Scottish folk singers

Through the woman classic recordings, Lucy Stewart of Fetterangus, Aberdeenshire (1901-82), became certainly one of Scotland's most influential "source singers. " Her renditions of old-fashioned Scots tracks and ballads helped fuel a renaissance of great interest in Scottish songs that began within the 1960s and is growing.

Lucy was taped by the folklore scholar Kenneth S. Goldstein, whom spent very nearly a-year coping with the Stewart family members in 1959-60 and recorded vast amounts of old-fashioned material including ballads, stories, riddles, and kids's games. From Lucy alone he was capable collect above 175 ballads and tracks that she had absorbed over the course of the woman life from the woman family and next-door neighbors, that would gather round the fire on cold wintertime evenings entertaining themselves with tracks and tales. Remarkably, published Goldstein:

Lucy Stewart pictures by Kenneth S. Goldstein.

Yet she had been an outstanding singer—tuneful, persuading, and possessing obvious enunciation. Her talked dialect was compared to the "taking a trip people" of northeast Scotland, but she might have customized her vocabulary and pronunciation while singing to make it simpler for outsiders to know. Goldstein himself noted that she sang differently whenever a microphone ended up being put into front side of this lady.

Lucy Stewart was created into the tiny Scottish country village of Stuartfield in 1901, in the heart of Buchan District of Aberdeenshire. The woman daddy, James Stewart, reported become a descendant of the Stewarts of Appin, a famous Highland household just who fought on the side of Prince Charlie at Battle of Culloden in 1746. He previously already been a tinsmith, a farm servant, and an odd-job employee in Aberdeenshire before becoming a piper with the Gordon Highlanders regiment. Elizabeth Townsley, the woman mom, was created in Northumberland in northern England, where her father have been a horse dealership and a showman with a traveling circus. The family moved to Fetterangus in northeast Scotland in 1917, and Lucy stayed truth be told there until her death in 1982.

Like her father, all Lucy's brothers were first-class instrumentalists on bagpipes, fiddle, pennywhistle, or accordion, and her sis, Jean, ended up being an expert musician along with her own dance musical organization. Therefore it ended up being usually Lucy who took duty for caring for Jean's young ones while she was out performing. Jean's child, the respected modern Scottish old-fashioned singer Elizabeth Stewart, liked the songs she heard the girl aunt sing, and she has used inside footsteps of both her mommy and aunt by forming her very own party musical organization and singing a number of the tracks she discovered from Lucy.

The Stewarts of Fetterangus were a family group typical of traveling folk. Frequently enduring discrimination from members of settled culture, Travelers tended to socialize along with other tourists, exchanging songs, tales, and gossip and keeping live the rich Scottish customs that were beginning to be forgotten among other teams. Within the 1950s and 1960s when folk-song enthusiasts like Kenneth Goldstein had been searching for performers of conventional material—communities for which songs and stories remained handed down orally and also the ballad tradition proceeded to thrive—Travelers communities just like the one out of Fetterangus proved to be a gold my own.