. Then I began producing, and then started my own Nevis label. Topic was the only big company at the time, Ewan MacColl was recording Jacobite songs, safe material, nothing more. There was no money in poetry or folk music, no small labels.
My first themed album was ‘Scottish Republican Songs’ a Republican album, sleeve notes by Hugh MacDiarmid. Winnie Ewing wrote to say it helped her get elected. Then I did a Major Minor album with Hugh MacDiarmid reading his own work, and I edited it. I made other albums after the [1972] UCS album, with Alastair McDonald, then Nigel Denver. A Burns album, then another Republican one.
I think some of Eric Bogle’s songs are tremendous. There are very few singer songwriters I can listen to, most are too introverted, telling you what they feel. Dylan is the same. He broke the scene. To me he diverted the movement away in Scotland, people began to write introverted songs.
I knew him, took him to clubs in London. When I first met him we chatted and he asked me if I was Hamish Henderson. I had a long chat with him that night explaining, in my opinion, all Scottish songs were political. This, incidentally, was the first time he sang in London. He visited Martin Carthy who lived across from me. One group [of singers and songwriters] were the pot heads, writing introverted songs. The other group were the drinkers. Lots of singers after Dylan didn’t write for the punters, but for themselves. Very few of their songs could be picked up by others.
I’m not surprised fewer of my songs are sung now. They were of the time, but ‘Glencoe’ has political lines, people don't always notice that. ‘Smile in Your Sleep’ makes my point, but as a lullaby. I wrote a lot for marches and platforms, later my songs were for albums.

DOLINA MACLENNAN

There was a lull in song writing in Gaelic until [the group] RunRig. In 1892 Mary McPherson said, “The wheel will turn for you through the hardness of your hand and the strength of your fist.” There was a wonderful song writer in Uist, Ho Dan, Uist bard, very famous, dead now. He would write songs about the tinker’s horse, but also political ones. They wouldn’t know what a folk song was, but songs were being written all along by village bards, about anything that happened.
[When I met folk song] I had just come down from the Islands. My education didn’t start properly till I came to Edinburgh. My father was a Labour man, an election agent, he died when I was twelve. There were local songs about poaching, making fun of bailiff. ‘A rod from the wood, a deer from the hill, a fish from the river – three things a Highlander should never be ashamed of.’
I joined the SNP in Dublin while ‘Cheviot and Stag’ was playing in the Abbey Theatre. A man came up and said “What a nationalist you must be.” I answered “I can’t equate nationalism with socialism.” He said “Remember what Connolly said, ‘A nation first of all has to be free to make its own decisions’.” I said “Thank you sir”, and came back to Scotland and joined the SNP. Dolina MacLennan

NANCY NICOLSON

I was writing songs that were political before I'd actually realised I was writing political song. There's quite a lot of thinking it's dangerous to do before you start. Sometimes you've done something and it amounts to more that you thought it was going to amount to. It can be dangerous to be very unconsciously writing a political song, because you forget what was the impetus that made you do it, and you then think of it being judged from the side as if by a teacher, or a college or something, trying to analyse it. It has to be listened to, and it has to get its home in somebody's head long before they have any right to analyse it, because they'll interfere with the process itself if they're too busy analysing to listen to the heart of it.
There are very few things in the world that are not political, and a song is one of the most effective ways of expressing yourself. So I will probably argue that most songs in the world are political, and I do know that one of the most political songs that I've ever written is 'Listen to the Teacher', which sounds tinky tinky, little girly, you know, skipping along merrily, telling a funny little song, but that song speaks of a bairn going to school and finding that her or his own native language is rejected. Now, if you reject the only way a child speaks, that's tantamount to rejecting the child themselves, and all that they can do. The first verse, the child goes to school, is scolded for saying 'hoose' instead of 'house'. The second verse has the child not opening his mouth to say a word.
It was very sad. I'd found myself at the age of about five or six being rejected by somebody that I deeply knew should not have had the right to reject me, and the whole culture of that day was so much that you do what teachers tell ye that I didn't even complain to my mother when this teacher gave me the big angry eyes which said that saying 'hoose' was wrong. I would worry if someone introduced me as a protest singer cos they’re often looked upon as people who have a very personal agenda and they’re protesting on their own behalf, not on anybody else’s. Nancy Nicolson

RAB NOAKES

I have done some songs with a political purpose, for example ‘Won’t Let You Do That Again’, ‘Don’t Keep Passing Me By’, ‘Spin’ and ‘How Can I Believe You Now?’. Thatcher’s re-election put a number of things into focus for me. I looked back on my old man’s generation. That was the end of what they had achieved. After the Falklands you knew we were in deep trouble. This was a mean spirited person. I had come across people like that all my life, people who demonstrated disdain for others, feeling intellectual and economic superiority. Was there ever a more pointless exercise than the Cold War? Nobody has ever explained to me what is the desirability of power. Why do people go to extreme levels to expand what they don’t even enjoy?
I wrote a couple of songs at that time. My father and many others went to fight World War Two for socialism. Not just to beat Hitler, it was much deeper. You get some terrific songs sometimes about issues. The 1984/5 miners strike, the UCS struggle, the South Side Baths campaign – that was Alastair Hulett writing the songs - all good projects need a good project manager, person who can corral people, and mobilise things and abilities.
Some issues fire me up, the lack of public housing just now, and the treatment of our service people post the Iraq conflict. Our services men and women are a highly specialised workforce and should be treated accordingly. There’s an urgent state of affairs between our armed forces and our public, the treatment of wounded soldiers. Economic decline pushes people into war. The main reason for war is commerce, and now also for the clean-up economies – that’s why we have wars. The best war songs are about the service people, not about the always ludicrous politics. War equates with a flaw in evolution, there is something wrong, that we can think war is a sensible way of conflict resolution.
Scots songwriters see the absurdity of the Bomb, and can demonstrate it through use of tunes and cartoon imagery, and the quick journalistic response to what someone says. If anything, an anti-war message is more successfully carried through drama than song. Songs tend to become date-stamped, and from a wordsmithery viewpoint a lot of the words you have to put in there are a bit lumpy.
I find it hard to empathise with territorial conquest and nationalism, except for nationalism as respect for your own national culture and therefore for others’ national culture. But nationalism for nationalism’s sake! Which is all there is left, there’s very little respect left except for the homogenised global culture that covers us all.
I have worked on accompaniment, I am not a musician as such, I play guitar in behind the song. I’ve worked hard on that, starting with guitar phrases to make songs. It imbues them with a rhythm and mood, more than a keyboard can.
Burns did not write tunes, but clearly he had an ear for memory, he decided his energy was best expended elsewhere. Why did Elvis not write songs? He did all the things a songwriter does, had skills of interpretation and finding his way into songs, unusual qualities as a singer, his high tenor voice, he had all the necessary elements.
Many of my songs are about relationships, they are interpersonal about what is going on around you, not self-centeredly personal as in mass-produced pop. My songs generally come out of chord sequences, or rhythm, or mood created, out of that comes dummy little things that fit rhythmically, where do the vowels go on the beat? Often a line comes out. Anything to get the thing going, then something sticks. I sometimes use other people’s tunes. If it’s a lyric idea, maybe try and find an older tune to stick it in, maybe amend. I also like to put in little bits of homage that are hopefully undetectable. Rab Noakes

CATHIE PEATTIE

People may not think their songs are important enough, because they themselves are not important. I grew up with music and song, my father sang, and played the mouthie and the bones. Cowboy songs were the pop music of the time, he liked Gene Autrey, but also Scots songs. My grannie was a singer, but she’d never have dreamt of singing at a concert. She had wonderful versions of ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Dark Lochnagar’, my father’s lullaby for me was ‘Scots Wha Hae’. I don’t see that song as a Nationalist dirge, but I’m a socialist, for me it’s Burns challenging the society he was living in.
When I was twelve or thirteen my music lesson was about singing opera. Then I heard Donovan and Joan Baez singing, and that was me. I identified with that more than with Puccini. It was different, and it was real, you could sing freely from the heart, and enjoy and understand what you were singing. I particularly identified with the political songs that Joan Baez and Dylan were singing. Then I went back to look at our own stuff. My dad knew Irish Republican songs, he collected songbooks, and he brought in the Bo’ness songbooks from the Lea-Rig.
The ‘Ma Maw’s an MSP’ song that Linda McVicar wrote for me reflects women now, the suggestion that women want it all, you can be a politician but you’ve still got to live your family life and meet your responsibilities as well. I do a lot of work in schools, I get invited as an MSP, and I teach it to the kids, and discuss with them about what if your mum was a politician, and they love it. It’s a funny song, and kids associate with it, and that I’m a woman daft enough to come to school and sing to them. They ask for the words.
The first year of Parliament a group of MSPs decided to do a Fringe concert for Childline. I was the only Labour party member there. When we were sharing the songs we would sing, I had my Eric Bogle songbook with me. Alec Ferguson was excited to see it, and borrowed it, he sang Eric Bogle songs. I was surprised that a Tory was happy to sing these songs. We go through life having opinions about folk, and we can make a mistake thinking that say Tories will not want to sing political songs.
When Hamish Henderson died, I put a motion down in Parliament. When we debated it and discussed his life, I had to get permission to sing in the Scottish Parliament, you’re not allowed to do it, it’s against Standing Orders, but I was allowed “One verse, no more, and don’t expect others to join in”. The Glasgow Herald asked why did I not sing more.
In the Labour Party, after branch meetings and AGMs, we sing. Folk in politics enjoy songs, and singing together. If someone starts to sing, it’s not about alcohol, people hear and they join in. I remember at a Conference, Neil Kinnock was speaking on the stage, and he spoke, then sang ‘We Shall Overcome’. Folk got up and sang it with him, though others were appalled.
Bill Butler, Anniesland MSP, hosted a Parliament anniversary event on the Spanish Civil War. Arthur Johnstone came along and sang. He finished with ‘The Freedom Come-All-Ye’, I see that song as a song of peace, Arthur saw it as a song of struggle. I grew up hating war, but what do you do about Fascism? Cathie Peattie

EILEEN PENMAN

have always sung. My dad sang a bit. He was very active in the NUR, my parents were old lefties of the 30s in the Communist Party, and Labour. We were brought up in a political household, for us it was every day, him working for the union. My older brother, Jack, got me interested in folk song. He discovered Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, he started bringing American folk music home in the mid to late 50s. He knew about the Howff in Edinburgh, Roy Guest. I saw Martha Schlamme in Edinburgh. I was hooked, the singers I heard at the time had a lot of passion, it came from the gut. Then I got involved in youth politics, ‘Bella Ciao’, then the anti-Polaris songs. I got a guitar, and Jack taught me a few chords.
Then I had kids and was away from the scene. At the first Edinburgh Folk Festival, in about 1979 in Chambers Street I saw the very young Cunninghams, they were just magic. I felt I wanted to get involved, went to the Crown Folk Club in Parish St, and saw Dolina MacLennan, Jean Redpath, Brian Miller, Cyril Tawney and Josh McRae there. Then I began to go to Edinburgh Folk Club. I started to sing there, the first song I sang was Hamish’s ‘Farewell to Sicily’, I can’t remember what drew me to it.
I went back to work, became heavily involved in the Trade Union movement. In 1984, during the Miners Strike, Left Turns was set up. It was an Edinburgh organisation set up by Dick Gaughan with May Shaw from Ireland, and performed at benefits for Miners, for Lee Jeans, for Nicaragua. I started singing with May, we would end political events with ‘Carry it On’. I got involved, organising and putting on singers’ workshops with the Crown Folk Club.
I have written some songs. They were made for the time. Dick had adapted the American union song ‘Which Side Are You On?’, I’ve carried on adapting it. I sang in a pub with John Greig and Tony McManus. When the Poll Tax campaign on I put my thoughts together and came up with a couple of things. Then I got involved in the ‘Women’s Right to Choose’ campaign.
I wrote a few anti-war songs, but I don’t sing them very much. I’m not sure why I don’t, I think I’m unsure about ramming my thoughts down someone’s throat. I’m quite a direct writer, not subtle. I write when I’ve something to say. When the war started in Lebanon a few years ago, I felt impotent, I got out a guitar and wrote a song. It’s an anti-war song. I sang it on the Long March from Faslane. I’ve sung that at a few places.
I’ve written another new song, about an Edinburgh suffragette, because of the ‘Guid Cause’ march to mark the centenary of the Suffragette Movement. When we are marching people will sing older songs, we decided to put together a songbook, some of them older and less accessible, some newer. The book is to be called ‘The Right to Vote and Aa That’, it includes a song written at the time to the tune of ‘A Man’s A Man’.
Sometimes a line will fire the imagination – ‘walking makes the road’ was said to me by someone. I was going to South Africa, with the SEAD charity, on an exchange study visit, and decided to write a song for it, on the theme of mutual solidarity. I used the line “Walking makes the road, when freedom is your goal”. I used an American style tune, I’m not very good at writing from the Scots tradition, I don’t know why that is, you’d think something would come out closer to my own culture. A Somali student was murdered in Edinburgh, and I wrote a song about it. I adapted MacColl’s Moving On Song’, added new verses re refugees in Scotland.
I am involved in the Protest in Harmony Edinburgh group. It is uplifting to have a big presence of voices. In about 2004 some of the members of an Edinburgh singers’ group wanted more songs to sing on demos. Workshops were organised, then monthly workshops. Some songs were written specially, and a book put together. Now song themes themes include climate change and the environment.
I don’t often sing for money, mostly for benefits. I am unable to separate my political background from my singing. I assumed when young that folk music was all political, then was surprised that some singers are not. Eileen Penman

ABBY SALE

Only the work of Ewan MacColl was available to us. He was a promoter and a good performer. We came to Edinburgh, and went to Edinburgh University Folk Society – Folk Soc. There were people singing, doing harmonies. We said to ourselves, ‘Oh, this is what it is supposed to be. This is not people in Harvard Square or Greenwich Village showing off, these are people joining together and doing stuff. And this I like’. We were solid from day one.
I had no sense of an actual political element in the way songs were sung, not in the the sense of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger. Songs would come in, for example those of John Watt, but just as casually as songs of the Copper family or Archie Fisher or the Stewarts of Blair. Dick Gaughan had not developed as a political singer at that time. Even MacColl did not bring that material in at that time, it was just folk song. You would hear a Mary Brooksbank song, or maybe even be lucky enough to hear her, you would be swayed by it, how she was speaking about conditions. But you would not go out with flags and torches.
Matt McGinn was the one exception. You would get carried away by what he had to say. The one person that you would get involved with the politics of what he had to say, though he would also sing something hysterically funny.
Hamish Henderson came to our house, and I became one of his 100,000 closest friends. Hamish opened other areas to us. His songs were sung and well known, I sat and drank with him, but everybody was in awe of him. He was such a charismatic person, and such a strange person to be charismatic – tall, gawky, funny speaking guy – but totally amazing. You enjoyed being with him, maybe because he was a good writer and thinker, but he was not a preacher like MacGinn. Hamish would write and pull us in. You could be influenced but not preached at. I liked that man.
I appreciated Folk Soc. It needed officers, elections. I’d always wanted to be treasurer of something and was elected. I would suggest ideas, people would agree. I did make some attempt to influence the idea that we actually promote and support folk music. Abbey Sale

PEGGY SEEGER

Political song is to me a total necessity. Musicians, we express ourselves in different ways. Being a folk musician, folk music coming from the lowest economic strata, I have always sided with the impoverished majority. Their songs express their hopes and dreams, and sometimes what they're gonna do about it. So I sometimes feel that just singing hard times songs about the past is kinda like being a museum keeper. That's fine, nothing wrong with that at all. I made that big step ahead when I went with Ewan MacColl. We decided to be museum keepers and add to the museum.
‘Political’ is virtually the science of human organisation. People often say political and they mean left wing. Of course political is all strata. Right from Che Guevara to Robert Mugabe to Hitler it's all political. It's action in trying to create an organisational difference, if you like. And sometimes just stating the case can do that. Just going along with the museum, and what there is there, and saying ‘This is what happens’. When you do that you can almost predicate, you can almost expand that into saying ‘This can happen again’. Singing about your troubles is the first step in political action, defining what there is to fight about.
So I think being political, they say nowadays especially with the ecological thing, and the global warming, you set yourself wherever you feel comfortable, and go a little bit further on issues. You can be political when you recycle your trash, you can be more political when you get other people to do that. You can be even more political when you set up an organisation that will arrange that all of the trash is recycled. You can get even more political when you force government to do this, so protest - you are protesting against something, when it's political you are in a way protesting for something.
I'm not an academic about these things. Protest songs sometimes seem to be what glues the protesters together, and help us to feel that we're not alone, and to help us protest together. Songs sometimes rub up - they're very abrasive for people who aren't in movements. Sometimes they're vulgar, not well expressed, they are for the converted. I feel the converted need a lot of songs myself - we need more than just 'Here we go, here we go, here we go'. Things that will keep us moving. And will also have to suggest how we can speak more to the unconverted.
The strongest Iraq song that I have is the ‘Ballad of Jimmy Massey’. It's a song I made out of the words of an Iraq marine. It was Radio Ballads style, make a song out of their words. This song talks about an ordinary boy, comes from the working class. It's his words, [I just helped him along]. It talks about his life. He thought the Marines were the cat's whiskers, and then how the Marines literally moulded him and sent him to Iraq, where he found himself killing women and children. He left, and he came back, and he now works in the anti-Iraq War body. But it tells it in his words.
To me that's a political song, but it's also a protest song. It's his protest, but I'm retelling it because people can identify with him in a way they can't identify with me. He actually says ‘I think the world shouldn't be run by men’. But if I say that ….
I take it back to him, and ask "Is this what you want to be saying?" Which is what we did. I see that as a big difference between political and protest, though the line is shady. Peggy Seeger

DONALD SMITH

I was very influenced by Hamish Henderson’s approach, that was at the core of everything he was doing. Going right back to the People’s Ceilidhs, you had union songs, bothy ballads, protest songs, traditional ballads, all there in the mix. That connected up for me, at that time I was becoming involved in Scottish theatre. The very same impetus drove that. We were moving toward the Cheviot and Stag. It was tapping into cultural forms that belonged to communities, that should be allowed to own those traditions as their own, to develop them as their own, to contribute to them.
It contributed to that atmosphere of shaking up the sense of who was running Soctland and why, in terms of the culture and the politics together. Folk tradition is not a museum curiosity. Songs are made in particular contexts or adapted for particular reasons just as stories are. And I think that is what is so powerful about the specific political song. We see, as it were, the process of development and creation in a very live and immediate way.
For example, one of the songs we were taught in school was ‘The Bonny Earl O Moray’ – “Ye Hielands and ye Lowlands, whaur hae ye been?” – and I loved that song before I had ever heard a real traditional singer utter it as one of Scotland’s great traditional ballads. And of course it was a bit of bloody, political propaganda as I was to find out later. The Earl of Moray had been murdered and his mother had exhibited his body in the church at Leith, naked with all the stab wounds – somebody had to come along and paint it. It was the equivalent of appearing in The Sun or the Daily Record, and the song appears, not only condemning the murder, but hinting that the reason for it was sexual jealousy, and that the king looked the other way and let Moray be murdered by Huntly.
So that’s a song that absolutely picks up on all sorts of traditional elements of folk song, but it’s made in the crucible of really, really dark political conflict. I think that’s where political song comes into its own because it demonstrates so many really important things about how folk song works, how songs are made and why they’re made – the context in which they’re made. There’s a kind of energy and immediacy in all that. It’s a specific and fascinating example, but not different from the way folk song as a whole works.
The influence of song tradition in poetry in Scotland is massive. One of the ways that that continues to come out is the emphasis on public reading of poetry. Now that’s much bigger here, relatively, than in England. Of course poets at these events sometimes move between song and poetry, but actually the speaking of poems at public events is still important to Scottish poetry, and it affects the style of poems as well – part of that same sort of cultural mix.
So on the one hand, political song is very specific and immediate, and on the other it’s tapping in to universal themes like the struggle for freedom and liberty. Civil Rights, anti-war and anti-nuclear songs – they all tap into international universal values. They communicate across cultures as well, and that’s another important aspect.
At the moment, we’re in this very individualistic period in our culture and society. It wasn’t really until the credit crash that people questioned it. There’s been an overwhelming public and political consensus, which is incredibly alarming. When everybody seems to be heading like sheep in the same direction, that’s the time to start worrying!
Politics have become very global, and the state of the environment is so critical. At the recent Summit in Edinburgh there were over two hundred thousand people on the march. It will be interesting to see what will come out of promises to “break the chain of debt.”
The contribution of rock music to these big global campaigns has to be a continuing illustration of the power of political song. It’s only one aspect, but there it still is, absolutely up front. You can be cynical about the rock stars up there condemning governments, but at the same time, the power of rock music is there to tap into genuinely popular radical protest. Donald Smith

IAN WALKER

The funny thing is I don't see myself as a political songwriter. My songs don’t come from carrying a banner, they come from personal situations. Other people say my songs are political, they influence people. ‘Hawks and Eagles’ became an anthem in certain ways, it was even sung when Mandela was in George Square, but I didn't write it that way. ‘Roses in December’ has been taken up as about Vietnam, ‘Some Hae Meat’ about poverty. They were not written to advance a political position. ‘Don't Turn the Key’ now in Penny Stone’s CND book, about the bombing of Libya.
I went through a period of years when I seemed to get inspiration [for songs from newspaper stories]. I read about a pilot who bombed Libya. Another time I read about the nuclear key holder who deserted his post, and was praised by the judge. ‘Some Hae Meat’ came from anger about the millions spent advertising food. Anger that maybe comes from the way I was brought up? It’s a Scots trait to rail against the misuse of authority, unearned power and authority of Royalty, etc The songs are social comment, my response to social situations. They were not written to bang the drum, but they get taken for that purpose. People say “that expresses what I want to say”.
I didn't know what I was doing to begin with. I started by writing little parodies. Political parodies, for example one about credit cards, 'You're my best friend' that was about poverty, spending all your money on the card. My first real song was ‘Some Hae Meat’ to a traditional tune. ‘Roses’ has a traditional tune, ‘Hawks’ is to a basic American trad tune that I learned from an American girl busker in Germany. I’m not a musician as such, I don't know where the tunes are coming from, sometimes I think I’m maybe using the same tune all the time. Ian Walker

JOHN WATT

"John has been a prolific writer. In the tradition of the ‘people’s poets’ his subject matter is wide-ranging, taking in all kinds of issues but always with a local flavour and with a streetwise perspective. John is a natural wordsmith and most of the time he has chosen song as the vehicle to bear his words. Traditional song has had a great influence on John and he has had a greater influence on the Scottish folksong revival than most people would appreciate.
“The overriding image of John is of fun, but below the surface lies some sharp political observation and social comment. His subject matter might mitigate against his name being mentioned alongside such luminaries as Sorley MacLean, Norman MacCaig and even Robert Burns, but it would be a grave misjudgement of his talent if he was not recognised at this level.” Pete Heywood, in the sleeve notes for John Watt’s 2000 CD of his own songs.

EWAN MCVICAR

Over the last fifteen years I have worked in many dozens of Scottish schools writing new songs out of old ones with the children. You wonder at times if you have a right to express in song your ideas on what has happened to someone else, and at times you take a risk of hurting or offending those who know more at first hand about what you are using in a song.
Early on I worked with a class in the primary school in Bridgend, beside where the Auchengeich coal pit had been. We made a song about the 1959 pit disaster. We sang our new song during a school concert, then I was asked back to help sing it at a community Christmas concert.
I was told that some of the widows of the men would be there, in the front row, and that there had been a debate in the village as to whether the song should be sung. I said, "It's your community, you should decide". The song was sung, and four women came to me afterwards, tears in their eyes, to thank me and the kids for remembering their loss.
In the 1980s I made several songs to sing with the SCND Buskers, and for demos. My last gasp as a street songmaker came in the long buildup to the First Gulf War in 1991. Every Friday evening there was a singing vigil in Glasgow's George Square, and every other Saturday morning a march from Blythswood Square down through the city to a demo in George Square. The march was headed by Eurydice, the Glasgow Women's Socialist Choir, and the vigil led by the choir's organiser, Gordeanna McCulloch. First thing every other Saturday I sat at my breakfast cooking up a new song, met Eurydice, taught them the song, and we marched off singing it.
The principles of 'contrived banality' and 'creative redundancy' were much employed in the songs. One Saturday we marched round a corner, and a middle-aged woman on the pavement began to have hysterics. I knew she must have a son out there in danger, and thought that we were the Evil Reds intent upon getting him killed. I wanted to stop, to explain and convince, to point out that the next verses said ‘Bring the boys all home alive’ and ‘Why should any young man die for petrol and for power?’ But the march rolled on, I felt she could not hear what we were singing, only hear the thump of her own anxious heart. Song is only a support for action, not a cure for heartache. Ewan McVicar