Berrypickers of Blair

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A few weeks ago I wrote about my imminent visit to Blairgowrie, home of the fabled berryfields which were eulogised in song by the late, great Belle Stewart. I’d been invited to a berry pickers’ ceilidh in the town hall there, and was interested to find out more about the workforce of today. Well, it turns out that the days when Scotland’s travelling folk toiled there are gone - the pickers nowadays consist predominantly of young eastern European students (which can only be a good thing both for them and for the local community.)

My time at the ceilidh was very enjoyable. I helped the kitchen staff to prepare food for the hungry berry pickers - I’ve never buttered so many scones - and the rudimentary knowledge of sound engineering I’ve gleaned from my years as a touring musician allowed me to help the local ceilidh band (who used a fiddle, two accordions and an electric piano) to figure out how to use the town hall’s recalcitrant PA system (although the evening wasn’t without the occasional burst of piercing feedback). It was good to observe these foreign youths, mostly in their early twenties, take to our national dances with unabashed vigour, unselfconsciousness and good humour, not to mention consummate skill - amost as if, like me, they had been brought up with these moves from primary school days. And the ceilidh was entirely dry - not a drop o’ the hard stuff in sight.

A few days ago my good friend and musical collaborator Rafe gave me the loan of an LP he’d sourced for £2.50 in a charity shop - ‘Festival at Blairgowrie’ on Topic Records, consisting of recordings made in the town in 1967. It is annotated by none other than Peter Shepheard of the TMSA (Traditional Music and Song Association), whom regular readers will realise we have encountered previously on the archive trail. The record includes music by Jeannie Robertson, Davy Stewart, Aberdonian singer Mary Brooksbank (who was new to me), the Border shepherd Willie Scott, John ‘Hoddan MacDonald (a Gaelic singer from Lewis) and English country dance band The Marsden Rattlers (featuring resident musicians from the South Shields Folk Club) and, of course, Belle Stewart. Belle treats us to two versions of her song ‘The Berryfields of Blair’ - the original version and also a parody of the same song written in honour of the first Blairgowrie Festival in August 1966. Belle’s song has been going through my mind over the past few months in relation to the Archive Trails project, and I imagine that my own work might eventually feature some kind of interpretation of it; knowing that Belle herself rewrote the song to make it fit a different occasion makes me believe that it might well be acceptable for me to do a similar thing myself.

Posted by Tracer Trails