And 20Th-Century Scotland Marina Dossena
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‘And Scotland will march again’. The language of political song in 19th- and 20th-century Scotland Marina Dossena 1 Some background notes On the tenth anniversary of Hamish Henderson’s death, it may be fitting to pay a small tribute to his work as a poet, song-writer and folklorist by taking a look at the language of political song in Scotland over the last two centuries. Starting from the texts currently available in ‘The Word on the Street’ pages in the website of the National Library of Scotland, in ‘The Voice of Radicalism’ pages in the website of the University of Aberdeen and in other materials specially collected for this study, I aim to discuss the main ways in which rhetorical strategies of personalization and involvement appear to occur in the texts under discussion. While Dossena (2011) provides a brief overview of the importance of political song in the history of Scots usage, particularly in Late Modern times, this contribution intends to focus on pragmatic choices that are additional to code selection. It is of course beyond the scope of this study to discuss the relationship between lyrics and tunes, as the notation of earlier texts has not always survived, and tunes have often been borrowed from already popular songs. What is much more interesting here is the linguistic dimension of the virtual dialogue set up with the listeners, and the ways in which active participation in ‘the cause’ is encouraged. From the methodological point of view, the investigation will place itself within the framework of current computer-assisted discourse studies, in which quantitative analyses combine with qualitative readings of the texts. The topic under investigation elicits interest in many respects. First of all, Scots (and Scottish) political song has very deep roots: Jacobite songs are a very well-known set of texts and tunes in which support could be expressed in more or less veiled terms, often in the thin guise of passionate love songs. Hanoverian loyalists also had their song lore (McAleer 1962), but the publicity given to the lyrics and tunes associated with the Stuart side by Robert Burns’s adaptations and additions contributed greatly to their popularity, and more texts were written in the nineteenth century by Dossena, Marina. 2013. ‘“And Scotland will march again”. The language of political song in 19th- and 20th-century Scotland’. In Cruickshank, Janet and Robert McColl Millar (eds.) 2013. After the Storm: Papers from the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster triennial meeting, Aberdeen 2012. Aberdeen: Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ireland, 141-65. ISBN: 978-0-9566549-3-9 The language of political song in 19th- and 20th-century Scotland important literary figures like James Hogg and Lady Nairne. Nor could we dismiss emigration songs as devoid of political interest: frequent references to the causes of emigration, whether in resignation or in despair, convey specific stance on such causes. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, broadsheet ballads and songs were powerful tools of political propaganda on the occasion of (local) elections. Finally, the twentieth century has witnessed countless occasions for marches in which the humorous adaptation of popular tunes or the creation of new ones enabled the expression of popular feelings that it might have been difficult to articulate in other as efficient ways. Among these, McVicar (2010) and McCulloch (2011) discuss the musical counterculture of the 1960s.1 Protest songs and appeals for reform (often in relation to the choice of a certain candidate or course of action) thus make up a complex body of texts in which various pragmatic strategies are seen to be at work: the listeners’ interest and solidarity are invoked or assumed to be shared through skilful use of linguistic choices meant to make the text acceptable and indeed memorably appealing. While verbal aggression is not unknown, humour is often employed to redress the most serious face-threats, or in fact to stress them, such as we see in the hyperbolic statements of the flyting tradition. Also, the occurrence of proper names may identify the actual object of praise or indeed of insults, providing readers with a specific target for solidarity or contempt. The main linguistic strategies employed in these texts may therefore provide a worthwhile object of study; although it might appear that some features are actually typical, such as exhortations and repetitions, which in many languages have been a predictable form of poetic appeal throughout the centuries, a more accurate investigation of the lyrics is in order for the identification of patterns beyond quantitative data. 1.1 The corpus under investigation: Scots and (Scottish) English texts The corpus on which this study is based comprises the texts of 65 songs and ballads; while the vast majority of these (58) date from the nineteenth 1 In addition, see the songs listed at http://www.scotsindependent.org/songbook/index.htm and http://www.scottishrepublicansocialistmovement.org/Pages/SRSMSongbook.aspx. Useful resources on this topic are at the Centre for Political Song of Glasgow Caledonian University, http://www.gcu.ac.uk/politicalsong/. As for the material collected by Hamish Henderson, the archives of the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh and the online ‘Kist o Riches’ (http://www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/) are invaluable repositories (see Bort 2011). On Henderson’s activities as a scholar and a folklorist, see Neat (2007-2009). 142 The language of political song in 19th- and 20th-century Scotland century, seven well-known twentieth-century texts have been included in an attempt to see how far these may and actually do reflect older pragmatic patterns. The decision to focus on the nineteenth century is dictated by an interest in popular writing and culture of the times, with the aim to shed more light on what uses were frequent in Late Modern English, beyond what is observed in literary and normative texts. As regards language, 38 texts are (mostly) in English and 27 are (mostly) in Scots; however, the well-known Scots-English continuum2 that is such an important trait in many texts, not least literary ones, makes it difficult to assess the extent to which some texts could be placed in one category or the other, and indeed it is the occasional occurrence of a Scots word or phrase that may function as a kind of ‘wink’ to the listener, such as in the example below, in which Scots occurs at the beginning and towards the end of the text – in the former case it is to draw the attention of the audience; in the latter, it is to frame a proverbial saying (‘The De’il maun hae his ain!’): The Bells are a’ ringing (1832)3 O cam’ ye down frae London, man, Or cam’ ye here yestreen? Then sit down in the muckle chair, And tell us what ye’ve seen. That the bells are a’ ringin’, And the folks are a’ singin’, And the Tories they are swingin’, By the necks fast at hame. O yes, the news indeed are great, For the noble Earl Grey Has made the Bills for to pass, And freedom’s won the day. There is mirth and there is joy, In cottage and in hall; 2 According to Henderson (1983: 101), ‘a curious ‘bilingualism in one language’ has been a characteristic of Scots folksong at least since the beginning of the seventeenth century’. 3 Dedicated to the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832, which extended the franchise to numerous middle-class men, but not to the working classes. 143 The language of political song in 19th- and 20th-century Scotland For Liberty bids us rejoice, And we obey her call. The Tories they are wearing off, Corruption’s growing blue, And we never were so happy; A’ our days, as we are now. And who will now presume To usurp our rights again, O gie them hemp enough, my lads, The De’il maun hae his ain! Hear’s a health to every man, And worthy Joseph Hume, Liberty in after times, Shall smile upon his tomb. Indeed, Scots does seem to occur more frequently in the more aggressive texts. As noted in an earlier, preliminary study (Dossena 2011: 3), political activism seems to manage both form and content, with language choices that convey the encoder’s political attitude to specific language policies; in Jacobite and emigrant songs we find typical overt Scotticisms like bonnie, lad, claymore, glen, shieling and clansmen, but syntax is normally English, with the exception of modal usage like in will ye no, or verb forms like kent and wad. This is even more the case in music hall pieces, where a sprinkling of Scots words, such as gloaming, is deemed sufficient to give the song a distinctly tartanized flavour. In fact, such language choices only reinforce the role of English as the standard medium. In political satire, instead, such as in the Tory pamphlet Whig-Radical Festival Extraordinary! (1835 – see The Voice of Radicalism), or indeed in Hamish Henderson’s texts, Scots is used as a fully-fledged ‘language of the people’ (Donaldson 1989).4 In the 1830s the tensions between the Tories, the Whigs and the Radicals gave rise to many texts, and indeed the corpus under investigation includes several references to Sir John Campbell, a London-based lawyer and Whig who stood as a Parliamentary candidate for Edinburgh in 1834, 1835 and 1837, and to James Aytoun (1797-1881), a well-known member of 4 On Henderson’s attitudes to Scots and poetic diction (and divergences with Hugh MacDiarmid in that respect), see Finlay (1998) and Gibson (2009).