Although Calum Maclean had very little to do
with FIOS (Folklore Institute of Scotland), his colleague and close friend,
John Lorne Campbell (1906–1996), certainly did. In a letter printed in The Scotsman newspaper, Campbell set out
a vision of how oral traditions were in urgent need of being recorded. Up until
around that time, the institutional neglect of preserving the fast-dying Gaelic
oral traditions was a concern not only for Campbell but also for other like-minded
individuals. Campbell had the necessary drive and energy to do something about this
and he, along with a few others, founded the Folklore Institute of Scotland (FIOS)in
1947, largely based upon the Irish Folklore Commission (founded a dozen years
earlier), which shared similar objectives. The rather ill-starred FIOS only
lasted five years as it soon became obsolete with the foundation of the School
of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1951. In his letter,
Campbell gives a brief overview of the recent efforts made in Scotland to
record and preserve oral traditions and makes recommendations for the best ways
in which such efforts may be done in the years ahead:
Gaelic Folk-Songs: Work
of the Collectors
by
J. L. Campbell, President of the Folklore Institute of Scotland
Now that the
Edinburgh Festival is an established annual event, it is to be hoped that
Scottish people will be roused to take a fresh interest in their own heritage
of folk-music, for in spite of the fact that some Scottish eighteenth and
nineteenth century collections of folk-songs were in advance of work done in
other countries at that time, the start has hardly been maintained.
The controversy that
raged in the correspondence columns of The
Scotsman a year ago on the question of the treatment of Gaelic folk-songs
by the late Mrs Kennedy Fraser show at any rate, that interest in the subject
is alive. It would be as well if this interest could be directed into the
practical channels of recording, transcribing, and publishing the surviving
songs before it is too late; there are a great many more of these in existence
than is generally realised, but they are usually well known only to people over
50 or 60 years of age.
The Gaelic Idiom
It is very
unfortunate that the work of a single well known folk-song collector and
arranger─or perhaps rather the
uncritical admirers of her work─has had the effect of laying a dead hand on
research in this field. Writers such as Sir Robert Raft and George Pryde in
Scotland in the Modern World series, and G. M. Thomson in A Short History of Scotland, have suggested that, but for Mrs.
Kennedy Fraser, nothing would have survived, and that her arrangements are
improvements on the originals.
The latter assertion
can be dealt with briefly. I doubt whether any of the critics who had made it
have ever heard the originals, or were familiar with the idiom of the
originals. Gaelic music is not a barbaric idiom that has to be polished for
refined ears; such a notion is absurd; but it has had to be bowdlerised and
sentimentalised for ears that have been unfamiliar with modal folk-songs sung
in the natural scale (which are really hardly susceptible of harmonisation) and
for listeners who had subjective notions of the Celtic Twilight.
We may indeed be
grateful to Mrs Kennedy Fraser for braving the hardships of travelling to the
Islands in the old days and arousing public interest in our folk-songs; but the
arrangements she published have no scientific value and the notion that she has
exhausted the subject has done great harm.
Some statistical
information on the latter point is of interest. Examining the four volumes of Songs of the Hebrides one finds therein
214 arranged songs and 121 unaltered airs given in the prefaces as specimens of
Hebridean music. The latter have far more interest for serious students of folk-music
than any other part of the books, but unfortunately many of them are printed
without any words at all, and none give more than the opening verse. However,
they are objective, at any rate.
Wealth of Material
Comparing the work of
other objective collectors of whom there have not been many, one finds
Miss Frances Tolmie
105 folk-songs from Skye, complete with words and translations, Journal of the Folksong Society, 1911.
Some of these airs were utilised by Mrs Kennedy Fraser.
Miss Lucy Broadwood,
72 songs, mostly from Arisaig district, word deficient; same Journal.
Miss Amy Murray, 26
airs published in the Celtic Review
and Fr. Allan’s Island; 15 airs known
to exist in MS., of which a photostat copy is in possession of the Folklore
Institute of Scotland. Miss Murray is known to have collected at least 150 airs
in the Island of Eriskay, the MS. of which is being searched for (at the
instigation of this Institute) in America at present. Words often lacking.
Miss Margaret Fay
Shaw, 12 songs from Uist in the English
Folksong Journal, with translations and notes. Miss Shaw has over 100 other
songs collected in Uist, as yet unpublished.
Mr Calum MacLean,
working for the Irish Folklore Commission, has recorded over 70 in Raasay and
Canna and 170 in Benbecula.
The writer and other
collaborators working under the aegis of the Folklore Institute of Scotland
have recorded 500 folksongs in Barra, Eriskay, Morar, Canna, South Uist, and
Cape Breton, since 1937.
The Linguistic Survey
of Scotland has already recorded a number of Gaelic songs.
Although there is
certainly some overlapping among these collections, what has been done already
proves beyond doubt that the total amount of material in existence must be very
large indeed─certainly something to compare with the 5000 English folksongs
which have been collected, or with collections made in Ireland by the Irish
Folklore Commission, or with the 7000 folk-songs collected in Hungary by Bartók
and Kodály─something, that is to say, far in excess of what is popularly realised.
Most of the early
collectors were greatly handicapped by not knowing Gaelic themselves and by
lacking efficient mechanical means of recording the airs, for writing down from
the singers themselves is a most laborious and slow process. The whole subject
has received a fresh impetus from the perfecting of portable mechanical means
of recording on tape, wire, or discs. Now that these devices exist it is most
urgent that the work of collecting our folk-music should proceed on a
systematic and scientific basis.
An Urgent Need
There are still
hundreds, if not thousands, of folk-songs to be collected in Scotland,
particularly in the Hebrides. There is still time to do what has hardly been
attempted, viz., the collection and collation of versions of the same song as
sung by different singers in different places. There is still time to trace out
persons living in Canada and other Dominions who have emigrated from Scotland,
or whose forebears emigrated from Scotland, bearing part of this tradition with
them.
It will, indeed, be a
grave reproach to all who are associated with the study of the humanities in
Scotland if no co-ordinated attempt be made to recover this material before it
is too late. In the past this work has been hampered by political and utilitarian
prejudices, but these should not be allowed to operate to-day. It is certainly
no credit to Scotland that hitherto such work has been left to amateurs and
that the only outlet for the publication of Scottish Gaelic folk songs is still
the Journal of the English Folk-Dance and
Folk-Song Society.
It is essential, in
other words, that the collection, recording, transcription, and cataloguing of
our folklore should be put on a proper whole-time basis, as is done in Ireland,
Scandinavia, and the United States. It cannot be left to amateurs, even though
Scotland may have been exceptionally fortunate having has amateur folklore
collector of the stature of J. F. Campbell of Islay, Alexander Carmichael,
Frances Tolmie in the past. For this purpose, the endowment of a body in
Scotland similar to the Irish Folklore Commission would be the best step; but
the universities, the B.B.C. and the Scottish Education Department ought to
co-operate and aid this work to the fullest possible extent.
The need is urgent;
the older people who preserved this lore are passing away─well known Barra
folk-singers have died within the last 12 months, for instance. The expense of
the work puts it beyond the means of amateurs and unendowed bodies. The dignity
and intrinsic merit and significance for the cultural life of Scotland demand
that it be recognised as an important object of research and adequately carried
out. As folk-music is the basis for all national music and how can Scottish
music flourish at the top, if its roots are neglected?
John Lorne Campbell’s plea for
further efforts to be made in order to record material did not fall upon deaf
ears. He along with other advocates such as Angus McIntosh and James Hamilton
Delargy, Director of the Irish Folklore Commission, were instrumental in
gaining support in Scotland and beyond for an institution to be set up in order
to scientifically record Scotland’s intangible cultural heritage. With the
foundation of the School of Scottish Studies, Calum Maclean was transferred on
a three-year loan (which subsequently became permanent) to be its first
fieldwork collector and researcher. Along with his colleagues, Maclean had his
work cut out for him and the recordings made by him in the School’s first
decade formed not an insubstantial part of an ongoing sound archive consisting of
over 12,000 hours of various materials.
Reference:
J.
L. Campbell, ‘Gaelic Folk-Songs: Work of Collectors’, The Scotsman (17 Sep., 1949), p. 9
Images:
John
Lorne Campbell as a young man and FIOS logo
