As I get to four and a half years of making my way, item by item, through my music collection, I wonder if I'm getting any wiser from the experience. There have been a couple of recent purchases — yet to feature on these pages — that cast big doubts over that. But along the way, one thing I've realised is that it's not the bargain-priced mainstream catalogue stuff that I treasure, it's the unusual things from the margins that are harder to come by, and which count their devotees in the hundreds rather than the hundreds of thousands.
I'm building a playlist called "Alasdair roots" in my iTunes. It's a collection of songs that Mr Roberts has performed, in versions by the singers that he cites where possible, but in others versions where not. Paddy Tunney, Jock Duncan singing Bonnie Mill Dams O Binnorie, Jeannie Robertson's My Son David (also a direct antecedent of Directing Hand's version), Duncan Williamson's The Golden Vanity, Alison McMorland singing Hamish Henderson's The Flyting O' Life and Daith, Sheila Stewart doing Twa Brothers — those kinds of things. Alasdair explains, in wonderful Alasdair fashion, what gets him going about this traditional music in this recent interview:
It's a realm of magical equivalencies. Consider the modes: why does the Dorian mode evoke a fox, or a full moon or a pine tree, and why does the Mixolydian mode evoke a swan and the rays of the rising sun or a yew tree? More functionally, it's a form of currency, so I probably like it for the same reason that as a boy I used to collect coins. I liked the way that the further away from Rome a Roman coin is minted, the more abstracted becomes the Emperor's face. No matter how psychedelicised Caesar's face becomes, a denarius is still a denarius. Songs change in the same way. Also consider the etymology of the Indo-European languages. Songs change the same way as words, but they all derive from the same proto-utterance. But one crucial difference — to me the very old songs, the ones about mothers, fathers, brothers and so on, the ones which evoke (or invoke) Fox and Swan, are more than just Symbol — they are numinous things-in-themselves, becoming what they seem to represent, and enabling the singer, however fleetingly, to become what they represent too.
Many of those old songs are available at very modest cost via eMusic's collections — the Voice of the People series and The Bothy Songs and Ballads of North East Scotland. But there's not much Stanley Robertson there. Alasdair paid tribute to Stanley Robertson when he headlined this Topic Records tribute night last September. I believe Robertson had originally been scheduled to play himself, but sadly he died a month or two earlier. Here's Alasdair singing a song he learnt from Stanley Robertson, earlier this year.
I guess Robertson's death may have triggered the release of The College Boy, which just came out a few months ago. I found out about it via a mailing from Veteran (how did I end up on their list? must have been when I bought this CD), and it arrived six weeks ago.
I won't pretend it's been an immediate hit round these parts. But if you want to accuse me of being a poseur for buying music that I don't already love, well, I plead guilty and ask that 350 similar offences be taken into account. It's through these mutations and not-quite-random injections of new/different stuff that the collection evolves — and me with it.
The two CDs come with an extensive booklet, including the words of each song, together with Robertson's commentary on the song and where he learnt it from. Son David, for example, he got from Jeannie Robertson, who happened to be his aunt. There's also a good bibliography/references section with URLs. Evidently we have the University of Aberdeen's Elphinstone Institute, where Robertson was Honorary Research Associate, to thank for this careful documentation and attention to detail.
The consequence of all this institutional support and overheads, however, is that the CDs end up being pretty expensive by current standards. And I can't quite see why ProTools was necessary to produce recordings of a single unaccompanied voice: seems like a sledgehammer to crack the proverbial nut. I kind of hope that the current generation of singers of travellers' songs — like Thomas McCarthy who was very entertaining at the Topic night — might be in a position to self-release their material (if they want to release it at all) using free software like Audacity on someone's borrowed MacBook.
Buy from Veteran Buy from the Elphinstone Institute |
Wikipedia entry for Stanley Robertson More about Stanley Robertson |
Comments