All About Scotland

The song tradition in Scotland is one of the strongest in Europe and in all areas of the country there are pockets of great singers and characters. In the 1960s the common ground was the folk club network and the various festivals dotted around the country.

The great modern pioneer of Scots folk song, and a man who perhaps rescued the whole British tradition, was the great singer and songwriter Ewan MacColl, born in Perthshire in 1915. He recorded the seminal Scottish Popular Ballads as early as 1956, and founded the first folk club in Britain. After MacColl, another of the building blocks of the 1960s folk revival were the Aberdeen group, The Gaugers. Song was the heart of this group – Tam Speirs, Arthur Watson and Peter Hall were all good singers – though they were also innovative in using instrumentation (fiddle, concertina and whistle) without a guitar or other rhythm instrument to tie the sound together.

Other significant Scots groups on the 1960s scene included the Ian Campbell Folk Group, Birmingham-based but largely Scots in character (and including future Fairport Daves, Swarbrick and Pegg, as well as Ian’s sons, Ali and Robin, who went on to form UB40). They flirted with commercialism and pop sensibilities – as virtually every folk group of the era was compelled to do – and were too often unfairly bracketed with England’s derided Spinners as a result. So too were The Corries, although they laced their blandness with enterprise, inventing their own instrumentation and writing the new unofficial national anthem, Flower of Scotland.

Other more adventurous experiments grew out of the folk and acoustic club scene in mid-1960s Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was at Clive’s Incredible Folk Club in Glasgow that The Incredible String Band made their debut, led by Mike Heron and Robin Williamson. They took an unfashionable glance back into their own past on the one hand, while plunging headlong into psychedelia and other uncharted areas on the other. Their success broke down significant barriers, both in and out of Scotland, and in their wake came a succession of Scottish folk-rock crossover musicians. Glasgow-born Bert Jansch launched folk super-group Pentangle with Jacqui McShee, John Renbourn and Danny Thompson, and the flute-playing Ian Anderson found rock success with Jethro Tull. Meanwhile, a more traditional Scottish sound was promoted by the likes of Archie, Ray and Cilla Fisher, who sang new and traditional ballads, individually and together.

The great figure, however, along with MacColl, was the singer and guitarist Dick Gaughan, whose passionate artistry towers like a colossus above three decades. He started out in the Edinburgh folk club scene with an impenetrable accent, a deep belief in the socialist commitment of traditional song, and a guitar technique that had old masters of the art hanging on to the edge of their seats. For a couple of years in the early 1970s, he played with Aly Bain in the Boys of the Lough, knocking out fiery versions of trad Celtic material. Gaughan became frustrated, however, by the limitations of a primarily instrumental (and fiddle-dominated) group and subsequently formed Five Hand Reel. Again playing Scots-Irish traditional material, they might have been the greatest folk-rock band of them all if they hadn’t just missed the Fairport/Steeleye Span boat.

Leaving to pursue an independent career, Gaughan became a fixture on the folk circuit and made a series of albums exploring Scots and Irish traditional music and re-interpreting the material for guitar. His Handful of Earth (1981) was perhaps the single best solo folk album of the decade, a record of stunning intensity with enough contemporary relevance and historical belief to grip all generations of music fans. And though sparing in his output, and modest about his value in the genre, he’s also become one of the best songwriters of his generation.

Crucial contributions to folk song came, too, from two giants of the Scottish folk scene who were probably more appreciated throughout Europe than at home – the late Hamish Imlach and Alex Campbell – and from song collectors and academics such as Norman Buchan, with his hugely influential songbook 101 Scottish Songs, and Peter Hall with The Scottish Folksinger. Robin Hall and Jimmie McGregor, too, while like The Corries often derided for their high profile and their occasional lapses into opportunist populism, were a formidable presence for many years. There has also been a massive contribution from Hamish Henderson both as folklorist and researcher, an immense conduit of songs and tunes. That Henderson has also written some of the most telling songs in modern currency add to his legend.