"The Finest Ballads": Women's Oral Traditions in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

"A great many Scottish ballads . . . were re-made in the eighteenth century, not instinctively and unconsciously, but as intelligently and artistically as might be."

—Bertrand Bronson, "Habits of the Ballad as Song"

Eighteenth-century Scotland was a nation of ballad singers and ballad lovers.¹ When Samuel Johnson and James Boswell visited that country from August to November of 1773, they found singers and musicians everywhere and frequently watched and even joined in a bit of dancing. Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) reports bagpipers accompanying their dinners, ladies singing songs of love and parting to entertain the assembly after an impromptu ball, and harvesters singing together in the fields—"the strokes of the sickle, . . . timed by the modulation of the . . . song"—and choruses of rowers singing upon the water.² Being more attuned to music than Johnson was, Boswell gives an even fuller account; he writes of drinking parties singing spirited songs in Erse, of the whole company singing songs round the table after dinner, and ladies singing songs to the accompaniment of guitar.³ He tells how, in Nairn, "over the room where [they] sat, a girl was spinning wool with a great wheel, singing an Erse song."⁴ He describes an excursion on water in the Hebrides with Dr. Johnson "high on the stern, like a magnificent Triton" while their guide sang an Erse song with a tune that reminded Boswell of a song he was familiar with: "Owr the muir amang the heather" ( Journal, 265). He recounts how their hostess showed them the operation of waulking cloth, that is, felting and sizing the new-woven woolen cloth by hand while singing. Even today in Scotland, one finds certain ballads described as "waulking songs," that is, songs traditionally sung while "waulking" the cloth. "It is performed by women," writes Boswell, describing the process, "who kneel upon the ground, and rub it with both their hands, singing an Erse song all the time" ( Journal, 275). And when a Miss McLean played some tunes on a spinet while singing, Boswell remarked: "Johnson seemed pleased with the musick, though he owns he neither likes it, nor has any perception of it. At Mr. McPherson's, in Slate, he told us, that he knew a drum from a trumpet, and a bagpipe from a guitar, which was about the extent of his knowledge of musick. . . . We had the musick of the bagpipe every day. . . . Dr. Johnson appeared fond of it, and used often to stand for some time with his ear close to the great drone" ( Journal, 372).

Folk music thrived in Scotland, prized by the Scots as nowhere else in Europe as the sacred signifier of their culture. People of every class and calling treasured their indigenous folk music and regarded it as unique and important. Scholars wrote treatises on Scottish folk music, middle-class men and women notated the tunes, and everyone sang and played it or listened to those who did with appreciation. The musically literate Dr. John Gregory, the founding member of the Aberdeen Musical Society, which put on concerts and followed the latest scores by Handel, Corelli, and other Europeans, distinguished between classical and folk music in a paper he read to the Edinburgh Philosophical Society in 1763, giving the preference to indigenous folk music. Classical music, he said, was "for the learned in the Science"—which is to say, it was composed and written down in a single authoritative version, complexly polyphonic, and performed by professional musicians with education and training. Folk music, on the other hand, was "a species of music perfectly well fitted to inspire that joyous mirth suited to dancing," or it could be "a plaintive Music peculiarly expressive of . . . tenderness and pleasing melancholy." Both were "original in their kind, and different from every other in Europe," he went on to say, and it was immaterial whether it followed prescribed rules of composition or not because its superior effects made folk music "the preferable Music."⁵

Similarly, William Tytler's A Dissertation on the Scottish Music (1779), after asserting...