Scotland's Music: A Tapestry of Scotland's Music Abroad

Weaving a tapestry, piecing a quilt, finding threads that pull through and ties that bind: these ideas turn up as often in descriptions of music as they do in speaking of textiles. In the project Scottish Diaspora: Music & The Song the two arts have come to together.

Across the centuries and across the years, across continents and miles people from Scotland have settled, bringing with them the love of their native land and making Burns night suppers in India. Highland games in Australia, and Gaelic speaking towns in Atlantic Canada. These folk also brought their music with them, handed it on, and used it to tell stories of the lives they made in new places.

The arts community of Prestonpans in Scotland decided to ask people from these far flung Scottish heritage communities to tell their stories through cloth and thread, embroidering them into blocks which will form a large and ever growing tapestry. The folk at Greentrax Recordings began gathering music that shared the ideas of finding life in new lands while leaving and still loving Scotland. The result is a two disc recording that spans, poetically enough, opening with the song Scots Abroad, sung by The McCalmans, and drawing the music to a close with Brian McNeill’s take in The Rovin’ Dies Hard.

As the music winds between these two songs, you will find songs of yearning, songs of leaving, the occasional song of return, songs of new lives in Canada, in Australia, in England, the flavors of Scottish music mixed with aboriginal stories, Spanish rhythms, beats from India, and thoughts on the working life in England. There are farewell songs in English and in Gaelic, and songs of exploration and remembering in both languages as well. Among the voices telling these stories are Jean Redpath, Dick Gaughan, Donnie Munro, Margaret Stewart, The Cast, Rua, Salsa Celtica, Ali Mills, Fiona J. Mackenzie, and Stan Rogers. Standout tracks include Munro’s Strangers to the Pine, Mairi MacInnes on Carry Me Across the Ocean, Siobhan Miller with River of Steel, and Natalie Mac Master’s Glencoe Dance Set. All the songs and tunes are well worth your time to listen, though. Taken together, they make an engaging tapestry all their own.

In the liner notes you may learn a bit about each song, and see photographs of some of the completed tapestry blocks. You may see images of several more parts of the tapestry by following this link.

Photograph is by Kerry Dexter and is copyrighted. Thank you for respecting this.

You may also wish to see
The Scottish Book Trust’s Project Stories of Home
Julie Fowlis: Every Story
Scotland's music: Capercaillie: At the Heart of It All

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here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

patrick season: emigration

There's a recurring story in Irish legend in which a person sets out -- usually because they've been banished from the island, community, or family--in a curragh with only the night stars as guide and a knife for tool. No oars, no companions. A curragh is a small fabric framed boat. Having made the night (and day) sea journey to arrive again on land, the person is then able to accomplish great things.



photograph of the Irish Sea off the coast of Louth


you may also wish to see

Music Road: patrick season: music and mist
Music Road: Songs of the Immigrants
Music Road: Cathie Ryan: Songwriter
to explore photographs from many parts of the world, visit Delicious Baby's Photo Friday

Songs of the Immigrants

From the First Peoples making their way across the Bering Strait to the just arrived, the United States is a nation of immigrants. Cathie Ryan gets to the heart and courage involved in such a journey in her song The Back Door. Here’s a vintage video of her singing it, with Joanie Madden on flutes and whistles, from 1992.



Fiona J. Mackenzie, a renown Scottish Gaelic singer, made an album of songs of emigrants from Scotland her contribution to the Homecoming Year. Learn more about A Good Suit of Clothes

What are your songs and stories of emigration and immigration?



This post is part of The Great American Road Trip: A Traveler's Library is taking you on a trip across the United States though books and film, and I’m chiming in now and then with music to go along. Read about what's on tap over at A Traveler's Library for today.

you may also want to see

Voices: Cherish the Ladies

Cathie Ryan: Songwriter

harvest time: Native American music

-->If you'd like to support my creative work at Music Road and elsewhere,
here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this.Thank you.

Thinking about Cape Breton: Music and Landscape

Thinking about Cape Breton and its music today...

have the leaves begun to turn there yet?

you really should hear the rest of the Barra MacNeils album, too. more about that

The Barra MacNeils: Album


and you may also wish to see

Music Road: Celtic Colours 2009 on the way

Music Road: songs of place: Canada

A quick way to support: you could

Potato Music

Potatoes are nutritious, adaptable to many sorts of cuisine, and among other things.can grow in poor soil, one of the reasons they became a sustaining crop in Ireland and in the highlands of Scotland hundreds of years ago. Both of these places suffered agrarian failures in the mid nineteenth century, which among other things led to dispersion of Irish and Scottish people to Canada, the United States , Australia, and many other countries, where bits and pieces of Irish and Scots culture. sometimes intermingled with local traditions, live on today.

I think I’ve known this song all my life. In Ireland, it’s sung as over here, in other parts of the world, as over there. There are many variations of the words.

Oh the Praties they grow small over here, over here
Oh the Praties they grow small over here
Oh the Praties they grow small,
And they're failing since the fall
So we eat them coats and all, over here, over here

Oh, I wish that we were geese night and morn, night and morn
Oh, I wish that we were geese night and morn,
Oh, I wish that we were geese
Who can die and take their peace
Who can fly, and take their ease eating corn, eating corn.


But the God in whom we trust, over here, over here,
But the God in whom we trust, over here,
But the God in whom we trust,
He will give us crumb and crust
and he'll raise us from the dust, over here, over here.


Having nothing to do with potato famine, American folksinger Cheryl Wheeler has a funny song about the personalities of potatoes, called reasonably enough, Potato. It’s on her album Sylvia Hotel.


Then there’s the modern folk classic, The Fields of Athenry, written by Pete St. John in the mid 1970s and recorded by Danny Doyle, Finbar Furey, The Dropkick Murphys, and many others. Doesn’t speak of potatoes but is the tale of a man sentenced to transportation to Australia for stealing corn to feed his family during The Great Hunger.

You can listen to it here : Fields of Athenry

and here is a bit of the lyric

By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl calling
"Michael, they have taken you away
For you stole Trevelyan's corn
So the young might see the morn'
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay"

Low lie the fields of Athenry
Where once we watched the small free birds fly
Our love was on the wing
We had dreams and songs to sing
It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry



I am in Ireland tonight, looking out as the fog rolls down mountain to the water, thinking that wherever you stand on the political controversy about the history of the famine, or whatever you think about the music, there’s a lot more to the potato than food.

Thousands Are Sailing is a collection of emigration songs which range from the over the top (Wolfetones) to the compelling (Cathie Ryan, Dolores Keane).

Potato2008 is the place for more information about the International Year of the Potato

One of the better versions of The Fields of Athenry is on Finbar Furey’s recording Chasing Moonlight

Cathie Ryan The Music of What Happens during the great hunger, more than half the population of Rathlin Island, off the coast of Antrim, sailed away. Cathie Ryan has a song about that, called Rathlin island (1847), on this recording.

you may also want to see
Voices: Cherish the Ladies





this is part of a carnival of posts from featured bloggers at Lonely Planet about Food Around the World, hosted by Kat at Tie Dye Travels.

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.