Far Ower The Faem – International Connections

Hie sits oor king in Dunfermline, sits birlin at the wine
Says “Whaur weill I get a bonnie boy that will sail the saut seas fine
That will hie owre to Norraway to bring my dear dochter hame?
Sir Patrick Spens, traditional, as sung by Amelia and Jane Harris, 1859

Political folk song in Scotland was never isolated. First there were the accounts and complaints about violent interaction with our English neighbour, then borrowings back and forth in song with Ireland. Scottish ballads had travelled with emigrants to northern America, then Scots learned about and borrowed from the increasing popularity of folk song in the USA. By the time of the Folk Revival the interaction with English songs and singers had become peaceful, and the process of political songmaking was interactive if at times competitive. Scotland’s singers and makers also drew on the events and songs of other countries for topics and tunes. The political folk songs of Scotland drew and draw on the songs, history and approaches to political song of other countries, and have in turn made an impact on the political song cultures of other countries. Songs and singers came to Scotland, Scots singers performed and toured and their recordings were sent outwith their own borders. Formerly song lyrics were exchanged with people in foreign parts through manuscript or printed versions, with or without music notation, then by disc or tape recordings. Now through the Internet song lyrics and performances of them can be accessed freely and fairly easily.

IRELAND

Irish rebel songs sung in Scotland
What’s the news, what’s the news, oh my bold shemalier with your long barrel guns from the sea
Say what wind from the south brings your messenger here with a hymn of the dawn for the free?
Goodly news, goodly news do I bring youth of Forth, goodly news shall you hear Bargy man
For the boys march at dawn from the south to the north, led by Kelly the boy from Killane
Kelly The Boy From Killane
I’ll sing you a song of the row in the town, when the green flag went up and the crown rag came down
’Twas the neatest and sweetest thing ever you saw, and they played the best game played in Erin Go Bragh
The Row In The Town
The midnight hags were sweeping round the castle of Drumboe
While patriot blood was running red in the sodden soil below
Their crime that they had left their homes, a tyrant to o’erthrow
And by Irish hands they were murdered in the castle of Drumboe
The Castle Of Drumboe

Scottish song has interacted with Irish song far more than with English song. Pro and anti IRA or Orange chants are staples of Scots football match singing. The Orange songs, ‘The Sash’, ‘Dolly’s Braes’, ‘The Old Orange Flute’ and others are mostly sung within enclaves. But stirring tunes played by Orange marching bands were appropriated for ‘The Coronation Coronach’ and ‘The Eskimo Republic’. Pro Irish republican songs abounded in the 50s ceilidhs and 60s folk clubs, sung by Dominic Behan or the Clancys, or by five hundred imitators. ‘Kelly From Killane’, ‘Kevin Barry’, ‘The Foggy Dew’, ‘The Row in the Town’, ‘The Bold Fenian Men’, ‘Follow Me Up to Carlow’, ‘The Patriot Game’, ‘Johnson’s Motor Car’, ‘Boolavogue’, ‘The Smashing of the Van’. Many more.

A Scottish-Irish song
The other night a copper comes and says to me, ”McGuire, Will you kindly let me light me pipe down at yer boiler fire?”
He planks himself right straight in front, with hobnails up so nate. “Oh”, says I, “me dacent man you’d better go and mind yer bate”
He turns and yells, “I’m down on you, and up to all yer pranks, sure I know you for a traitor in the Tipperary ranks”
Boys, I hit him from the shoulder and I gave him such a welt that he landed in the boiler full of hot asphalt
With the rubbin and the scrubbin sure I caught me death of cold,and for scientific purposes me body it was sold
In the Kelvingrove museum, boys, I’m hangin by the belt as a monument to the Irish stirrin hot asphalt
Hot Asphalt

In reaction to the Republican and Orange bigotry, songs aiming at reconciliation and tolerance like Adam McNaughtan’s ‘Derry and Cumberland Boys’ and Jim McLean’s ‘Forget the Old Orange and the Green’ came from the Revival. Winnie Ewing tells how she heard an Irish priest sing ‘The West’s Awake’. “The words seemed so entirely appropriate, then and now for Scotland as well as Ireland – Alas and long may Erin weep when Connaught lies in slumber deep. The good creator never planned for slumbering slaves a home so grand.” She and a Labour activist sang ‘The West’s Awake’ together at a reception after the opening of the Scottish Carfin monument to Irish famine victims, “greatly to the shock of all the others”.
As well as songs from Ireland, Irish issues feature in some Scots songs – ‘The Battle of Balfron’, about a non-fight between Irish navvies and Scots villagers, another Irish worker accused of being ‘a traitor’ in the industrial song ‘Hot Asphalt’, ‘Erin Go Bragh’ about a rebellious Scot accused of being a Paddie. Some of the songs were filtered through another continent. The Irish Clancy Brothers had made their name in the USA, their recordings had come to Scotland, then they came to tour Britain. The new politicisation of American song was added in.
Donald Smith says, “I spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland as a youngster and it wasn’t until the Civil Rights thing began to be taken up and happen in Northern Ireland, that I began to make the connection with what was happening round me and this media, record culture, where all the action seemed to be really in the States. Maybe that was typical in many ways of Scotland – all sorts of aspects of our popular culture were really coming from America.
“Ireland and America – for me, those would be the two influences. But then there was what I can only describe as a kind of conversion experience – and Northern Ireland was quite instrumental in that, because of the strength of local culture – as I began to sense that these cultural energies were flowing in our own society and community.
“There’s another aspect of political song. I was in Wexford for their Storytelling Festival and for the opening night, they trail round all the pubs in Wexford, trying to tell stories in various impossible situations. And I’m there kind of as the token Scot – and I’m in the George Moore pub – he had some connection with great Irish poetry and song – and I thought “What am I going to do here?” And I got up and sang ‘Scots Wha Hae’, and silenced the whole place. It was not just about the Scottish-Irish connection but about Burns – so celebrated in Ireland, on all sides. Burns was a great supporter of the democratic cause in Ireland. If he’d still been on the go in 1798, he’s have supported the Rising, as many Presbyterians did. But it’s a universal language. Burns shows that in political songs there’s an immediate struggle. ‘Scots Wha Hae’ is really about the democracy movement and the sentencing of Thomas Muir to transportation. There’s an immediate occasion but he has to use an historic metaphor because otherwise he’d be put in prison and be transported himself for saying it.”
At the time Smith talks of, the increasing violence and atrocities of the Northern Ireland struggles of the 1960s and 70s led to the gradual abandonment of rowdy Irish rebel songs in the Scots repertoire. To sing them was to associate the singer not with the fights of 1916 and the 20s, but with the current horrors. There was a real discomfort with violent terrorism. People reacted against the inappropriateness of singing these songs at that time. ‘Johnson's Motor Car’ and other humorous ones lingered on. But the hard-hitting ones, the Black and Tans, dropped out. At the time of those 1920s events these were not retroactive songs, but if you sing them later they are retroactive, and you are associating yourself with current violent action because the songs have been claimed as the identifiers of those currently involved in or supporting violence. When sung before they were telling of what seemed justified action.
Geordie McIntyre says, “If ‘The Freedom Come-All-Ye’ became associated with bombing English people, we would stop singing it. There is a sense of ownership of certain songs by singers with whom they are strongly associated. But, unlike a poem, once a song is out there it takes on a life of its own. There are innumerable examples of how powerful political songs can be. Not long ago you could not sing at all in Glasgow pubs. It was assumed the songs sung would be inciteful of violence.”

USA

A Scottish-American connection
Full fifteen stane o Spanish iron, they hae laid aa right sair on me
Wi locks and keys I am fast bound into this dungeon dark and dreirie
he first strong door that they cam at, they loosened it without a key
The next chain’d door that they came at they garr’d it aa to flinders flee
Jock O The Side, 16th C Border
There was eighty weight of good Spanish iron, between his neckbone and his knee
But Billy took Johnny up under his arm and lugged him away right artfully
And Billy broke locks, and Billy broke bolts and Billy broke all that he came nigh
Until he came to the dungeon door, and that he broke right manful-leye
The Escape Of Old John Webb, 1730 American

The links between American and Scots songs, political and otherwise, are many and varied, old and new. There were remembered in Appalachia many American versions of the ancient ‘Big Ballads’ that were and are also sung in Scotland – ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Ellen’, ‘The Cruel Mother’, ‘Lord Randal’, ‘The Twa Sisters’. Few of the intensive political songs of 16th Century cross-border theft and strife, the Border Ballads, were sung outwith the Scottish Borders, but one, ‘Jock o the Side’, furnished lines and couplets for ‘The Escape of Old John Webb’, a 1730 broadside from Salem, Mass. The North-East ballad ‘The Bonny Lass o Fyvie’ moves to become ‘Pretty Peggie’, a traditional version of which was recorded by Bob Dylan. On occasion he is credited with writing it, but it came to him from husband and wife duo George and Gerry Armstrong (a Borders surname).
American tunes used for Scots kids songs were in turn appropriated for Holy Loch and SNP campaign songs. ‘She’ll Be Coming round the Mountains’ becomes ‘’Ye Canny Shove Yer Grannie Aff a Bus’ became ‘Ding Dong Dollar’, ‘Twa Twa Zero’ and ‘Ye Cannae Push Auld Scotland Aff the Map’. In the 1980s the same tune was still in vogue, for ‘If You’ve Nuclear Weapons Ready’, ‘They’re Building Fallout Shelters For The Queen’ and ‘No Nuclear Weapons Wanted Here’. ‘Marching Through Georgia’ became ‘The Glesca Eskimos’.
Gospel songs ‘I Shall Not be Moved’, ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore’ and ‘I’m Gonna Rock My Soul’ were employed for ‘We Dinnae Want Polaris, ‘Shout To The Man In Number Ten – Independence’, and ‘I’m Going to Change My Vote’. ‘John Brown’s Body’ became ‘Ban Polaris – Hallelujah’. ‘Yankee Doodle’ was used for ‘Gie The Man A Transfer’ and later for Ian Davison’s ‘Star Wars For Reagan’. There were more.
American strike songs were employed on British picket lines – ‘Hold The Fort’, and ‘Solidarity Forever’ – and songs from the International Workers of the World Little Red Song Books in concerts – ‘You Will Eat By And By’, ‘Hallelujah I’m A Bum’, ‘The Banks Are Made Of Marble’, ‘Roll The Union On’, ‘The Union Maid’, ‘Which side Are You On?’. Two US country music coal mining songs with a political tinge – ‘Down In The Mines’ and ‘16 Tons’ - were adopted into the Scottish political song repertoire, and Ewan MacColl even recorded ‘16 Tons’ commercially in the 1950s, though later the London Ballads and Blues Club passed an edict against such intercultural performances.
Among US influences were the parodies of the Wobblies (I.W.W.) particularly Joe Hill, the songs of white songsmith Woody Guthrie and black singer Leadbelly, songs shared by animateur and collector Alan Lomax. The group the Weavers, who featured banjoist Pete Seeger, were influential as just about the only folk group available on record, and Seeger went on to create anthemic politically committed songs. His songs and his performing inspired many young Scots. He and other US singers introduced Scottish folk club audiences to songs of the Civil Rights movement, and records by Phil Ochs and his New York contemporaries showed how songs could be ‘singing newspapers’.

American Union lyrics
Hold the fort for we are coming, union men be strong
Side by side go marching onward, victory will come
Hold The Fort
Oh, why don’t you work, like other men do?
Tell me how can I work when there’s no work to do?
Hallelujah I’m A Bum
Come all of you good workers, good news to you I’ll tell
Of how the good old Union has come in here to dwell
Don’t scab for the bosses, don’t listen to their lies
Us poor folks haven’t got a chanc unless we organise
Which Side Are You On, tune Lay The Lily Low, words Florence Reese
Come all of you good people, you women and you men
Once more our backs are to the wall, we’re being attacked again
It’s time for a decision, and you really have to choose
Support the miners’ struggle or the next in line is you
Which Side Are You On, new words Dick Gaughan

Most of all, songmaker Bob Dylan carved his mark on 1960s Scottish political, folk, and popular song. John Powles comments, “Janette McGinn says that when Matt appeared with Dylan in Carnegie Hall in 1962, Matt reported that Dylan was a very nice young man, very polite, and had asked Matt if he could borrow a pair of nail clippers.
“Dylan [as a political songwriter] started off with ‘This is wrong’ songs. He didn’t dwell quite so much maybe on ‘What can we do about it?’ From the beginning I think he was posing difficult questions. In ‘A Pawn In Their Game’ the perpetrator was seen to be as much of a victim as the actual victim was. He was already saying, ‘This is difficult.’ But of course he moved the whole thing to a totally different level when he started to move away from that kind of anthem, or preachy or straightforwardly political songs. Why he did that again is complex, like everything is to do with Dylan. I think that as he said himself, he was getting worried about how big a figurehead he was becoming. In 1962 he became particularly worried that people were being bumped off all around him, and he could be the next one. And he pulled back and he produced complex songs like ‘My Back Pages’ which to me is the absolutely seminal Dylan song, in realising that things were much more complex – “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” He’s seen through the glib questions. Glib questions actually have very complex answers.” John Powles
Donald Smith says, “For me the 60s is the Dylan decade – the American decade. I was only a lad then, born in ’56, and we didn’t even have a telly until the mid 60s, but one’s sense of politics in the 60s as a Scottish middle class child, was that it happened somewhere else. We didn’t have politics in Scotland. Now that may sound crazy, but that was the kind of impression that was given. It was Vietnam, all that, and there’s no question that your Dylan man caught the mood and tone of all that and expressed it, and that was the beginning of energising huge waves of popular, political protest. Alongside that, the other big thing was the Civil Rights movement, again largely centred on the States and the struggle for Afro-American rights.” Donald Smith
Ian McCalman says, “Woody Guthrie’s songs were poetically smooth, but Dylan writes real intellectual poetry, using imagery to get his songs over in a different way. Then you suddenly get to know about Holy Loch, the LPs, you meet your Hamish Imlachs and realise there is so much more to it in Scotland.”
In the opposite direction, Dylan and others were affected by Scottish political and traditional songs. Dylan made use of various traditional Scots songs and tunes. His ‘Times They Are A-Changing’ uses the tune of ‘Farewell To Sicily’, and his ‘Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ draws on ‘The Queen’s Four Maries’.
Pete Seeger got the ‘Ding Dong Dollar’ songs printed in New York’s ‘Broadside’ song magazine, and lobbied to get the ‘Ding Dong Dollar’ album released on the US Folkways label. I have noted earlier how the ‘Broadside’ community were envious of the incorporation of song into British peace marches.
In her book ‘Bob Dylan, Intimate Insights’, Kathleen Mackay tells of a conversation Liam Clancy had with Pete Seeger. Clancy says Seeger “was bound to the cause [of social justice]. I felt he was talking through me to humanity. He was sending me a message. One time he told me to learn a Scottish song called ‘Freedom Come-All-Ye’, and it was a Communist anthem. Yes, Pete was preaching."

ENGLAND

While in Scotland the 1950s impetus and examples that spurred on the 60s Scottish Folk Revival were developing, a parallel push and example-setting was happening in England, spurred on by singer, collector and author A L Lloyd and singer, playwriter and songmaker Ewan MacColl. The ‘Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger Songbook’, their own compositions, has section headings that show their writing priorities.

Various Trades Contemporary Broadsides The Iron Road Road Builders The Bold Fishermen Coalminers Lovers Songs For Survival Just Songs

Some of the titles show a little of the strength of their political commitment and creativity.

Go Down, You Murderers That Bomb Has Got To Go Brother, Won’t You Join In The Line? March With Us Today No Agents Need Apply

MacColl was born in Salford of Scots parents who both held fine repertoires of traditional song. In London Lloyd, MacColl and his partner, American singer, musician and songmaker Peggy Seeger, developed the concept of a Ballad and Blues folk club. This became regularised in Britain as a weekly event run by an organiser or organisers, usually themselves singers, with some support from a committee of volunteers, usually in a pub ‘back room’, where a central performance by a professional or semi-professional singer was supported by ‘floor spot’ songs from club regulars and perhaps a resident group of performers.
There was much cross-fertilisation of songs and performances between Scotland and England, and many young Scots singers developed their performance skills at home then went down to seek employment and fame in London, where there were more performance opportunities, and access to national broadcast media and record companies. Some Scots singers succeeded in ‘The Smoke’. More found part time employment touring the developing network of folk clubs in England.
Many of the first wave of these young people had been moved to take up a guitar and try out their singing voices by the recordings of Glasgow born London based Cockney accented ‘Skiffle King’ Lonnie Donegan. Later waves got their inspiration from established Scottish performers, or from recordings and performers coming from the USA. Those who began to make a living from touring in England left at home the polemically critical Independence songs. English performers and audiences had little or no knowledge of the Scots political songs that protested about English and Royal Family power and actions.
MacColl and Seeger and the Singers Club they ran continued to dominate the English folk scene, they incorporated Scots singers into their Radio Ballads, and Scots songmakers’ work was included in their political song chapbook series the ‘New City Songster’. Their recordings and song books of traditional songs, and of their own songwriting, and their frequent touring of Scots clubs, fuelled and fired many Scots singers and some songmakers, though other Scots songwriters drew more on native models and approaches, and on local topics. In his autobiography ‘Journeyman’ Ewan MacColl wrote that in the early days of the Folk Revival “only Scotland differed from the general pattern.” He identified three distinct categories of song in the folk clubs. The traditional songs “popularised by Hamish Henderson’s ceilidhs”, a category “made up almost entirely of the songs of Woodie Guthrie” and the skiffle repertoire, and songs about the Stane. MacColl makes no reference to the key influence of the Bo’ness Ceilidh Song Books. The Singers Club decision that folk singers should only perform songs from their own birth area was less adopted in Scotland than in England. Scots singers were and are always more eclectic in their selection of their repertoire.
A few English songmakers other than MacColl and Seeger were also admired and influential in Scotland, but the traffic was more from north to south. Young Scots went to study with MacColl and Seeger in London, and political songs by Scots, especially Matt McGinn, featured in issues from small commercial London based recording companies and songbooks.

WALES

I am a London Welshman, I am a Cymro da, like Gwyn and Iori Thomas and Dai Llewelyn are
I’m much more Welsh in London than I have ever been. I stand up for my country and for God Save the Queen
The Exile’s Song, tune God Bless The Prince Of Wales, words Meic Stephens

For two nations with such similar political issues there is remarkably little social, cultural or song interaction between Wales and Scotland. Morris Blythman was very pleased to be able to include in the ‘Second Ceilidh Songbook’ two songs from Meic Stephens. ‘The Boys From Gwent’ exploded a bomb at the site of the new Bala Dam being built to supply water to the English Midlands. ‘The Exile’s Song’ criticised the ‘London Welshman’ who sentimentalised from afar. But these songs are lone exceptions.

AUSTRALIA

Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles play the Last Post and Chorus
Did the pipes play ‘The Floors o the Forest’?
No Man’s Land, Eric Bogle

Australia was one of the major destinations for emigrating Scots, some not in accordance with their desire, as in broadside ballads about ‘Hardie, Baird and Wilson’ and ‘Jamie Raeburn’. One voluntary emigrant, Eric Bogle of Peebles who went in 1969, had run a folk club in his home town, and had sung and begun songwriting, but his talent bloomed in his new home. In 1971 he wrote a now famous song about the Anzac troops’ attack on Gallipoli in 1916, ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’. In 1975 he wrote another tremendous anti-war song, ‘No Man’s Land’, now better known under the title used when it also became a hit record in Ireland sung by the Furies, ‘The Green Fields of France’. This song tells of a World War One Scots soldier killed in Flanders.
Is Bogle a Scots political folk song writer? He is Scots, and a wonderful songmaker who shows his fierce political commitment in many of his lyrics, and performs to acoustic guitar accompaniment. A few of his lyrics relate to memories of Scottish issues, and strong identification with his anti-war songs is voiced not just by the left but also the right in Scotland. On the other hand, his melodies draw more on soft US country music than on Scots airs, and he is territorially claimed by Australia as an adopted native son – and also by Ireland because of the chart success there of his songs. Like Ewan MacColl, Bogle’s work is not driven by the mainspring of Scots political song, but is considered by singers to be part of the Scots heritage.
In 1996 Scots singer-songwriter Alistair Hulitt returned from 25 years residence in Australia where he was active on behalf of Aboriginal rights, to express in his own songs and repertoire his commitment to political issues, including the Glasgow South Side Baths struggle.

France

Scotland has always been more aware of the ancient Auld Alliance with France than the French have been. I mention elsewhere links between the two nations through the tune ‘Hey Tutti Taiti’, and Robert Burns’s initial support in songs for the French. Revolution. I also wrote earlier about Scottish right wing revulsion at the French Revolution, expressed in songs condemning the horrid concept of ‘democracy’, and supporting gallant local Volunteer soldiers.

ITALY

Avanto o popolo, alla riscossa, Bandiera Rossa, bandiera rossa
Avanto o popolo, alla riscossa, Bandiera Rossa trionfera.
Bandiera Rossa la trionfera, eviva il socialismo a la liberta
Bandiera Rossa

The Scots folk song movement acquired a small Italian connection through Hamish Henderson’s enthusiasm for the Italian partisan songs he had gathered on active service. There is still in Rome a successful Hamish Henderson Folk Club. A connection better known in Scotland arose through the adoption by singers of the Italian songs ‘Bella Ciao’and ‘Bandiera Rossa’ (Advance, people, to the barricade, the scarlet banner will triumph). It is still a Scots favourite. In the late 1980s the SCND buskers were singing in Clydebank to welcome the marchers arriving in the annual commemoration of the 1941 Clydebank Blitz. The march was led in to the shopping complex by the Barrhead and Neilston Pipe Band playing ‘Bandiera Rossa’. The pipers, who had never heard anything musically louder than themselves when playing, were visibly startled to hear the Buskers joining in, singing the lyric over the PA.

SPAIN

Songs of the Spanish Civil War
There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama, that’s a place that we all know so well
For ‘tis there that we wasted our manhood, and most of our old age as well
Jarama, tune Red River Valley, words Alex McDade
He’s gane frae the shipyard that stands on the Clyde
His hammer is silent ,his tools laid aside
To the wide Ebro River young Foyers has gane
To fecht by the side o the people of Spain
In the fecht for Belchite he was aye to the fore
He focht at Gandesa till he couldna fecht more
He lay owre his machine-gun wi a bullet in his brain
And young Jamie Foyers in battle was slain
Jamie Foyers, tune traditional, words Ewan MacColl

In the 1930s many Scots communists and socialists went to fight supporting the national government of Spain against General Franco’s invading fascist armies. The author’s mother’s father, ex-soldier Hugh Reynolds of Plean, sought to go and fight with the International Brigades but was rejected as too old at 40. The songbook ‘Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales’, published in Barcelona in June 1938, holds some 120 songs (the multiplicity of translated versions makes it difficult to give an exact tally) in 16 languages.
They include James Connolly’s ‘Rebelsong’, ‘Bandiera Rossa’, and another that is still held in British singing repertoires, ‘The Peat Bog Soldiers’, a song from the German concentration camps. The songbook does not give ‘Los Cuatro Generales’, a sweet-tuned Spanish account of the four generals who “tried to betray us”, which was sung in Glasgow folk club settings in the early 1960s, nor ‘Viva la 15 Brigata’, an Italian song of the Spanish fight from which Hamish Henderson took the tune and refrain line for his ‘Rivonia’. The volume has many German and Italian songs and lyric translations, reminding us that Italians and Germans fought on both sides in Spain.
It does not hold the best known Scottish song of the Spanish Civil War, “There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama”, made by Glasgow Brigader Alex McDade to the tune of a then current cowboy ballad. The other song of that War very popular in Scotland is about a Glasgow ship worker killed fighting in Spain, written in the 1930s by Ewan MacColl, using the tune and first verse of the Peninsular War Scots song ‘Jamie Foyers’.

RUSSIA

Earlier I gave Josh McRae’s account of ‘Ding Dong Dollar’ songs, in Samuel Marshak’s translations, being published in Russia.
Higher and higher and higher, our emblem the Soviet star
And every propeller is roaring defending the U S S R
Red Air Fleet
The influence of the Communist Party in the 1950s development of the Revival was strong, but only one Russian political song, in praise of the Russian Air Force and included in ‘Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales’, was sung in Scottish folk settings in the 1960s.

AFRICA

It was in sweet Senegal, that my foes did me enthral for the lands of Virginia, -ginia, O!
Torn from that lovely shore, and must never see it more, and alas! I am weary, weary, O!
The Slave’s Lament, Robert Burns

In Scotland the opposition to the African-American Slave Trade involved both ‘left and right wing’ songmakers. There were in effect still slaves in Scotland till 1799, coal miners and salters, and there were various court cases seeking to free black slaves brought to Scotland as servants. Robert Burns’ ‘The Slave’s Lament’ is currently much sung and recorded, and adduced as evidence of Burns’ compassion on the issue. Dr Gerard Carruthers, a lecturer in Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow, questions this, considering that the class-conscious bard was strangely silent on slavery at a time when abolition was a big issue. Carruthers claims this points to a lack of concern.
Carruthers writes, "Even supposedly right-wing contemporary Scottish poets wrote more against slavery. For instance, the Glasgow poet William Campbell, who was against the French Revolution, published poems in Glasgow newspapers passionately protesting against the crimes against humanity that Britons were committing on a daily basis both in their own country and overseas against black people. Burns only writes one mediocre song, ‘The Slave's Lament’, which has very little to say about the plight of the slaves.”
Scots Anti Jacobins also wrote ambivalent slavery songs. In the 1820 ‘Union Song Book’ is Anti Jacobin novelist Robert Dallas’s ‘Bonja Song’, in which the happy Jamaican slave has none of the white man’s cares, but can sing all day and sleep all night, and play his bonja [banjo].
When the South African freedom movement began to gather strength, Scottish songs in support appeared, most notably Hamish Henderson’s 1964 ‘Rivonia’, calling for the release of African National Congress officials sentenced at the Rivonia Trial, with its refrain ‘Free Mandela’. A recording of the song sung by the Corrie Folk Trio was sent to Mandela in his Robben Island Prison, and was later translated into and performed in at least one African language.

They have sentenced the men of Rivonia,
Rumbala rumbala rumba la
The comrades of Mandela,
Rumbala rumbala rumba la
He is buried alive on an island,
Free Mandela, free Mandela
He is buried alive on an island
Free Mandela, free Mandela
Rivonia, Tune Viva la 15 Brigata,
words Hamish Henderson

Geordie McIntyre also has sung Hamish’s version of the song. He said “Mandela was a statesman, his political stance re forgiveness. Singing it in USA, it goes down extremely well with general audiences. So does ‘Peat Bog Soldiers’, it's about hope against adversity. And look at all the people on the planet today who have hopeless lives. There are exceptional songs that transcend their period.”
It has been suggested that the line “And a black boy frae yont Nyanga dings the fell gallows o the burghers doon” in Henderson’s 1960 ‘Freedom Come-All-Ye’ is about Mandela. Certainly there were political riots in Cape Town’s Nyanga in 1960 at the same time as the more famous Sharpeville riots, but Mandela’s home area was hundreds of miles away on the other side of South Africa from Cape Town, where maps record no place named Nyanga. He worked in Johannesburg, and in 1960 he was not permitted to travel in his own country.
The Nyanga student could more likely have come to Scotland from Nyanga in present day Zimbabawe. At a time when Henderson was unwell I visited him, and I asked about the Nyanga reference. He could not recall any specific person or event that had occasioned it. Morris Blythman had years before told me an eloquent story of a Glasgow demonstration, three or four protesters leaving the evening event passed under a piece of the old gallows of the city, three of them commented on the injustices associated with it while still respecting its age. One of the group, a black African university student, challenged this attitude, and leapt up and tore smashed the wood frame down. A good story but I’ve been unable to substantiate it or even find a reference to such a structure remaining in Glasgow.
Later when in internal South African violence people were killed by burning tyres around their necks in ‘necklace killings’ several songs were penned by outraged Scots. In 1983 Glasgow was the first city to make Nelson Mandela a freeman.
Glasgow’s Royal Exchange Square, home of the Glasgow Stock market, had been renamed by the city fathers Nelson Mandela Square. On the night in 1990 that Mandela was released from prison, the bus services had to be rerouted - Mandela Square was full of people celebrating in song and dance in the darkness. Glasgow women’s Eurydice Choir sang ‘Nkosi Sikelele Africa’ then, and again on the George Square platform in October 1993 when Mandela came to a public meeting in Glasgow’s George Square to thank the city, and in heavy rain, during the music that followed his speech, he danced on the stage. Ian Davison’s song ‘Mandela Danced in the Square’ speaks of this moment and the crowd’s response. I asked Davison if the song, telling of a moment of community pleasure, could be called political in nature?
“Absolutely. So many political songs are dire - sad, or banal. My Mandela song became very important. There are many people who think [wrongly] that they were arrested at the Holy Loch, and there are many people who think they were at George Square. It’s an imaginative trap for people. Mandela dancing on a British public stage happened there for the first time, he later did it elsewhere also. He knew what he was doing, he was hitting the off beat. My memory was that it was spontaneous, he was pulled into it, grabbed in by the South African pop singer there, she was married to a Scots engineer and sang to a backing tape.”

We’d sung about him for years, and there were speeches every where
But I’ll never forget the cheers when Mandela danced in the square
When Nelson came to Glasgow after all his pain
Ten thousand people met him and listened in the rain
The big umbrellas folded, many heads were bare
But every face was shining when Mandela danced in the Square
When Nelson talked of duty you could feel us hold our breath
We were just a bit uneasy when Mandela talked of death
And when he talked of trouble there was tension in the air
But we faced the future smiling when Mandela danced in the Square
Mandela Danced, Ian Davison