Chapter 05 (1940 – 1945) - (Pages 46 - 56) - The Wanderin' Drummer
There was a Shand Band playing fairly regularly by 1940.
Part-time personnel ; Fiddler Jim Cameron, Lemonade man from Kirriemuir, and his daughter May who played accordion ; Alan Reid and Dave Donaldson.
Due to the exigencies of war there was no guarantee they could always be free to play at the same time. Substitutes often had to be located at very short notice.
But at the end of February 1941 it was a lightening attack of flu that knocked a drummer out of the combination.
“How’s it goin’ Jim?” Jerry McCafferty happened to ask in the Fire Station that afternoon when Jim looked more than unusually morose……Then when told of a gap in the ‘dunt’ section – “So ye need a drummer? Cheer up – that’s nae bother! Wee Owney McCabe – he’s yer man! We’ll get him at the sawmill at Lochee.”
Alan Dunsmore describes the meeting (People’s Journal 1/11/56) –
Owney was fetched from the workshop….It was some time before Shand could open his mouth to explain his errand. The man he hoped would play his drums that night stood no higher than his bottom jacket button.
At last Shand announced to the little man ; “Want a job the nicht? I’ve a band playing’ at Alyth an’ we’re needin’ a drummer.”
McCabe went home in great glee to his wife that night.
“I’ve got a job wi’ the drums!” he said excitedly. “Chap called Shand. Never seen him before. But another few bob will come in handy.”
Yet when he set out for Alyth that night his last ounce of confidence took some holding.
“I’ll be all right once I get started,” he thought. But no one had told him that the nervous Shand had a habit of turning his head to the side every time he felt an audience attacking him with their eyes.
Great was Owney’s despondency when he got back home.
“How’d you get on?” his wife asked.
“No’ very braw,” said Owney. “He kept turnin’ round an gie’n’ me dirty looks!”
Thus began a partnership that was to last for more than twenty years.
At this time Jimmy was occasionally augmenting the band of the Dundee Empress Ballroom where an enthusiast named Douglas Henderson organized Scottish Country Dance Sessions…..And, not long after, he himself was leading a group playing for the same type of dancing at a local hall names St. Patrick’s run by Craigie Football Club.
Left-handed fiddler Dave Ireland had a band of his own, but on Monday nights he played with Jimmy’s outfit at St. Patrick’s.
While awaiting call-up, piano-accordionist George McKelvey had sat in with Ireland’s band at a Saturday night in the village of Longforgan ; went along with the fiddler one Monday night to meet Shand ; accepted an invitation to become second-box player.
It was through cousin George that I first came to know Jimmy Shand.
Like Jimmy, George was also one of a family of nine, and started playing the melodeon while still at school.
In spite of hard times, my aunt Annie could always spare a bowl of soup for the needy, and this included the miner-musicians from Fife who came to play in the streets of Dundee during the 1926 Strike.
One day one of them had a piano-accordion (novel then) for sale, and through the timely winning of a sweepstake – and with the balance somehow made up from mother’s purse – young brewery-worker George was able to acquire it. I was often in my aunt’s house when he would come eagerly clattering up the tenement stair to snatch a few minutes practice while the kail was being ladled. Soon he was playing the new box in a trio at Saturday night dances in small halls. His spare-time music-making progressed, although not as spectacularly as Shand’s. But every move was to a better hall, higher fees.
Despite her humble station my aunt Annie was in her way a valuable patroness of the art of music. There was, for instance, the hard-up pianist who regularly tuned up….
Sometimes he would lighten her gargantuan labours at the washboard stuck in the galvanized bath set on a backless wooden kitchen chair, imposing a delecate filigree of capriccio or lilting Highland melody upon the sudsy, rhythmic, rasping, cleaning of semmits and drawers and the intermittent pizzicato of rattling shirt and blouse buttons ; or perhaps he would accompany himself on an old heirloom organ in The Lost Chord while she sat darning or mending on a drowsy afternoon beside the blackleaded iron kettle on the blackleaded hob. In return he would share the family’s simple meal.
The pianist was Tammy McDaniel, one of the trio my cousin George started off with. (The leader had been drummer Stuartie Foy, who would leave the skins to deliver a comic monologue……In dame get-up he would rush onstage, eyes shut – he kept this up until in his seventies without ever once falling over the edge – hands clasped in a wringing gesture, head turning this way and that in perplexity, before launching into the uproarious ‘My Man Tam’ or ‘My Wee Johnny’ – Mind ye that an’ mind ye yon when ye marry my wee John prefacing a long list of the fastidious son’s idiosyncrasies reeled off by the doting mother to the daughter-in-law-to-be, who, in the last verse, rebels with It’s his mither he needs merried on! Ye can keep ye rain wee Johnny!)
There were many small halls in Dundee running dances then, some of them considered somewhat ‘oary’ which means less than respectable.
In my urchinhood, playing in the streets, I saw bobbed and shingled girls setting off in the evenings, their slippers wrapped in paper ; a few escorted, but mostly in twos and threes, chattering gaily, cracking chewing-gum, shouting ”We-ell!” to boys. They smelled of cachous and spearmint and Jockey Club ; and sometimes they woke you up later, returning in groups, singing. At such times you might also hear a stirring of feet in the echoing close below, a girl’s laugh, and a deeper male voice.
Cousin George became one of a quintet playing at one of the less-refined halls ; a hall, which because of its long narrowness was known as the Palais de Loabby. Sometimes there were ugly scenes, even bouts of fisticuffs, in and just outside the hall ; but the checkers and supporters always managed to keep the tide of battle from engulfing the quintet. Admission was only sixpence, yet there could be arguments over that.
One night George gave his wrist-watch to pal John who was on the door. John strapped it on beside his own. Later, a girl sought to gain admission for fourpence. When she was refused she shrieked abuse – no wonder he was able to sport TWO watches at such fancy prices! Well, he would certainly get no more money from her towards a third watch!
This, and other anecdotes, filtered back to me from the Big Out There, where music was played for hours at a stretch, and where some people didn’t even bother to listen to it but wanted to fight instead. I decided that when I was older I would go to the dancing, certainly not to fight – not even to dance but merely sit and listen entranced to the band……
A little first-hand experience of that period of the ‘thirties might not be out of place here….
Came the time when, with my hair glued down in front with Kolene and sticking up at the back, with points on my shoes and my double-breasted waistcoat ; in very long and very wide-bottomed trousers topped by a very narrow and very short coat(‘bum-freezer’ was the local term) I took up the ‘jiggin’.’ I still wanted to just sit and listen to the band, but with a girl now – for the opposite sex was now beginning to assume a strange power over me. Paradoxically, you had to learn to dance before being able to sit one out with a partner, I learned at Robertson’s in Well Road, and stuck to such respectable hall for some time.
Then a mate boasted of all the tough joints he had been in…….It became necessary to prove I also was a youth-about-town, at home anywhere.
With a blasé smile, mocked by the involuntary chattering of my teeth I entered a dive one Saturday night. Perspiration streamed from the band playing at a frenzied tempo. I waited until the quickstep ended and a waltz was announced, then mumbles huskily to the nearest girl – a gum-chewing amazon, and we took to the floor.
The waltz was played at the same galloping speed as the quickstep, and we flew round the hall ‘birlin’ like peeries’ (spinning like tops), my partner nonchalantly cracking gum in my ear. Like many of the girls she wore her coat in preference to paying the cloakroom penny or leaving it unattended on a chair…..
Well, I could now boast of having been to this place and having whirled a measure in it, but I felt I had to show I could also converse with the denizens on their own level. As the floor whizzed by underneath I noticed how battered and scarred it was ; chunks had been booted out of it leaving murderous slivers.
“Helluva floor” I croaked.
“I’nt it,” she agreed. Then, with a strident guffaw, “Hey – how’d ye like yer arse dragged over it, eh?”
Personnel when George McKelvey joined the new combination ; Jimmy and George, accordions ; Johnny Knight, piano ; Dave Ireland, fiddle, Owen McCabe, drums.
George fitted in well, for Scottish dances had always been some part in his previous playing.
How was Jimmy to work for in those days? I should have thought that the inimitable Shand Band Sound was only achieved after very long sessions of rehersal, playing and replaying, refining, polishing endlessly……
George told me, no. Jimmy was as easy-going then as he is now. At the same time through some rapport his players must have been capable of appreciating and performing the extremely individual Shand selections and arrangements.
Jimmy himself puts it somewhat disparagingly – “we jist somehow seemed tae hit on a way o’ playin’ Scottish dance music that folk liked.”
From the start, the style aimed at was a simple clarity ; twiddley-bits and fal-de-rals were out.
Being invited to play with Shand was the best opportunity that had come George’s way.
It lasted three weeks – for then he was called up.
Three months later he was out again due to stomach trouble. He was ro be in the band almost as long as Owney McCabe.
Dr Sandy Tulloch recalls –
I was at Mayfield as a Clinical Clerk by this time. Jimmy and the Band played in St. Patrick’s Hall in Maitland Street every Monday night and I used to be allowed to sit in. There I got to know and make a lasting friendship with Dave Ireland, the left-handed fiddler. With George McKelvey, who played a Hohner accordion with a curved keyboard which he changed later for a Morino model (the so-called 2 + 1) and which is still playing as well today as it was then. With Owen McCabe, the drummer, wonderful wee Owney, sadly missed now. I think the pianist was Willie Robb, but it is a long time ago now.
I used to sit in at the back but at times I was so intent on the fingering that I would miss the change of tune when the time came. Jimmy used to turn round with a wee smile and a shake of the head and I’d realise with a start that I was out on my own, and get back on the right tune as quick as I could, hoping that only the band had noticed. I soon realised that playing Scottish Country Dance Music with Jimmy Shand was an exact science. Jimmy chose his tunes with care and gave each couple a change of tune and a change of key. It soon became second nature to know all the dances and to change automatically for an 8 x 32, 8 x 40 or 8 x 48 as the dance required. Jimmy had no use for so-called ‘original’ tunes if they were poor musically and did not fit the dance. He used to get in trouble with the SCD Society and the BBC about this, and later in Glasgow I suffered the same way. But I agree entirely with him in this matter.
What use is a 4/4 reel if it is virtually unplayable and unpleasant to the ear? And who decided what is the ‘original’ tune anyway? I’m sure Scott Skinner did not compose an ‘original’ tune for a dance that was devised long after his death!
It was about this time I was in the Odeon Cinema at Coldside when an accordion record was played during the interval. The music was new to me, a lively Continental, but I was sure the style was Jimmy Shand’s. I went to the Manager’s Office and got the details. It was Jimmy and he was playing a piece by Emile Vacher called Triolets. On the other side was a Valse Musette. As I got to know Jimmy better and he was relaxed and off duty, I began to realise what an immense repertoire this man had – especially ‘old time’ music. He also played many Continental numbers which I found very interesting and this interest has always remained with me. Curiously enough, although they sound complicated, I have always found them easier to play than a fast Scottish reel. These really sound out your technique on this type of accordion. These happy days at Sutherland Street and playing with Jimmy at every opportunity went on until 1942, when I got married and almost immediately left for Medical Service in the Army. Needless to say ‘the box’ went with me and I continued to practice Scottish music and tried to improve my technique in Continental style playing.
During the war I listened to Continental accordion whenever I could and collected music in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. I still have a large collection of this in my Music Cupboard. The Scandalli did well but, with only 80 bass, lacked the diminished seventh chords required in Musette, although never required in Country Dance Music. Its use has gradually crept in but Jimmy considered it out of place in our type of music and said it was a chord to be used with care, and only when absolutely necessary. So I remained content with the accordion I had.
Petrol rationing had its effect. For instance, a dance at Coupar Angus meant they had to make their own way to Camperdown gates – a large estate on the outskirts of Dundee. From there a car would take them to the dance, bringing them back to the gates afterwards. After several hours playing they now had to wend their several ways homeward, carrying their instruments, in the blackout and possibly in snow or rain.
Ancient cars broke down ; punctures abounded – once in desperation a tyre was packed with grass, which didn’t do any good.
There was the time they arrived at Blairgowrie to find that some of drummer Owney’s equipment had rattled off the top of the car, and he still managed a precision beat with his side drum set on a chair.
Owney it was who provided the band’s first amplification equipment, which was lugged along not without considerable difficulty on their first visit to Forteviot Hall…..Oh, no!
The hall was lit by paraffin!
Their appearances at Forteviot were always to be particularly welcomed by schoolboy Bill Powrie, who was allowed to play his accordion for the company while the band went off for tea.
“Tak’ yer time, now, lads!” he would plead as they left the platform for him to take over.
He was a good player. Could he be other than this when his dad was Will Powrie, celebrated as soloist and duettist on Beltona records while Shand was still awaiting his first break? And of course Will’s other son, Ian, was later to have his own recording and broadcasting band.
But despite privations, shortages, they were happy nights, the increasingly enthusiastic receptions they got sending them back home in good spirits.
There was one dark night though Dave Ireland the fiddler remembers particularly well. They had been playing at Letham Hall, and now, in the early hours of a moonless morning they sped to Dundee with Jim at the wheel, and Dave happily whistling a pipe tune, and not missing a grace note until they hit a right-angle bend ; the car mounted the bank, Jim wrestled it back down again……Dave was still whistling – but “That’s a helluva lang note, Dave!” from Jim.
The war went on, and the band went on, managing to steadily improve its reputation despite the demands of war-work, fire-fighting, fire-watching, home-guard duties, and ever-present the frustrations of trying to get from A to B and back again.
That the band had something, and that this was beginning to be widely recognised, seemed obvious. Yet, looking back, Jimmy sees the early war years as a time when he began to learn to play!
“Whit I mean is this,” he explained. Although I’d been playing Scots dances lang enough, it wasna disciplined playin’. Ye see, there had been nae set length for a (Scottish Country) dance. Ye played until the dancers began tae get tired. But a’ Scots Country dances have a set length, sae many bars tae each figure. This I learned fae Doug Henderson at the Empress first of a’, and later at the instructional dances at Rockwell School. I’m no’ kiddin’ ye, for the first time I was learnin’ tae play Scots music richt!”
No doubt many will say that though the Shand modesty is legendary this is ridiculous. I can assure you he meant every word.
Doug Henderson had been teaching dancing for some years before he introduced Jimmy in 1938 to the Old Time Nights at Dundee’s dockland ballroom, the Empress, then under the efficient management of the popular Mrs Duncan.
For one hour before the sessions proper started Doug instructed in Scottish Country Dancing, and Jimmy was brought in as being more useful here than the resident band.
Even at that very early stage in his career it might be thought that ‘useful’ was a considerable understatement. Well, it was and it wasn’t. He readily admits that he learned a great deal from Doug.
Certainly, few, if any, could teach him anything about how to play Scots music – what he learned was how long to play. From dancer-creator Doug it was he began to acquire understanding of the important relationship between a particular dance and, say, four by thirty-two bars. All dances have their prescribed procession of steps, their ordered lengths ; this timely information was gladly seized upon and stored away in his wonderful musical memory.
The time came when an ambitious Scottish evening was being planned. Would Jimmy advise on a really professional Scottish Country Dance Band?
A well-known band he recommended was brought through from the west, and the result was something of a shambles. A great deal of the time they were still playing after the dances were completed, or they had concluded prematurely, leaving the dancers with only the accompaniment of the soft thud of their sandals, the swish of their kilts.
At the end of the debacle Jimmy could have named any fee to provide a band of his own for the next gala Scottish event!
“Aye, Dougie could tell ye!” as Para Handy would say.
(Doug, once a young drummer with Winifred Bird Matthews and her Orchestra, is still spryly active (1976) ; is connected with and helps to run various societies and associations devoted to Scots Folk activities ; still teaches as he has done since before the war – as in fact he continued to do through war service in Singapore, India, West Africa, Canada).
Short solo spots on the radio came fairly regularly now.
Exactly a year after Owney had joined him – and in the same Alyth Town Hall –
“London, Jim? London? Tae mak’ a record? Wait a minute – I-I’m no’ sure I –“
“Nothing tae worry about. Jist play as ye have been an’ we’ll be a’ richt.”
And the wee drummer, who until then had never been further than about fifty miles from Dundee, went off to the metropolis to accompany the virtuoso on a batch of recordings.
“Don’t forget the blackout, boys,” their London landlady reminded them when they went up to their rooms. She had already told them that the air-raid shelter was in the basement…..
Owney had hardly time to get a proper worry going about how he would manage in the recording studio next day, when the siren sounded.
“Dinna switch the licht on!” Jim cautioned. Before they went to bed he had thrown back the curtains, opened the windows.
They executed a grotesque, hopping reel in the dark, banging into the furniture, walls, each other…..If they could at least even get their trousers on – “Hell, nae wonder, Owney – these are yours ; gie’s mine!”
At long last they felt presentable enough to hurry down to the basement ; which they reached just as the all-clear sounded!
Bach up all the stairs to bed, and for the rest of the night the Luftwaffe left Owney undisturbed, to ponder the pitfalls of the rhythm of reel, strathspey, jig and hornpipe, until he bemusedly wondered if indeed he ever had understood the difference in beats.
One record would have been demanding enough – hell, they were to make six!
But with the patent encouragement of Jim and George Scott Wood, the studio pianist, all eventually went well. In due course Beltona advertised in the People’s Journal the new discs, featuring Owen McCabe, drums. And if it was back to the mundane work days to cut less glamorous discs of wood for bobbins at the sawmill, it was with a leavening of hope that the future might offer a more creative way of making a livelihood.
War seemed to deepen the enthusiasm for all kinds of music.
Soloists gave classical recitals to packed lunch-time audiences not only in art galleries and various small halls but also in factory canteens. Ballet, symphony concerts attracted large audiences in the evening…….
Understandingly, perhaps, the palais now saw the extrovert the-hell-with-it gyrations and semi-acrobatics of jitterbugging challenging the staider quicksteps and foxtrots – yet, this was the very time when the formal, precisely-controlled measures of Scottish Country dancing gracefully took over.
In the great gilded, chandeliered ballrooms, the gentry, kilted and sashed, met to dance on spacious floors the same patterns danced by lairds and ladies for hundreds of years. Village halls, schoolrooms, were crowded with enthusiasts ; and celebratory sprees in barn or tenement kitchen – to welcome the servicemen on leave or give joyful send-off to newly-weds – were not complete without stays-loosening sessions of rafter-rattling, floor-dirling hooch-and-birl to Chae on the fiddle, Wull on the box – or Jimmy Shand on records.
The repertoire of Scottish Country dances was extended, a notable addition being The Reel of the 51st Division composed by officers in St. Valery prison camp in 1942 (there had been few new dances for the past fifty years).
No doubt war brought about an upsurge of nationalistic pride, a sharper appreciation of heritage…….Musically speaking, to bring this into focus, the right man was on hand ; Shand.
Part-time personnel ; Fiddler Jim Cameron, Lemonade man from Kirriemuir, and his daughter May who played accordion ; Alan Reid and Dave Donaldson.
Due to the exigencies of war there was no guarantee they could always be free to play at the same time. Substitutes often had to be located at very short notice.
But at the end of February 1941 it was a lightening attack of flu that knocked a drummer out of the combination.
“How’s it goin’ Jim?” Jerry McCafferty happened to ask in the Fire Station that afternoon when Jim looked more than unusually morose……Then when told of a gap in the ‘dunt’ section – “So ye need a drummer? Cheer up – that’s nae bother! Wee Owney McCabe – he’s yer man! We’ll get him at the sawmill at Lochee.”
Alan Dunsmore describes the meeting (People’s Journal 1/11/56) –
Owney was fetched from the workshop….It was some time before Shand could open his mouth to explain his errand. The man he hoped would play his drums that night stood no higher than his bottom jacket button.
At last Shand announced to the little man ; “Want a job the nicht? I’ve a band playing’ at Alyth an’ we’re needin’ a drummer.”
McCabe went home in great glee to his wife that night.
“I’ve got a job wi’ the drums!” he said excitedly. “Chap called Shand. Never seen him before. But another few bob will come in handy.”
Yet when he set out for Alyth that night his last ounce of confidence took some holding.
“I’ll be all right once I get started,” he thought. But no one had told him that the nervous Shand had a habit of turning his head to the side every time he felt an audience attacking him with their eyes.
Great was Owney’s despondency when he got back home.
“How’d you get on?” his wife asked.
“No’ very braw,” said Owney. “He kept turnin’ round an gie’n’ me dirty looks!”
Thus began a partnership that was to last for more than twenty years.
At this time Jimmy was occasionally augmenting the band of the Dundee Empress Ballroom where an enthusiast named Douglas Henderson organized Scottish Country Dance Sessions…..And, not long after, he himself was leading a group playing for the same type of dancing at a local hall names St. Patrick’s run by Craigie Football Club.
Left-handed fiddler Dave Ireland had a band of his own, but on Monday nights he played with Jimmy’s outfit at St. Patrick’s.
While awaiting call-up, piano-accordionist George McKelvey had sat in with Ireland’s band at a Saturday night in the village of Longforgan ; went along with the fiddler one Monday night to meet Shand ; accepted an invitation to become second-box player.
It was through cousin George that I first came to know Jimmy Shand.
Like Jimmy, George was also one of a family of nine, and started playing the melodeon while still at school.
In spite of hard times, my aunt Annie could always spare a bowl of soup for the needy, and this included the miner-musicians from Fife who came to play in the streets of Dundee during the 1926 Strike.
One day one of them had a piano-accordion (novel then) for sale, and through the timely winning of a sweepstake – and with the balance somehow made up from mother’s purse – young brewery-worker George was able to acquire it. I was often in my aunt’s house when he would come eagerly clattering up the tenement stair to snatch a few minutes practice while the kail was being ladled. Soon he was playing the new box in a trio at Saturday night dances in small halls. His spare-time music-making progressed, although not as spectacularly as Shand’s. But every move was to a better hall, higher fees.
Despite her humble station my aunt Annie was in her way a valuable patroness of the art of music. There was, for instance, the hard-up pianist who regularly tuned up….
Sometimes he would lighten her gargantuan labours at the washboard stuck in the galvanized bath set on a backless wooden kitchen chair, imposing a delecate filigree of capriccio or lilting Highland melody upon the sudsy, rhythmic, rasping, cleaning of semmits and drawers and the intermittent pizzicato of rattling shirt and blouse buttons ; or perhaps he would accompany himself on an old heirloom organ in The Lost Chord while she sat darning or mending on a drowsy afternoon beside the blackleaded iron kettle on the blackleaded hob. In return he would share the family’s simple meal.
The pianist was Tammy McDaniel, one of the trio my cousin George started off with. (The leader had been drummer Stuartie Foy, who would leave the skins to deliver a comic monologue……In dame get-up he would rush onstage, eyes shut – he kept this up until in his seventies without ever once falling over the edge – hands clasped in a wringing gesture, head turning this way and that in perplexity, before launching into the uproarious ‘My Man Tam’ or ‘My Wee Johnny’ – Mind ye that an’ mind ye yon when ye marry my wee John prefacing a long list of the fastidious son’s idiosyncrasies reeled off by the doting mother to the daughter-in-law-to-be, who, in the last verse, rebels with It’s his mither he needs merried on! Ye can keep ye rain wee Johnny!)
There were many small halls in Dundee running dances then, some of them considered somewhat ‘oary’ which means less than respectable.
In my urchinhood, playing in the streets, I saw bobbed and shingled girls setting off in the evenings, their slippers wrapped in paper ; a few escorted, but mostly in twos and threes, chattering gaily, cracking chewing-gum, shouting ”We-ell!” to boys. They smelled of cachous and spearmint and Jockey Club ; and sometimes they woke you up later, returning in groups, singing. At such times you might also hear a stirring of feet in the echoing close below, a girl’s laugh, and a deeper male voice.
Cousin George became one of a quintet playing at one of the less-refined halls ; a hall, which because of its long narrowness was known as the Palais de Loabby. Sometimes there were ugly scenes, even bouts of fisticuffs, in and just outside the hall ; but the checkers and supporters always managed to keep the tide of battle from engulfing the quintet. Admission was only sixpence, yet there could be arguments over that.
One night George gave his wrist-watch to pal John who was on the door. John strapped it on beside his own. Later, a girl sought to gain admission for fourpence. When she was refused she shrieked abuse – no wonder he was able to sport TWO watches at such fancy prices! Well, he would certainly get no more money from her towards a third watch!
This, and other anecdotes, filtered back to me from the Big Out There, where music was played for hours at a stretch, and where some people didn’t even bother to listen to it but wanted to fight instead. I decided that when I was older I would go to the dancing, certainly not to fight – not even to dance but merely sit and listen entranced to the band……
A little first-hand experience of that period of the ‘thirties might not be out of place here….
Came the time when, with my hair glued down in front with Kolene and sticking up at the back, with points on my shoes and my double-breasted waistcoat ; in very long and very wide-bottomed trousers topped by a very narrow and very short coat(‘bum-freezer’ was the local term) I took up the ‘jiggin’.’ I still wanted to just sit and listen to the band, but with a girl now – for the opposite sex was now beginning to assume a strange power over me. Paradoxically, you had to learn to dance before being able to sit one out with a partner, I learned at Robertson’s in Well Road, and stuck to such respectable hall for some time.
Then a mate boasted of all the tough joints he had been in…….It became necessary to prove I also was a youth-about-town, at home anywhere.
With a blasé smile, mocked by the involuntary chattering of my teeth I entered a dive one Saturday night. Perspiration streamed from the band playing at a frenzied tempo. I waited until the quickstep ended and a waltz was announced, then mumbles huskily to the nearest girl – a gum-chewing amazon, and we took to the floor.
The waltz was played at the same galloping speed as the quickstep, and we flew round the hall ‘birlin’ like peeries’ (spinning like tops), my partner nonchalantly cracking gum in my ear. Like many of the girls she wore her coat in preference to paying the cloakroom penny or leaving it unattended on a chair…..
Well, I could now boast of having been to this place and having whirled a measure in it, but I felt I had to show I could also converse with the denizens on their own level. As the floor whizzed by underneath I noticed how battered and scarred it was ; chunks had been booted out of it leaving murderous slivers.
“Helluva floor” I croaked.
“I’nt it,” she agreed. Then, with a strident guffaw, “Hey – how’d ye like yer arse dragged over it, eh?”
Personnel when George McKelvey joined the new combination ; Jimmy and George, accordions ; Johnny Knight, piano ; Dave Ireland, fiddle, Owen McCabe, drums.
George fitted in well, for Scottish dances had always been some part in his previous playing.
How was Jimmy to work for in those days? I should have thought that the inimitable Shand Band Sound was only achieved after very long sessions of rehersal, playing and replaying, refining, polishing endlessly……
George told me, no. Jimmy was as easy-going then as he is now. At the same time through some rapport his players must have been capable of appreciating and performing the extremely individual Shand selections and arrangements.
Jimmy himself puts it somewhat disparagingly – “we jist somehow seemed tae hit on a way o’ playin’ Scottish dance music that folk liked.”
From the start, the style aimed at was a simple clarity ; twiddley-bits and fal-de-rals were out.
Being invited to play with Shand was the best opportunity that had come George’s way.
It lasted three weeks – for then he was called up.
Three months later he was out again due to stomach trouble. He was ro be in the band almost as long as Owney McCabe.
Dr Sandy Tulloch recalls –
I was at Mayfield as a Clinical Clerk by this time. Jimmy and the Band played in St. Patrick’s Hall in Maitland Street every Monday night and I used to be allowed to sit in. There I got to know and make a lasting friendship with Dave Ireland, the left-handed fiddler. With George McKelvey, who played a Hohner accordion with a curved keyboard which he changed later for a Morino model (the so-called 2 + 1) and which is still playing as well today as it was then. With Owen McCabe, the drummer, wonderful wee Owney, sadly missed now. I think the pianist was Willie Robb, but it is a long time ago now.
I used to sit in at the back but at times I was so intent on the fingering that I would miss the change of tune when the time came. Jimmy used to turn round with a wee smile and a shake of the head and I’d realise with a start that I was out on my own, and get back on the right tune as quick as I could, hoping that only the band had noticed. I soon realised that playing Scottish Country Dance Music with Jimmy Shand was an exact science. Jimmy chose his tunes with care and gave each couple a change of tune and a change of key. It soon became second nature to know all the dances and to change automatically for an 8 x 32, 8 x 40 or 8 x 48 as the dance required. Jimmy had no use for so-called ‘original’ tunes if they were poor musically and did not fit the dance. He used to get in trouble with the SCD Society and the BBC about this, and later in Glasgow I suffered the same way. But I agree entirely with him in this matter.
What use is a 4/4 reel if it is virtually unplayable and unpleasant to the ear? And who decided what is the ‘original’ tune anyway? I’m sure Scott Skinner did not compose an ‘original’ tune for a dance that was devised long after his death!
It was about this time I was in the Odeon Cinema at Coldside when an accordion record was played during the interval. The music was new to me, a lively Continental, but I was sure the style was Jimmy Shand’s. I went to the Manager’s Office and got the details. It was Jimmy and he was playing a piece by Emile Vacher called Triolets. On the other side was a Valse Musette. As I got to know Jimmy better and he was relaxed and off duty, I began to realise what an immense repertoire this man had – especially ‘old time’ music. He also played many Continental numbers which I found very interesting and this interest has always remained with me. Curiously enough, although they sound complicated, I have always found them easier to play than a fast Scottish reel. These really sound out your technique on this type of accordion. These happy days at Sutherland Street and playing with Jimmy at every opportunity went on until 1942, when I got married and almost immediately left for Medical Service in the Army. Needless to say ‘the box’ went with me and I continued to practice Scottish music and tried to improve my technique in Continental style playing.
During the war I listened to Continental accordion whenever I could and collected music in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. I still have a large collection of this in my Music Cupboard. The Scandalli did well but, with only 80 bass, lacked the diminished seventh chords required in Musette, although never required in Country Dance Music. Its use has gradually crept in but Jimmy considered it out of place in our type of music and said it was a chord to be used with care, and only when absolutely necessary. So I remained content with the accordion I had.
Petrol rationing had its effect. For instance, a dance at Coupar Angus meant they had to make their own way to Camperdown gates – a large estate on the outskirts of Dundee. From there a car would take them to the dance, bringing them back to the gates afterwards. After several hours playing they now had to wend their several ways homeward, carrying their instruments, in the blackout and possibly in snow or rain.
Ancient cars broke down ; punctures abounded – once in desperation a tyre was packed with grass, which didn’t do any good.
There was the time they arrived at Blairgowrie to find that some of drummer Owney’s equipment had rattled off the top of the car, and he still managed a precision beat with his side drum set on a chair.
Owney it was who provided the band’s first amplification equipment, which was lugged along not without considerable difficulty on their first visit to Forteviot Hall…..Oh, no!
The hall was lit by paraffin!
Their appearances at Forteviot were always to be particularly welcomed by schoolboy Bill Powrie, who was allowed to play his accordion for the company while the band went off for tea.
“Tak’ yer time, now, lads!” he would plead as they left the platform for him to take over.
He was a good player. Could he be other than this when his dad was Will Powrie, celebrated as soloist and duettist on Beltona records while Shand was still awaiting his first break? And of course Will’s other son, Ian, was later to have his own recording and broadcasting band.
But despite privations, shortages, they were happy nights, the increasingly enthusiastic receptions they got sending them back home in good spirits.
There was one dark night though Dave Ireland the fiddler remembers particularly well. They had been playing at Letham Hall, and now, in the early hours of a moonless morning they sped to Dundee with Jim at the wheel, and Dave happily whistling a pipe tune, and not missing a grace note until they hit a right-angle bend ; the car mounted the bank, Jim wrestled it back down again……Dave was still whistling – but “That’s a helluva lang note, Dave!” from Jim.
The war went on, and the band went on, managing to steadily improve its reputation despite the demands of war-work, fire-fighting, fire-watching, home-guard duties, and ever-present the frustrations of trying to get from A to B and back again.
That the band had something, and that this was beginning to be widely recognised, seemed obvious. Yet, looking back, Jimmy sees the early war years as a time when he began to learn to play!
“Whit I mean is this,” he explained. Although I’d been playing Scots dances lang enough, it wasna disciplined playin’. Ye see, there had been nae set length for a (Scottish Country) dance. Ye played until the dancers began tae get tired. But a’ Scots Country dances have a set length, sae many bars tae each figure. This I learned fae Doug Henderson at the Empress first of a’, and later at the instructional dances at Rockwell School. I’m no’ kiddin’ ye, for the first time I was learnin’ tae play Scots music richt!”
No doubt many will say that though the Shand modesty is legendary this is ridiculous. I can assure you he meant every word.
Doug Henderson had been teaching dancing for some years before he introduced Jimmy in 1938 to the Old Time Nights at Dundee’s dockland ballroom, the Empress, then under the efficient management of the popular Mrs Duncan.
For one hour before the sessions proper started Doug instructed in Scottish Country Dancing, and Jimmy was brought in as being more useful here than the resident band.
Even at that very early stage in his career it might be thought that ‘useful’ was a considerable understatement. Well, it was and it wasn’t. He readily admits that he learned a great deal from Doug.
Certainly, few, if any, could teach him anything about how to play Scots music – what he learned was how long to play. From dancer-creator Doug it was he began to acquire understanding of the important relationship between a particular dance and, say, four by thirty-two bars. All dances have their prescribed procession of steps, their ordered lengths ; this timely information was gladly seized upon and stored away in his wonderful musical memory.
The time came when an ambitious Scottish evening was being planned. Would Jimmy advise on a really professional Scottish Country Dance Band?
A well-known band he recommended was brought through from the west, and the result was something of a shambles. A great deal of the time they were still playing after the dances were completed, or they had concluded prematurely, leaving the dancers with only the accompaniment of the soft thud of their sandals, the swish of their kilts.
At the end of the debacle Jimmy could have named any fee to provide a band of his own for the next gala Scottish event!
“Aye, Dougie could tell ye!” as Para Handy would say.
(Doug, once a young drummer with Winifred Bird Matthews and her Orchestra, is still spryly active (1976) ; is connected with and helps to run various societies and associations devoted to Scots Folk activities ; still teaches as he has done since before the war – as in fact he continued to do through war service in Singapore, India, West Africa, Canada).
Short solo spots on the radio came fairly regularly now.
Exactly a year after Owney had joined him – and in the same Alyth Town Hall –
“London, Jim? London? Tae mak’ a record? Wait a minute – I-I’m no’ sure I –“
“Nothing tae worry about. Jist play as ye have been an’ we’ll be a’ richt.”
And the wee drummer, who until then had never been further than about fifty miles from Dundee, went off to the metropolis to accompany the virtuoso on a batch of recordings.
“Don’t forget the blackout, boys,” their London landlady reminded them when they went up to their rooms. She had already told them that the air-raid shelter was in the basement…..
Owney had hardly time to get a proper worry going about how he would manage in the recording studio next day, when the siren sounded.
“Dinna switch the licht on!” Jim cautioned. Before they went to bed he had thrown back the curtains, opened the windows.
They executed a grotesque, hopping reel in the dark, banging into the furniture, walls, each other…..If they could at least even get their trousers on – “Hell, nae wonder, Owney – these are yours ; gie’s mine!”
At long last they felt presentable enough to hurry down to the basement ; which they reached just as the all-clear sounded!
Bach up all the stairs to bed, and for the rest of the night the Luftwaffe left Owney undisturbed, to ponder the pitfalls of the rhythm of reel, strathspey, jig and hornpipe, until he bemusedly wondered if indeed he ever had understood the difference in beats.
One record would have been demanding enough – hell, they were to make six!
But with the patent encouragement of Jim and George Scott Wood, the studio pianist, all eventually went well. In due course Beltona advertised in the People’s Journal the new discs, featuring Owen McCabe, drums. And if it was back to the mundane work days to cut less glamorous discs of wood for bobbins at the sawmill, it was with a leavening of hope that the future might offer a more creative way of making a livelihood.
War seemed to deepen the enthusiasm for all kinds of music.
Soloists gave classical recitals to packed lunch-time audiences not only in art galleries and various small halls but also in factory canteens. Ballet, symphony concerts attracted large audiences in the evening…….
Understandingly, perhaps, the palais now saw the extrovert the-hell-with-it gyrations and semi-acrobatics of jitterbugging challenging the staider quicksteps and foxtrots – yet, this was the very time when the formal, precisely-controlled measures of Scottish Country dancing gracefully took over.
In the great gilded, chandeliered ballrooms, the gentry, kilted and sashed, met to dance on spacious floors the same patterns danced by lairds and ladies for hundreds of years. Village halls, schoolrooms, were crowded with enthusiasts ; and celebratory sprees in barn or tenement kitchen – to welcome the servicemen on leave or give joyful send-off to newly-weds – were not complete without stays-loosening sessions of rafter-rattling, floor-dirling hooch-and-birl to Chae on the fiddle, Wull on the box – or Jimmy Shand on records.
The repertoire of Scottish Country dances was extended, a notable addition being The Reel of the 51st Division composed by officers in St. Valery prison camp in 1942 (there had been few new dances for the past fifty years).
No doubt war brought about an upsurge of nationalistic pride, a sharper appreciation of heritage…….Musically speaking, to bring this into focus, the right man was on hand ; Shand.