Burns, My Dad and Me

I'm Kirsteen McCue.

There are two people who have shaped my life -

Robert Burns, who I have spent my career writing about,

and my dad, Bill McCue, the great Scottish singer and entertainer.

# But just a drappie in our ee

# The cock may craw, the day may daw

# But aye we'll taste the barley bree. #

As a child, Burns was on such a pedestal in our house

it almost put me off.

It's 16 years since my dad died

and I'm collaborating on a new edition of Burns's songs.

# Sic a wife as Willie had

# I wadna gie a button for her! #

At this point in my life,

I want to find out more about what connects Burns, my dad and me.

# My love is like a red, red rose

# That's newly sprung in June. #

# But then one day I saw a maid. #

# Land of my high endeavour

# Land of the shining river. #

If you watched any TV in Scotland in the '70s and '80s,

you'll definitely have seen my dad in a kilt.

He could turn that amazing voice to almost anything.

From serious opera...

# Is the head that wears the crown. #

..to real crowd-pleasers.

# Come along, come along

# Be it fair or stormy weather

# With the hills of home before us

# And the purple o' the heather

# We'll sing a happy chorus

# Come along, come along. #

But it was Burns who turned him into a singer

# Flow gently, sweet Afton... #

and I do wish now that I could ask him lots of questions,

which I wasn't able to ask him when he was alive.

# My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream... #

Mum was a very fine musician who took a step back from her own career

really because my dad's took off.

She often accompanied Dad at the piano,

though some of the early recordings are a wee bit of a mystery.

It just... It looked so glamorous -

this sort of rags-to-riches film.

I once got off the bus at Allanton and he had parted his hair

like Mario Lanza!

One of the really big influences on Dad was Paul Robeson.

Yes. So Dad went to this concert and you went with him, didn't you?

Yes, he must've found out that they would be having a rehearsal,

so he went to the back door and asked to see Paul Robeson,

and went in and sang for him.

And got some good advice.

I think he must have sung a Negro spiritual to him,

or a spiritual as we say nowadays,

and he probably sang it in the same style as Robeson

and Robeson said, "No, if you're doing this,

"you do it in your own language, your own vernacular.

"Don't mimic."

What do you think it was that made the connection for Dad with Burns?

When he was a boy,

he had won the regional Burns competition in Motherwell.

The judge at that particular contest was another famous Scottish singer

called Robert Wilson.

That's the book he got, wasn't it? And that's the first prize.

"Presented to William McCue by the Burns Federation, first prize.

"November 1948," when he would have been 14. Yeah.

Dad's love of Burns was forged at that competition, and both Burns

and that very book became his lifelong companions.

I sang...I think it was The Bonnie Lass O' Ballochmyle

and I was in the middle of the second verse when I thought

I was getting a frog or phlegm or something and I coughed to clear it,

and when I went to come in with the next phrase

there was nae voice there, you see,

and Robert immediately got up and said, "Ladies and gentlemen,

"I think we've heard the final notes of what was a boy soprano voice."

# Even there her other works are foiled

# By the bonnie lass o' Ballochmyle

# The bonnie lass o' Ballochmyle. #

Hello, Uncle Denny. Hello, Kirsteen.

How are you? You look a million. Oh, you're lovely, hen.

So are you. Oh, deary, dear.

Uncle Denny is my dad's big brother

but I haven't seen him for some time.

It's a nice photo, that, of him. Yeah.

The girls were all after him, you know. They liked Big Wullie.

We never called him Bill, you know. I know.

His pals christened him Bill.

They christened him Bill.

But he was always Wullie, was he?

Aye. Oor Wullie.

What was music at home like then?

Everybody's pals used to come up,

"Come up to McCue's and we'll get a wee sing-along on a Sunday afternoon."

If the weather was good, my faither would say, "Open the windaes,

"let the neighbours hear us!"

And did you and Dad sing, because you sang as well, did you not? Oh, aye.

Aye.

They always say, "Oh, Denny, Denny's a better singer than Bill."

Denny could never lace Bill's shoes.

Oor Bill was class.

I was a pub singer, as they say.

Tell me, Uncle Denny, about Granny.

She could debate. She was a great reader. Right.

She was a great woman.

My mother was a Communist, you know. Right.

Oh, aye. She just thought there was nothing like the Communist Party.

Did she read literature? Did she read Burns? Did she read poetry?

Oh, she read Burns. She used to say,

"If ever I was asked who was the greatest man Scotland produced,"

she would say, "Robert Burns."

My mother was the first lady president

of the Lanarkshire Federation of Burns Clubs.

Was she really? Oh, my goodness.

I don't think there have been many since!

Do you think that my dad's interest in Burns then

came really directly from Granny?

Came from Granny, oh, aye.

My mother used to always say, "Burns could sum up a situation

"and tell you a full story in four lines." Yeah.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly,

Had we never lov'd sae blindly,

Never met - or never parted -

We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

Yeah. Now that's a... A whole story, yeah.

And I suppose he represented for Granny something that she

understood being a woman in a working-class world.

The socialist movement.

Obviously, after school, he ended up going into the pit.

When Bill came to leave the school at age 14,

the electrical manager at the pit said,

"We're looking for an apprentice electrician."

So Bill got the job and he worked in the pit.

He worked there for quite a while.

Men shouldn't have been allowed to go in to the bowels of the earth

and work the way they worked.

My dad was an ardent socialist all of his life

and I can see clearly that there is a connection with

the sort of more political or egalitarian aspects of Burns.

# For a' that and a' that

# Their tinsel show and a' that

# The honest man, tho' e'e sae pair

# Is king o' mean for a' that. #

The Coal Board awarded Dad a scholarship to study singing.

With his rich bass voice, just about as deep as the mines,

his dream of becoming an opera singer was finally realised

when he joined the newly formed Scottish Opera.

He also started doing a bit of television

and discovered he had a real knack for it.

# Duncan Gray cam' here to woo

# Ha, ha, the wooing o't. #

# These are my mountains

# And I'm going home. #

As a teenager in the '80s, I must confess I did cringe

at some of that tartanry.

He really loved wearing the kilt and he was the perfect build for wearing

the kilt, because he had, to use a word that Burns also uses,

he had great "hurdies",

so he was really solid built,

really good backside, and so the kilt hung very well on him,

and he felt very comfortable in it.

But, you know, there were times, my goodness, through the '80s especially,

where he would have to dress up in other tartan things for the telly.

I do remember cringing at a few of those outfits,

and he never seemed to mind!

He never seemed to mind wearing these awful things with '80s shoulders

and really garish tartans,

and yet his own choice, as you can see,

his own choice in kilt tartan was actually quite classy,

in many ways.

It didn't seem to bother him that he was asked to wear hideous things for the telly.

It just bothered me!

One of the people who knew Dad from both the Academy of Music

and his TV tartan heyday is former head of television at BBC Scotland

and fellow musician, James Hunter.

When you moved on in your professional lives,

you then worked together at a time when he did a lot of television.

Yeah. What kind of things did you do together at the BBC?

I televised a lot of Scottish Opera's major productions,

like The Golden Cockerel, that's one you remember.

# From now on, I'll think of entertainments

# Carnivals and jesters

# I'll forget it, all my mirth. #

I think the thing that impressed me, about his singing of songs

and Burns in particular, because he was mad keen on Burns,

was that he knew the poems.

The poems were the starting point, the words were the starting point,

and the music was there to emphasise the words,

not always the case in all singers who just sing the song.

Duncan Gray, you can hear all the words he sings.

His diction is perfect.

# Duncan was a lad o' grace

# Ha, ha, the wooing o't

# Maggie's was a piteous case

# Ha, ha, the wooing o't. #

He used to, as you know,

bill himself as the most versatile singer in Scotland.

I once said to him, "Who said that, Bill, the most versatile?"

"I did, any objections?" he said, you know.

So I had no objections.

And he was the most versatile singer in Scotland, but there you go.

Lots of the telly stuff was Scottish stuff

and it was very much that kind of era of light entertainment.

Gets a bit of criticism nowadays, or people looking back,

as being a bit kitschy and a bit tartan and a bit...

It was, because that was the fashion of the time.

I mean, it was in a tradition going back from Harry Lauder

to Will Fyffe and all the rest of it, through the theatre.

Television was just in its infancy in the '70s,

'70s and '80s, people forget that in Scotland,

so they naturally borrowed things from the theatre.

# Flow gently, sweet Afton

# Among thy green braes... #

I'm very conscious in my own understanding of Dad

that his connection to Scotland was very powerful to him,

and that he really made a decision to be here and to have his career in Scotland.

I think that is absolutely correct.

I mean, he felt Scots to the inner core, you know.

Considering he did about 60 roles, ranging from Wagner

through to Catiline Conspiracy and modern pieces,

I mean, he would have been a gift to any opera company abroad.

I'm extremely proud, as I said earlier,

to have been born in Scotland... Why? ..and to have this legacy.

Because I've got things that I can sing about

and speak about that I believe in.

Like what? Like the songs and poems of Robert Burns,

like Scott, like the new tradition that's been taken on

through Scottish Opera. We're getting opportunities to sing

Verdi and Mozart and Wagner and Debussy and Massenet in Scotland.

One piece Dad did combined his love of Burns with his love of opera.

In 1979, Scottish Opera produced an operatic version

of The Jolly Beggars for television.

Until recently, it was thought to be lost.

Dad was really proud of the production but I've never seen it.

Linda Ormiston was one of the soloists.

The Jolly Beggars is a cantata that Burns wrote,

which is based on a group of slightly lower-class individuals

coming together in a pub in Poosie Nancie's in Mauchline, of an evening.

These characters, who are the jolly beggars,

all sing us a song which is related to their life experience.

# The first o' my loves was a swaggering blade,

# To rattle the thundering drum was his trade

# His leg was sae ticht

# And his cheek was sae ruddy

# Transported I was with my sodger laddie. #

It's a piece that's never published in Burns's lifetime.

Now it's regarded really as one of Burns's masterpieces.

# But bless me wi' your heav'n o' chairms

# An' while I kittle hair on thairms

# Hunger, cauld, an' a' sic hairms

# May whistle owre the lave o't

# At kirns an' weddins we'se be there

# An' O sae nicely we will fare

# We'll bowse about till Daddie Care

# Sing whistle owre the lave o't

# Whistle owre the lave o't

# Whistle owre the lave o't

# Whistle owre the lave o't

# Sing whistle owre the lave o't

# The lave o't. #

It's amazing to see that and it's not at all what I thought it would be.

I thought... Better?

Well, miles better. That sounds terrible!

It's really fantastic, actually.

We were very jolly because they had real...

They had real booze, did they?

Real booze!

Real wine and lots of beer, as I remember.

And as the day wore on, the beer got warmer and flatter.

The really nice thing about that piece is that it's a combination

of him singing the Scots songs that were so important to him

and singing them the way he sings them.

# He hated only to be sad

# And so the muse suggested

# His sang that night. #

But also it being a kind of slightly operatic rendition. Exactly.

Which also kind of brings out the best in him. The two sides.

And it kind of combines the two things.

I mean, he was... it was international standard.

He was probably one of the first kind of crossover artists,

you know, to do light music and operatic music,

and I think people think of your dad as the jolly singer,

you know, Scottish singer,

and actually he had so many other facets to his talent, really.

I still find it quite difficult to watch Dad, actually,

even after all these years,

especially in a performance like that because it's absolutely him,

and so it's quite an emotional experience, actually, to see it.

For me, that kind of combination of the two things he loved most

as a singer are just married beautifully in that production.

My dad was passionate about sharing his love of music and Burns

with a new generation, as he did with me.

Opera singer and broadcaster Jamie MacDougall

attributes his own crossover career to my dad.

I had done my three-year study here

at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama,

and then I went down post-grad to London, the Guildhall.

And it was suggested to me by someone in the profession

I should just maybe turn my back on the whole Scottish thing

and go down to London and pursue the whole classical thing,

the audience up here... All that sort of stuff.

And I sort of took that advice.

I went down, but, you know...

Scottish music, I've been doing it since I was...

And it was just very much part of me, so talking to your dad,

it proved to me that it was possible

to have a career that would bridge both the traditional,

in the way that I sing,

and classical repertoire.

# But from Glasgow to Greenock

# And from towns on each side

# The hammers' ding-dong is the song of the Clyde

# Oh, the River Clyde

# The wonderful Clyde

# The name of it thrills me... #

What about your own Burns songs? What does Burns mean to you?

The great thing about Burns's songs is that the words, the melodies,

are such that they can be performed in all sorts of ways,

whether it be with a big symphony orchestra or unaccompanied.

You've got... The base, the material, is so good,

you can do anything with it.

# O plight me your faith, my Mary

# And plight me your lily-white hand... #

With my colleagues at the University of Glasgow,

we've been working on the songs that Burns wrote

for two major contemporary song collections,

and we'd been exploring these in period performance

with a group of young musicians.

# Before I leave Scotia's strand

# O plight me your faith, my Mary

# Before I leave Scotia's strand. #

Very few people know that Burns's songs were initially created

for publications which people were buying

and which were very much part of a kind of drawing-room music life

at the turn of the 19th century.

This is how the songs would have sounded there or thereabouts

in Burns's own day, because we're using replicas of instruments

that would have been in the Edinburgh houses that Burns visited.

# There was a wife wonn'd in Cockpen, Scroggam

# She brew'd gude ale for gentlemen

# Sing auld Cowl lay ye down by me

# Scroggam, my dearie, ruffum. #

I'm sure actually that what I do and singing the songs

and working with the materials that I work with

does connect me quite strongly with my dad.

There are a large number of younger performers now

who are discovering Burns's songs and doing new things with them,

and of all of those performers, I think Karine Polwart

is the one who impresses me most.

What I want to find out is

if there's any connection at all with the kinds of performances

that my dad and that generation of singers were involved in

and what performers like Karine are now doing with Burns.

# When o'er the hill the eastern star

# Tells bughtin time is near, my jo

# And owsen frae the furrow'd field

# Return sae dowf and weary O... #

Burns had to have an intimate knowledge of tunes

and different kinds of tunes actually.

He used a lot of different kinds of tunes to write very different...

It's why we've got such a range of different kinds of sets of lyrics.

For me, the one song where it's really striking,

the two different tunes that are possible, is Auld Lang Syne,

which is probably the best known of all his songs.

And of course, if you're at a big party

with hundreds or thousands of people,

the tune that most of us know it to...

SHE HUMS AULD LANG SYNE

It's got a really militaristic, bombastic... All join in.

All-joiny-iny, party feel to it,

so it's perfect for the purpose of masses of people getting together.

But it's maybe only in the past 10 or 12 years or so

I was aware that there's another tune, which is totally different,

so instead of this party thing you have...

# Should auld acquaintance be forgot

# And never brought to mind?

# Should auld acquaintance be forgot

# For auld lang syne!

# For auld lang syne, my jo

# For auld lang syne

# We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet

# For auld lang syne. #

And it's totally different when you hear it that way.

It's just...

Oh, it's sad.

Or there's sadness in it, it's not wholly sad,

but you get a real sense of pathos and nostalgia

and the idea of time passing

and that friends come and they go.

# For auld lang syne, my dear

# For auld lang syne

# We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet

# For auld lang syne. #

What do you remember about watching those kinds of glitzy Scottish

programmes when you were in your teens?

I remember that they were there.

Everybody was watching the same thing on a weekend

apart from anything else.

The songs that were getting sung were Scots songs.

I was listening to on Top Of The Pops.

It's very easy now to look back on those programmes

and just have a mental...

Oh, my goodness. It's just like, "Would you just look at those?

"Look at those breeks. Who thought that was a good idea?"

Yeah, yeah, I did! I did! I do!

But it had heart, at the time.

And actually if you can see past all the cheesy aspects of it,

it still has heart even to listen to it now

and even within the confines of a very particular kind of

arrangement and orchestration and all the rest of it.

It clearly has heart to listen to it now,

and it kept something alive at that time

and was fondly received by people.

# Will ye go, lassie, go

# And we'll all go together... #

And it's important just to give credit to a long lineage

because he had this very round, really reverberant chest.