The origins of this book are described below in the Introduction. While working for Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches as a cataloguer, data editor and indexer, I became interested in quantifying the song transmission data that I could see were latent in the cataloguing database. Over several years, in the intervals between other work, I pursued this study. My intention was to publish a couple of very dry journal articles and leave it to scholars in the field to make what they would of them. Having been informed how boring this was (by a colleague who wishes to remain anonymous), I embarked on the long trek towards this book.
I am very much aware that I am outside my own discipline in this research, but I hope that where I am in error, scholars in Scottish Ethnology will at least find this work worth the effort of correcting it. I was both encouraged and rather dismayed to read a recent paper by Eldar Heide about folklore archives in Scandinavia, particularly the Norwegian Folklore Archives (Heide, 2018). He points out the new opportunities for research that are opened up by digitisation – but acknowledges, at the same time, that these opportunities come belatedly: there has been a paradigm shift in Ethnology since the 1970s, and research interests have moved away from the traditional materials preserved in such archives. So it is often academics from other disciplines who are interested in what the collections contain. The archives that Heide is concerned with do not, for the most part, consist of tape-recordings, but nevertheless the present research is in some ways the type of study that Heide describes: an exercise in the data mining of material now largely of historical interest.
Yet this study does pertain to an issue that has become rather submerged: the cultural identity of Lowland Scotland. The deserved praise and attention given to Traveller tradition bearers has been tending more and more to obscure and deflect the Lowland population’s ownership of their own cultural tradition. Happily, however, the newly digitised material is being channelled into education by Tobar an Dualchais’ outreach activities. The educational work of former Tobar an Dualchais Scots song cataloguers Steve Byrne and Chris Wright (
The School of Scottish Studies Archives and Tobar an Dualchais are keen to encourage scholars and the public to listen to the tape recordings, of which a large part is now available online. I certainly would not want to undermine this message. At the same time, the digitised cataloguing does have great research potential in its own right for the extraction of large amounts of data on particular topics, with audio available to clarify and expand the catalogue summaries. With this end in view, further indexing of the material is extremely desirable.
I was first introduced to the riches of the School of Scottish Studies Archives in 1973–74 as a first year student at the University of Edinburgh, taking the course then called ‘Oral Literature and the Popular Tradition’. I had the privilege of being taught by Hamish Henderson, Ailie Munro, Alan Bruford, Peter Cooke, and other members of staff of the School at that time. I would like to express my gratitude to those teachers, mostly now no longer with us, who first opened my eyes to Scottish folk culture. I hope that the broad view of the Scots song collection that is presented here will reproduce for the reader the general impressions that the collectors would have formed as the recordings accumulated.
My much more recent debt is to my colleagues on Tobar an Dualchais between 2007 and 2012, with whom it was such a pleasure to work, and from whom I learned so much. The present study would not be possible without the expertise and dedication of Steve Byrne and Chris Wright, who worked mightily to complete the addition of classifications to the Scots song part of the database, and in Chris’ case also indexing, as we approached the end of the main phase of the project, with the funding running out. I am also indebted to Steve for helping me find some obscure references. I would also like to thank Andy Hunter for passing on to me, through a mutual friend, his typescript of Bell Robertson’s correspondence relating to her contributions to The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection. This made it easier to gain a perspective on this important contributor, as otherwise the material is scattered through the notes to individual songs in the published collection. I have another very large debt to a colleague who does not wish to be publicly acknowledged, but who helped me enormously, especially by asking questions, directing me to published sources, suggesting that the study be extended to The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection, and saving me from egregious errors. Any remaining errors are, of course, entirely my own responsibility.
I very much appreciate the input of two anonymous peer reviewers, whose detailed comments helped me to pull the book into its final shape, and gave me the encouragement I needed for that final effort. One suggested that it would have been better to have conducted one large multivariate analysis, such as a cluster analysis, rather than the plethora of smaller analyses actually presented. However, my feeling from the outset was that the data would not support statistical (as opposed to merely quantitative) analysis. Even if inferential statistical analysis was used, a multivariate analysis – leaving aside the problems of combining discrete and continuous variables – would produce entities that would either be very difficult to interpret (as well as difficult to distinguish from artefacts, since the data involve too much estimation to justify significance tests) or would correspond to patterns easily demonstrated by simpler methods. I have therefore retained my original approach, which attempts to bolster the various simple analyses of often incomplete data by approaching the data from a number of different angles.
I am grateful to the editor of Scottish Language, Prof. Robert Millar, for permission to reproduce parts of Macafee (2019), and to Profs. Simon Burnett and Dorothy Williams for permission to reproduce parts of a paper (Burnett et al., 2017) written jointly with them. I am also grateful to Prof. Williams, and to the Robert Gordon University, for permitting me to work on this topic while temporarily employed by the university in 2013–14. An unusual interdisciplinary exchange of ideas gave rise to the paper. In the present work, I have reproduced only the parts that relate directly to folk song, but the structure of the analysis was only arrived at through the theoretical framework provided by my co-authors. I am very grateful also to Mairead MacDonald, then Director of Tobar an Dualchais, for making it possible for me to carry out the present research. The rights in the material continue to subsist with the School of Scottish Studies Archives and the individuals recorded, and I am very grateful to the Archives for permission to cite and quote specific information not presently online, and to the Archives Curator, Dr Cathlin Macaulay, and the Archivist, Kirsty Stewart, for their assistance. I am indebted to Dr Linda Williamson for permission to refer to the contributions of her late husband, Duncan Williamson.
The path to publication has been smoothed by the prompt and efficient input of the editor at Brill, Christa Stevens, and the judicious and supportive help of the commissioning editor, Dr Rhona Brown. Finally, my thanks to my husband, Alan Anderson, and our daughter Sophia for their patience and understanding as I followed this obsession, and for their intelligent conversations about it as it slowly took shape. My special thanks to Alan for finding and buying me a set of the out-of-print eight-volume Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection, which is as rare as hen’s teeth.