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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Music, Meditation, and Weather

Weather and music seem to be intimately connected at times. That makes sense when you think about it: the first music people ever heard was the rush of the wind, the fall of rain, the crunch of snow. As winter and spring are negotiating the weather in my neck of the woods just now. it has me thinking about music, weather, and contemplation.

R. Carlos Nakai plays Native American flutes; Will Clipman plays all manner of percussion, including Frame drums, claves, Tibetan bowls, bodhrans, all sorts of other things. For Awakening The Fire they’ve paired up the fluid melodies of flutes with striking, beating and chiming notes of percussion in a dialogue which leads them through ten tracks of original music. By turns fast paced and reflective, pieces including Kindling the Essence, First Morning, and Portal evoke the landscapes of the southwestern United States, landscapes which often suggest mediation themselves with the fall of light and shadow.

The landscapes of the Highlands of Scotland have a different character altogether. They inspire and evoke reflections as well, though, through their wooded glens, dramatic coastlines and rugged crags, all with falls of northern light with characters all of their own as well. For Celtic Airs and Reflective Melodies Ian Green of Greentrax Recordings has chosen eighteen slow airs and reflective tunes from across the Greentrax catalogue, a creative companion and a doorway to meditation that speaks without words. Harp, fiddle, and pipes are the primary instruments as artists including Fiddlers’ Bid, Ceolbeg, and Tony McManus lead the way through tunes including Cairn Water, Ye Banks and Ye Braes, and Wendel’s Wedding.

you may also wish to see
Hanneke Cassel: For Reasons Unseen

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Two from Scotland: Highland Journey and Barbara Dickson

Music rises from and frames the land throughout the Highlands of Scotland.


Musical expressions of love for the land, memories, and connections found across it hold a strong place in the traditional music of the Highlands. That’s what Jack Evans, Marc Duff, and Pete Clark explore in their recording Highland Journey: Music in the Glen. Both meditative and lively pieces find place in their choices for this instrumental album. In addition to their guitars, fiddles, whistles, and other instruments you may hear sounds of the waters, birdsong, and other sounds of nature from the Highlands woven into the music. Glen Lyon, The Forests Where the Deer Resort, and a set comprising The Lass of Glenshee, Lochnagar, and Cairngorm are but three of the baker’s dozen of fine tracks on Highland Journey: Music in the Glen. All in all it is a lovely album which you will want to listen to again and again as you recall or imagine or look out over the Highlands.



Barbara Dickson began her career in her native Scotland as a folk singer, touring folk clubs and among other things recording with with well known folk musician Archie Fisher. Though she hadn’t exactly planned on it, connections made through her touring in England led to opportunities in music theater. As it happened, she excelled on the London stage, and in television acting as well. Barbara never lost her love folk music or for Scotland, however, and in recent years her recordings have tended back toward that vein. For her recording Words Unspoken she chose to work with the renown Scottish label Greentrax.

Words Unspoken opens with The Magical West, which Dickson co-wrote with the album’s producer, Troy Donockley. It is song which manages to be both intricate and straightforward at the same time. It proves a fitting beginning to an album which winds through a varied gathering of mainly tradtional songs including Jamie Raeburn, The Trees They Do Grow High, Presonent Hodie, and Ca’ the Yowes. The collection draws to its close with what may be called a modern day folk song, Bridge Over Troubled Waters. Dickson brings her own distinctive voice and thoughtful interpretation to each, and the arrangements support her well. This too is an album which well repays more than one listen, and will likely bring back and add to memories of Scotland.


Barbara Dickson sings the traditional piece Skye Boat Song


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eddi reader, willie stewart, and the search for haggis
Julie Fowlis:Uam
Eddi Reader sings more of the songs of Robert Burns

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from Scotland: Alistair Ogilvy: Leaves Sae Green

Alistair Ogilvy knows how to seek out a good story, and how to tell one well through word and music, too. Missing a loved one, unrequited love, travels and journeys in search of love, alongside darker themes ranging from deceit to murder turn up in the music he chooses for his debut album Leaves Sae Green.

That title comes from a phrase in a traditional song, of which there are a good few among the eleven tracks. These are songs from the well of Scottish tradition -- Ogilvy was born in Strathblane near the Campsie Hills and is based now in Glasgow. If you’re familiar with Irish or North American folk tradition, though, you’ll meet characters and hear turns of phrase in these songs which have traveled back and forth across waters and communities.


Notable tracks

Bonnie Ship the Diamond is a lively tale of Greenland whale fishers and their homecomings, while Wars o’ Germanie treats of partings and leaving loved ones behind

So does, in a different way, Girl from the North Country. Ogilvy does his own bit of helping song to travel, with this on, as it was written by Bob Dylan. In Ogilvy’s hands it stands naturally among songs from the tradition.

As tradition goes, it also seems natural to include a Robert Burns piece, and Ogilvy has a good time combing two of them, in Crowdie/Wantonness.

Earl Richard is a complex story of murder, with Ogilvy well handling the thread of the story.

The Kirkwall Light is is a quiet piece born of the winter time in that northern place in Orkney, and is a song which Ogilvy wrote himself.

Leaves Sae Green proves a strong debut from a gifted musician and story teller. If the buzz around the film Disney/Pixar film Brave has you thinking about Scotland, Leaves Sae Green could prove a fine entry point to Scotland’s music.


Here, Ogilvy sings a version of Loch Lomond that might be a bit different than the ones you've often heard




You may also wish to see
from Scotland: Emily Smith: Traiveller's Joy
tuning up for Burns Night: Jim Malcolm
from Scotland: The Boy and the Bunnet

-->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.

Scottish Musicians look at the Future of Our Past

In folk music of any country, there often arises the question of how do we pass this on? right alongside the question of how do we make this new? and how do we add our own stamp to it? how do we do that while respecting and sharing the best of what’s gone before? There are as many answers to these questions as there are musicians, of course. Listeners often weight in too, some wanting only exact replicas of what they’ve heard before, others wanting only fusion, and others willing to hear what the musicians my have in mind.

The students and tutors on the Scottish traditional music course at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow (RSAMD for short) think about this sort thing quite often, and put their answers in to practice in the work they do. RSAMD is the only place in the world with an honours BA course in Scottish traditional music, and just to get in one has to meet a very high standard.

That standard is well shown in the nicely titled recording The Future of Our Past, as students on the BA and post graduate diploma courses in 2010 have a go at jigs and reels, pipe solos, puirt-a-beul, and ballads and songs in English and Scottish Gaelic. More than three dozen students took part in the project, which was produced by two artists you’ve met before along the music road, Phil Cunningham and Findlay Napier. The set of jigs and polkas which includes Muireann’s Jig, written by Irish composer Niall Vallely and the traditional Tom Barrett’s is very well done and makes a fine opener for the set. Paul McKenna takes lead vocals on The Banks of Newfoundland, while Katherine MacLeod is the singer on the Gaelic song Moladh Uibhist. There’s a song written by Richard Thompson and a tune by Fred Morrison, and many tunes and songs from the tradition, and otehr from contemprary composers who write in that vein as well. Hazne Metrao and Alasdair hendrson on Highland bagpipes and Kirstem MacLeod on accrodion are aomong the otehrs who have solo aprts .All in all, it is a well paced and well thought out project, lively and engaging, and well worth your listening.

Side note: Students from the RSAMD, the University of Strathclyde, and Berklee College in Boston, Massachusetts, all got together for an equally engaging program during Celtic Connection in January of this year. This was called Atlantic Breeze, and the music traced a bit of melody and song travels across the Atlantic and back again.

photograph made with permission of the artists, and is copyrighted. thank you for respecting this.


you may also wish to see
Music Road: Scott-Land at Celtic Connections
Music Road: from Donegal: T with the Maggies
Music Road: Celtic Connections 2011: images

-->If you'd like to support my creative work,
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.