The School of Scottish Studies

Welcome to our exhibition.

During the next half hour, we shall show short excerpts

from films and tapes in the video archives of the School of Scottish Studies.

GAELIC WAULKING SONG

In 1951, a new department of the University of Edinburgh,

the School of Scottish Studies, was created to record the culture,

customs, folklore, songs and stories of Scotland.

It was about going out with tape recorders - people like Hamish Henderson

and Calum Maclean, the early field workers of the School -

Going round the country into real people's homes,

looking at real people's lives and their cultural traditions.

Over the past 60 years,

thousands of recordings have been added to the archive.

So you can see there are racks and racks of open reels here.

It's a vast archive and it's quite exciting and really overwhelming

when you go to visit it.

Edinburgh University's School Of Scottish Studies

has a small staff of wandering scholars

whose life work is studying and collecting items of the country's folklore.

Here are two of them now.

There was always this sort of great suspicion about what were these guys up to and what was their agenda.

60 years on, the School is still researching and collecting.

Tiber Falzett is a PhD student at the School,

who has been meeting with Rona Lightfoot

to learn from her about traditions of piping and song.

Many of Rona's family were also visited by the School's early researchers on South Uist.

My mother was recorded, my dad was recorded, my grandmother

and my uncle, my mother's uncle and my grandmother's brother.

Absolutely fond memories. I will never ever forget it.

Never.

GAELIC SONG

We have thousands of hours of recordings here.

Songs, music, stories, rhymes, verse, descriptions of way of life,

descriptions of crafts, of processes, weather lore,

customs, beliefs, all sorts of things that have been collected.

As you can see it's alpha-numeric and it's a way of referencing

the material so that you can search either by index card here

or on the computer database.

There's no perfect system because anyway,

how you classify something it's, I think, quite idiosyncratic in a way.

People classify things in their own minds in slightly different ways.

It's interesting because when you look through it,

you get distracted by something else that you think

might be more interesting that what you looked for originally.

'Chap at the doory, peep in, lift the sneck, walk in.

'Take a chair, sit doon.

'Good morning to you, sir.'

SONG IN SCOTS DIALECT

'This individual's apparition would appear along their side and they wouldnae be frightened

'and maybe walk a piece with them and then disappear down through the ground.'

GAELIC SINGING

The project, a new town in the heart of Fife, to house the men...

After the Second World War, it seemed that Britain was becoming

increasingly homogenous.

Many felt that in the TV age, the differences between the Scots,

the English, Welsh and Northern Irish were becoming less marked.

A cultural sameness was creeping across society.

Things were becoming diluted, watered down.

And so the School of Scottish Studies was set up to collect

and preserve our traditional ways of life, before they vanished forever.

SONG IN SCOTS DIALECT

The School was set up in 1951.

It was closely modelled on the Irish folklore commission

which was set up in 1935 and that in turn had been modelled

on Uppsala University in Sweden.

And these were, if you like, the mother and father

of the School of Scottish Studies.

Their workers and their leaders were very influential,

very helpful, coming across here

and helping the early members of the School set up.

The man who had the vision, supported by others, including

a number of people, who were his friends, Professor Angus McIntosh,

had worked during the war period at Bletchley Park,

he had been part of that team

of people recruited from lots of different backgrounds.

To help break enemy codes, you had at Bletchley Park, people working

on quite individual projects,

but all working towards a common cause...

working in a team,

in ways which, perhaps, people in the humanities hadn't quite done before.

The arts and humanities.

Scientists had been used to working in teams

but it wasn't quite the case, perhaps, for other disciplines.

And Angus McIntosh could see the tremendous value of people

all working towards a common aim,

building up bodies of data which they and, importantly,

other people could use in the future.

He'd also seen how valuable new forms of technology

like Magnetic tape and the portable tape recorder could be.

And he could see the importance

and the need for undertaking collecting work in the field,

preferably, right where people were living and working.

When they were telling stories, Jeannie, your own folks,

did they tell them with plenty of actions, did they give them plenty of gestures?

Hamish Henderson himself was a folk collector, a folk songwriter.

A poet.

He was out there trying to kick-start a folk revival

here in Scotland. And he had a deep-rooted philosophy of what

folk culture should be and should be about.

Hamish Henderson was very inspired by the ideas of Antonio Gramsci,

who was a Sicilian socialist.

And one of Gramsci's ideas was the way in which imperial powers

and capitalism enforce conformity on people is through culture,

so what we now call cultural imperialism.

And what happens, according to Gramsci, is that indigenous culture is denigrated.

It's made worthless, and that makes people feel worthless

and that enables capitalists or imperialists

to be better able to exploit indigenous people.

So in one sense,

you can say, yes, there is a clear political direction in this,

in that it's sticking two fingers up at the idea of cultural imperialism

and the idea, a very important idea,

that Scottish culture was not as valuable as these kind of standard

BBC culture which was being pumped out to people on a daily basis.

It's not just a sound archive.

With an extensive photographic archive,

the obvious next step was the moving image

and researchers began to film as well as record their informants.

Filming was a major

and important innovation for us because it enabled us

to give context to,

for example, storytelling, to be able to see the facial gestures

and the other gestures of a storyteller, or to see a craft process,

or to see a dance, you know how, the intricacies

of how a reel in Shetland might be performed in a kitchen.

FOLK MUSIC PLAYS

THEY CHANT A RHYME

HE PLAYS A DANCE WITH PIANO ACCOMPANIMENT

Nobody had done this before. There was no template.

There was no script, so one of the great things people like Hamish Henderson did

was to go out into these communities,

who were quite suspicious of these outsiders, with these strange devices,

tape recorders and things like that,

and getting them to open up and part with, you know

important aspects of their culture,

real treasured kind of items, and be able to communicate to them

in a way that didn't seem authoritative

or talking down to them.

And that, you know, is something that they would have to make up as they went along.

Of course, going to an old community where you are alone,

and you don't know anybody there personally,

there is a diffidence about it, you know.

As you go up to a door...

In fact, I remember thinking, more than once,

"I'll knock gently on the door, and if nobody comes out,

"then thank goodness, I don't have to go in."

But a couple of hours later, when you're in, you're so delighted that you have gone in.

There was never at any stage

any course of training for field work or for research.

We were left to our own devices.

I think it would have been advantageous

if we had had, right at the beginning, some indication of what material

and what questions we ought to ask people.

I regret now and for many years,

that when I was a youngster,

talking to old people long since dead, that I didn't ask certain things

but even if we had been trained to do that, it's impossible,

unless you are living permanently in a community, to get round everything.

My first memory of anyone looking for old stories,

songs, legends, I would be about

13 or 14 or whatever...

was going to Dr McLean's

to play the pipes for an American lady

and Dr McLean told my dad

what the lady was about and what she was after -

stories, songs, legends, anything, old stuff.

And my father said, "I think my wife Kate knows a song or two like that."

So my mother was sent for

and that was the first time I had heard my mother singing properly.

She used to hum to herself but nobody paid any attention to her.

But after this lady came Calum McLean came, and...

I think my mum fell in love with him. She used to practise

for him coming to record.

And we had wonderful ceilidhs at Dr Alastair's.

They would have a dram, and everybody was always in a good mood and the singing would start,

playing pipes and singing, a ceilidh and everything was being recorded, nothing formal.

If you came to a house where...

say a man or woman had been known to be a storyteller,

they, in general, would be more than delighted to give you what they could give.

There were others who might know a great deal...

you heard that they knew a great deal about traditions...

that might involve things like second sight, you know,

looking into the future and that sort of thing

And they might be diffident about putting it on tape

and one or two might say "I'll tell you about it but don't record."

Others would say, and you'd heard they were full of this sort of lore,

"Oh, I don't believe in that sort of thing."

So you would say, "That's all right, but let me tell you about something that I have heard,"

and before an hour or two has passed,

they were ready to tell you everything they had

because they knew that you weren't coming to sneer at them, you know?

For the collectors, there's time for a friendly word.

They've got another important fragment in a living tradition,

another recording to place beside the many thousands held in the sound archives in Edinburgh.

RONA SINGS IN GAELIC

TIBER JOINS IN

Well, there's nothing very technical about it.

It's mainly about creating a relationship with someone

in which you can have a conversation.

I think at the base it's friendship - you are learning from them,

they are sharing parts of their life with you.

It's very much about what we're doing here, we're having a conversation.

I think field work is always undergoing an evolution -

it changes with the times, and when the School first began doing

field work 60 years ago, it was very much trying to

record texts that were about to disappear,

whether it be traditional narratives, long narrative songs, forms of music,

and it was very much about getting these items.

And field work has changed very much to looking at the context,

looking at where did these songs fit into everyday life?

How where they part of your experience

in creating identity in the family, in the community?

I think this was also part of field work from the beginning.

But with reel-to-reel tape recorders,

you only have so much time you can fit on the tape,

so I think these conversations were happening

but weren't being recorded and being deposited in the archives.

So now we have the privilege of being able to talk about context.

When a story is passed on from person to person

in a traditional community,

it's not passed on in an envelope somewhere,

it's two people who are looking at each other

and those individuals,

through all kinds of signs and proximities are bringing more to bear than just the story

or the song, that's the crystallisation of it. But so much that you pass on

in that story or that song, is something that is outside of it,

or something that goes into the performance that is intangible. And to make recordings

of this quality requires again that kind of relationship and that relationship gets built up here.

SIGNS SILENTLY

It's more than just the nature of the School's fieldwork

that's changed in the last 60 years.

New ways of using and interpreting the archive have led to projects

such as this one - to translate some of its stories into British Sign Language.

And Archive Trails, a project that invites contemporary musicians

to play with and discover the archive for themselves.

HE SINGS AND PLAYS

SHE SINGS SONG IN SCOTS

Everything in that archive had been

learned or passed on from someone at some point

and I found that fascinating

because there was a kind of unspoken conversation

that had happened behind the scenes, or, you know, where people were learning things.

And I wanted to make a piece of work that was all about

trying to learn something because it's not an easy task often,

whether it's a song or a story and trying to get things right,

so I thought that this whole process of learning was a fascinating one.

So my performance is me trying to learn something on stage,

live, under the most uncomfortable circumstances.

SCOTS SONG

I think it's a fantastic collection, it's really fascinating

and I think it was made with the people of Scotland in mind and with

the intention that this material should be available to future generations.

I'd been working with these artists interpreting Scotland's traditional music in new ways

and I thought there was a lot of potential in bringing those kinds of artists into this kind of archive,

which is something that hasn't happened really here before.

So I listened to some recordings of fishermen

in the East Neuk of Fife,

so I had Jimmy Muir from 1983, which was recorded by Roger Leech.

Jimmy Muir was a Cellardyke man and a fisherman.

At some point in the conversation he said, "16 fathom on the cot rope, 17 fathom on the foot rope,"

talking about different types of rope they used.

But just that little phrase, and the way he said it,

the rhythms of it, I wrote it down and that went on to be

factored into the Shoals of Herring song, like a rolling sea shanty.

# 17 fathom on the foot rope

# And heave-ho, you're hauling in the herrin'

# You silver darlings, oh you silver darlings

# You silver darlings oh you silver darlings... #

There was quite a lot of remixing of already existing material,

but just sort of trying to come up with something new, creatively,

out of it, which I guess is kind of what a lot of folk culture is about.

The commission was essentially to create some new musical work

but I kind of wanted to use the opportunity to

expand my work into different directions.

I've come across a book a few years before, about Galoshins,

a Scottish folk play.

# So I am going to sever his head

# What should I do more? #

# Fight on, fight on brave warriors! Fight on with all your speed!

# I'll give any man a hundred pounds that kills Galoshins deid! #

So I am working in collaboration with my friend

Shane Connolly, creating a puppet theatre interpretation of Galoshins.

# The next young man that I call in's Galoshins by renown

# He's gonna slay the admiral and take his golden crown. #

This is the tape of the interview with Andrew Rennie.

Andrew Rennie is the blacksmith from Kippen,

who performed Galoshins when he was a small boy, and this is him

being interviewed on the 6th December 1979,

talking about the play and his performance of it when he was a boy.

At the time of this recording, he was about 90 years of age.

# The money's for to give

# And what you freely give to us

# We clearly shall receive

# The first young man that I call in

# Is the admiral stout and bold

# Who won the battle of Heggy Peggy And got the crown of gold

# Here comes in the admiral The admiral stout and bold

# Who won the battle of Heggy Peggy And got the crown of gold. #

I was talking to my aunt, my father's sister about this project,

about Galoshins, and I mentioned Andrew Rennie of Kippen

and my aunt said, "You know we are related to the Rennies of Kippen?"

And sure enough, we looked a bit further and it was indeed the same Andrew Rennie

and we are related - quite a strange, a strange discovery.

We have a kind of similar nose. We have this big nose.

# I wish you all a good Hogmanay And a happy Ne-e-e-w Year! #

GAELIC SONG

I'm very happy that they did it.

I just live it,

I just live the songs. I learnt them listening to my mother

and listening to recordings of my mother, of course.

SHE SINGS

But, eh, she learnt them by going to the waulking, because they did

waulking the tweed in those days, to shrink the tweed.

They were so busy bringing up children and doing the work outside as well as the work inside,

they never had any... that was their social way of meeting.

You know they gave each other's troubles to each other from the table

while they worked, and composed as they went along.

It was amazing how they did it - and the beautiful tunes.

I'm very proud of them. I listen to them a lot because I teach young people at Feisean,

and it's very nice to be able to hand them over

to the young, but I always tell them "Please don't change them."

So I hope they don't.

REEL PLAYS

The texture of our lives today, how we work,

tell each other stories, spend our evenings,

enjoy ourselves, has changed dramatically since the School began.

Accurately passing traditions from one generation to the next

is less critical in an age of information saturation,

when the internet gives us the world in seconds.

But who knows what details of our lives today

will hold the interest of tomorrow's researchers?

One of the important things that they did was to build up

a brilliant archive and this has been absolutely fundamental

to scholars in the past, and the present and the future,

so I think no matter what happens, their legacy will always be secured

because of that important stuff they did when Scotland was changing.

I think part of the ethos of the School was definitely to,

in a way, find all the diversity of Scottish life

and get all the different textures of life.

To collect material that was on the verge of dying out

in many ways, at that particular time.

I mean, some people call this rescue ethnology, and I think

it's really important that this material was collected at the time.

Because if we went out with tape recorders now,

it would no longer exist.

They have a place that is, has the depth of memory that you

find in the books, and files around us, is an important thing.

But having the people who make that connection and having this place be a magnet,

for the scholars and for the storytellers, and for the singers

and the tradition bearers, is an amazing thing.

It's exciting times in some ways, although I think we are at a crossroads,

in terms of the generations.

The entire generation that taught me is retired or retiring now.

We know where it's come from and we have to decide where to take it to.

What should the role be of a place like the School of Scottish Studies

in the 21st century as opposed to the middle of the 20th century?

Your version of the story is going to be your version.

If you give that to another person, that's the richness of it

that they are going to be able to interpret it in a different way.

And I think that's a richness in it

but at the same time we heard Rona saying yesterday, when she teaches

a song to students, whether it's at a feis or someone who comes to the house like we were yesterday,

she wants the song to be maintained,

she doesn't want the student to change it, the person who is learning it to change it.

And this isn't a backwards, historic look at tradition, a static tradition,

but it's the dynamism of tradition. It's how oral tradition is resilient

and can be maintained intergenerationally for hundreds of years,

that it is just as relevant today as when the piece was first composed.

And that's what keeps it going.

WOMAN SINGS: "Andrew Lammie: Mill O' Tifty's Annie"

# Noo when Andra hame fae Edinburgh came

# Wi' muckle grief and sorrow

# Oh my love she died

# For me last night

# So I'll die for her

# Tomorrow. #

That's the shortest I can make it.

That is the last item

from this short series of excerpts from our sound and film archives.

We hope you've enjoyed them.

If you wish to see them again, please ask for the tape to be rewound to the beginning.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd