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  • Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories
  • Carl Lindahl
Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories. By Donald Braid. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Pp. xiii + 313, acknowledgments, note on transcription, notes, works cited, index, 15 black-and-white photographs, 6 musical transcriptions.)

Captivated by the stage performances of American revival storytellers, Donald Braid set off in search of information on Scottish tales. A chance meeting with the late Hamish Henderson in 1985 led Braid to seek out Duncan Williamson, the best-known narrator of traditional Traveller tales. He describes in some detail how he grew to know Williamson and how other celebrated Traveller performers taught him about the migratory lifestyle from which they received their name. Working as seasonal agricultural laborers, Travellers resemble gypsies in their peripatetic ways as well as in the scorn and bias they have suffered for living unconventional lives. Nevertheless, in spite of their extremely marginal social position, and largely through the attention of Hamish Henderson and other Scottish folklorists, the Travellers have come to be viewed as the conservators of Scottish traditional culture, revered for their command of "ancient" songs and tales even as they have been reviled for their "backward" ways.

Braid's book is, among other things, an autobiographical account of how he transformed himself from a physicist to a lover of folktales and then to an academic interested in storytelling. This self-exploration is one of the finest aspects of the book, notable both for its frankness and its humility. Braid's personal story should appeal to those who, like the author at the outset of his research, cultivate a love of story for its own sake. The author acquaints us with the storytellers in the same fashion as he first came to know them; he presents several of Duncan Williamson's songs and stories before he tells us anything about Traveller culture. In so doing, Braid may well hook revivalist readers and keep them reading along as he transcends the story-for-story's-sake level to discuss the complex ways in which Travellers' tales reflect Travellers' lives.

On another level, the book is about how sociolinguists read stories. Drawing upon the work of Richard Bauman, Erving Goffman, William Labov, and John McDowell, Braid discusses ways in which performance contexts and narrator-audience interactions lead storytellers to strategize their performances and create powerful new tales at each telling. In detailing many simultaneous levels on which some [End Page 473] closely read sample narrative performances create their effects and meanings, Braid offers a splendid primer in the study of storytelling. Scottish Traveller Tales would serve superbly as an introductory text for a college course on the functions and strategies of folk narration.

On a third level, Braid makes great efforts to present the Travellers on their own terms, using "the words, stories, and songs of Travellers I met during my field research" to "bring the reader face-to-face with Travellers' own voices" (p. 48). He is particularly successful in his presentation and analysis of a number of seldom-printed personal narratives centered on the mistreatment of Travellers by outsiders.

Nevertheless, it is in the treatment of Traveller culture that Braid's work falls short. The author's laudable humility, sincerity, and zeal cannot compensate for the lack of attention paid to the daily lives of the Travellers or for the enormous body of preceding scholarship that his book fails to acknowledge or factor into its conclusions.

Some significant errors mar the text. For example, the great nineteenth-century Scottish folktale collector John Francis Campbell of Islay is misidentified as Joseph Campbell, a guru of the American storytelling revival (p. 101). More pervasive, and more detrimental to the book, are errors of omission. Braid mentions, but does not print, Willie MacPhee's unique version of "The Black Laird and the Cattleman" (p. 274); readers would like to know that one of MacPhee's performances of this tale has been available for fifteen years in Sheila Douglas's dissertation, "King o' the Black Art" (published by Aberdeen University Press under the same title in 1987). By the same token, the finest printed anthology of Scottish folktales (Alan Bruford's...

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