Whatever Happened to the Tune?

Bespectacled and buck-toothed, huge and affable, the multi-talented Hamish Henderson— poet, songwriter, folklorist, and chief of the literary lefties—was an unmissable presence in Scotland for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Always at the centre of whatever was going on from conference to ceilidh, with a pint of beer seldom far from hand, he was a public intellectual whose work seemed, somehow, to get done in the midst of a gigantic, continuous, wall-to-wall party. He was the master-spirit of the Scottish Folksong Revival, the great fixer, enabler, and promoter of countless individual talents; collector, writer, critic, translator, and a much-loved man whose death in 2002 launched an epidemic of national mourning that few of his contemporaries could have predicted and fewer elicited. Almost at once the process of deification began. An extraordinary plethora of books appeared, depicting him as saint, seer, bard, and all-round great man, including a eulogistic two-volume biography by Timothy Neat (Hamish Henderson: A Biography [Edinburgh: Polygon, 2007–2009]), and Eberhard Bort’s four edited volumes of reminiscence, analysis, and tributes (Borne on the Carrying Stream: The Legacy of Hamish Henderson [Ochtertyre, Scotland: Grace Note, 2010]; ‘Tis Sixty Years Since: The 1951 Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh and the Scottish Folk Revival [Ochtertyre, Scotland: Grace Note, 2011]; At Hame wi’ Freedom: Essays on Hamish Henderson and the Scottish Folk Revival [Ochtertyre, Scotland: Grace Note, 2012]; and Anent Hamish Henderson: Essays, Poems, Interviews [Edinburgh?: Grace Note, 2015]) making Henderson, within little more than a decade of his death, the most written-about writer in Scotland after Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and Hugh McDiarmid. And now we have two new books by Ian Spring and Corey Gibson.

Ian Spring’s Hamish Henderson and Scottish Folk Song is a direct response to these developments and takes a refreshingly level-headed approach, remarking dryly that “Any sanitisation or sanctification of a life that was, in many ways, brilliantly chaotic, is, in my view, unhelpful” (p. 11). The section on Henderson is accompanied by several other essays by Spring of interest to ballad and folk-song scholars, including “The Weary Farmer and the Painful Plough” (a social study of nineteenth-century ploughmen’s lives closely based on the bothy ballads); “Some Thoughts on Edward and Incest”, which discusses various possible interpretations of the family relations at the centre of this famous ballad; a piece on David Buchan’s editing of the Glenbuchat Ballads; a sketch of the Victorian collectors Robert Ford and Inspector John Ord; and a defence of the early nineteenth-century collector Peter Buchan from charges of fabrication. There is an interesting piece on “Improvement and Romance: The Horseman’s Word” (pp. 176–201) which asks serious questions about the reality of the Word, the initiation rituals that surrounded it, and the socio-economic circumstances that produced it. Spring is inclined to doubt whether it ever really existed at all, although Hamish Henderson characteristically swallowed the thing whole and revelled in its mystical-macho swagger.

The essay “Why Did the Bridegroom Greet” (pp. 13–28) shows the author’s typical approach. He considers a range of texts from various written and printed sources spread over a period of about two hundred years of one of the central performance pieces of the Scottish Folk Revival, “Grat for Gruel”, comparing several of the song’s variants to establish a putative order of priority and demonstrate the evolution of the text.

For many readers the main interest of Ian Spring’s book will be the centrepiece article “Hamish Henderson: Man and Myth” (pp. 142–175). As Spring says, a “great deal has been written (and said) about Hamish...