UHI Research Database pdf download summary Introduction: Hò ro hù ò, hò ill eò. Hebridean Folksongs and the Authenticity of the Òran Luaidh or Waulking Song Tradition. Cheape, Hugh Published in: Hebridean Folksongs I - III Publication date: 2018 Publisher rights: The copyright to the Introduction is retained by Hugh Cheape. The Document Version you have downloaded here is: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to author version on UHI Research Database Citation for published version (APA): Cheape, H. (2018). Introduction: Hò ro hù ò, hò ill eò. Hebridean Folksongs and the Authenticity of the Òran Luaidh or Waulking Song Tradition. In Hebridean Folksongs I - III: A Collection of Waulking Songs (New edition ed., Vol. 1). John Donald. 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Oct. 2021 hebridean Folksongs i HEBRIDEAN FOLKSONGS volume i A Collection of Waulking Songs by donald maccormick in Kilphedir in South Uist in the year 1893 Completed and edited by j. l. campbell Some songs translated by Fr Allan McDonald Tunes transcribed and annotated by Francis Collinson First published in 1969 by Clarendon Press, Oxford This edition published in Great Britain in 2018 by John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd West Newington House 10 Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QS www.birlinn.co.uk ISBN: 978 1 910900 01 7 Copyright © National Trust of Scotland 2018 Introduction copyright © Hugh Cheape 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library Printed and bound in Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow introduction Hò ro hù ò, hò ill eò Hebridean Folksongs and the Authenticity of the Òran Luaidh or Waulking Song Tradition The three remarkable volumes of Hebridean Folksongs published between 1969 and 1981 by Oxford University Press represent the culmination of approximately forty years of applied scholarship in Scottish Gaelic and the outcome of a remarkably effective collaboration between John Lorne Campbell, the instigator of the project, and Francis Collinson, founding staff-member of the School of Scottish Studies from its establishment in 1951 and leading musicologist of the Scottish tradition. The Hebridean Folksongs are a classic product of twentieth-century research and interdisciplinary collaboration, offering a definitive study of a total of 135 songs with more than one version of some of them and a total of over 5,000 lines of Gaelic verse. These ‘folksongs’ are a very important part of the Scottish Gaelic song tradition and are described as òrain luaidh and conventionally in English as ‘waulking songs’. ‘Waulking’ was the process of finishing and shrinking hand-woven cloth by pounding it, in a wet state, onto a long wooden board of planks – the cliath. The work was carried out by a group of women lined up on each side of the board. Sitting at the board, they would grasp the web of cloth, pound it down and shift it on to their neighbour in a clockwise (or sunwise) direction. Some older descriptions of the waulking state that the cloth was trampled and pounded by the feet.1 This task had gone out of use by the mid twentieth century as the handloom weaving of tweed had ceased, thus threatening the survival of the accompanying song tradition itself. Continuing interest in these Gaelic songs and the recording of them, as in the Campbell and Collinson collection, has ensured their survival although performance today (as ‘art songs’) is in very different contexts than previously. Singing to accompany work – to ease the burden – has probably been a universal practice and custom. In the Gaelic world (as elsewhere), singing extended to a range of other work tasks and communal activities. Comparable song-types with choral refrain are on record and remembered as rowing songs, songs for reaping with the sickle and grinding grain with the quern, and songs for milking the cow and churning the milk for butter. Such communal activities accompanied by song would often turn into social events in the life of a community. The songs for fulling homemade cloth were in a very special category of Scottish Gaelic songs, of single line or couplet structure with a refrain of words or vocables such as, for example, ‘Cò sheinneas an fhìdeag airgid / Hò ro hù ò, hò ill eò’ (Vol. III, page 224). At least one woman, acknowledged as an experienced singer in the community, would lead the singing while the rest took up the refrain or chorus. Songs with a refrain of spoken syllables often seem to be associated with labour 1 Morag MacLeod, ‘Foot-Waulking – Luaidh-Chas’, in Katherine Campbell, William Lamb, Neil Martin, Gary West (eds), ‘A Guid Hairst’: Collecting and Archiving Scottish Tradition. Essays in Honour of Dr Margaret A Mackay. Maastricht: Shaker Verlag 2013, 45–62. e where rhythm and metre are chosen to match physical action, and the waulking songs are sung to a rhythm that picks up the beating of the cloth on the board. The òrain luaidh are largely assumed to be the compositions of women and are for the most part anonymous as we have them. Full expression of the song requires choral support to the solo singer, and such a body of song with choral participation has existed for an undefinable period in Gaelic society without necessarily all originating as work songs; here there may have been a link with a complex of dance and song common throughout Europe in the medieval period.2 As principally in the voice of women as the tradition has come down to us, the work songs’ verbal and melodic structure, with phrases in alternating pattern between solo and chorus, invariably achieves an extraordinary and impressive unity and intensity. The first volume of Hebridean Folksongs is built on a collection of waulking songs made by Donald MacCormick of Kilphedir, South Uist, in 1893, to which musical scores have been added by the editors. Significantly, the editors remind us in the Foreword that ‘[h]itherto, no book has been entirely devoted to the subject of waulking s o n g s’. 3 Donald MacCormick was a schools attendance officer in Uist in the 1890s. John Lorne Campbell had learnt of his collecting of oral tradition from the notebooks of Fr Allan McDonald of Eriskay (1859–1905) whose folklore collections Campbell was then trying to recover and reassemble. Fr Allan had written about (and evidently used) a manuscript of songs transcribed by Donald MacCormick in the context of a proposal in 1902 to publish a book devoted to waulking songs. John Lorne Campbell, with the help of Francis Collinson, was then able to put versions of airs to most of Donald MacCormick’s forty transcribed songs from their own recording work in South Uist, Benbecula, Barra and Eriskay between the late 1930s and the early 1960s. The scope of the MacCormick collection within South Uist and of John Lorne Campbell’s recording work in the southern Outer Isles defined the final form of the work as ‘Hebridean Folksongs from South Uist and Barra’. A review commented that the northern Outer Isles and Skye might usefully have been included, together with a gathering of remnants from Mull and other areas. The editors countered that ‘our object in publishing the material in these volumes is to give a comprehensive description of the waulking itself and to preserve the best of the old waulking songs recoverable in South Uist and Barra [editors’ italics] and adjacent smaller islands’.4 For the purposes of the earlier project to publish waulking songs, Fr Allan had made translations of some of Donald MacCormick’s transcriptions, and translation of the texts was completed in Fr Allan’s own style. By following Fr Allan’s initiative, John Lorne Campbell was honouring Fr Allan’s earlier endeavours and seeking to reinstate 2 John MacInnes, ‘Òrain Luaidh and Other Work Songs’, in John Beech, Owen Hand, Fiona MacDonald, Mark Mulhearn and Jeremy Weston (eds), Oral Literature and Performance Culture, Scottish Life and Society 10. A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology. Edinburgh: John Donald 2007, 412–426. 3 We should exclude from this comment the collection of waulking songs, though with texts only, made in South Uist from 1942 by K C Craig, Òrain Luaidh Mairi nighean Alasdair. Glasgow: Alasdair Matheson & Co 1949. 4 [Alan Bruford], Review of Hebridean Folksongs II, Tocher No. 27 (1977), 188; John Lorne Campbell and Francis Collinson, ‘To the editor of Tocher’, Tocher No. 28 (1978), 257; see also review by Derick Thomson in Glasgow Herald, 24 July 1969, on including other islands. f him as a leading scholar of Scottish Gaelic, as part of his own efforts to recover what he could of Fr Allan’s ‘lost’ folklore research papers.