Archive Trails

Esteemed reader - I would like to draw your attention to a recently released CD on Greentrax Records (CDTRAX9024) in the Scottish Tradition series: ‘Scottish Tradition 24: Songs and Ballads from Perthshire Field Recordings of the 1950s’.

This edition of the series, which consists of selections made from the extensive collection of the School of Scottish Studies’ sound archive, features 15 singers in total, mostly drawn from the Perthshire Traveller community - singers such as the late Belle Stewart, matriarch of the Stewarts of Blair and her daughter Sheila Stewart (who still sings to this day), Willie MacPhee, Bella, Charlotte and John Higgins and Martha and John Reid, to name a few.  This release is of particular personal interest to me, being a Perthshire-raised lad myself and having done some amateur ‘fieldwork’ in those environs myself a few years ago; also, it just so happens that a number of the songs featured on the disc are in my own traditional repertoire - auld ballads such as ‘Lord Randal’, ‘The Golden Vanity’, ‘Banks o Red Roses’ and ‘The Banks o Airdery, o’.

The CD was compiled by Maurice Fleming, a native of Blairgowrie, Perthshire, who himself recorded the bulk of the material on the disc.  Maurice was a friend of Hamish Henderson, one of the founders of the School of Scottish Studies, and by his own account was bitten by the folksong collecting bug after a discussion with Hamish about his own work in the field.  The town of Blairgowrie is famous for its berryfields, upon which Travellers would traditionally descend in the summer ‘the straws and rasps to pick’ (in the words of Belle Stewart’s song ‘The Berryfields o’ Blair’).  There is a famous quote from Henderson to the effect that collecting songs, ballads, tales and traditions from the Travellers in those berryfields was like ‘holding a tin can under Niagara Falls’, so rich was their trove of material.  This testifies to the importance of the Travelling folk of Scotland as key bearers of the nation’s oral tradition.

Because of all this, the town of Blairgowrie has a near-mythical place in my mind although, despite my own Perthshire connections, I have so far not spent a great deal of time there.  However, this evening I have been invited to a ‘berry picker’s ceilidh’ in Blairgowrie, which I anticipate with glee.  I am hoping to find out who the current ‘crop’ of berrypickers might be, and to discover what forms of oral culture thrive there nowadays.

So the Archive Trail leads me to Blairgowrie, Perthshire, to discover whether Hamish Henderson’s ‘tin can under Niagara Falls’ analogy still holds true.