Box and Fiddle
Year 21 No 07
April 1998
Price 70p
28 Page Magazine
7 month subscription £8.00
Editor – Charlie Todd, 63 Station Road, Thankerton, Biggar, ML12 6NZ
B&F Treasurer – Mrs Margaret Smith, Smeaton Farm Cottage, Dalkeith, Midlothian, EH22 2NL
The main features in the above issue were as follows (this is not a comprehensive detail of all it contained. The Club reports, in particular, are too time consuming at this stage to retype).
Editorial
Well, it’s with a sigh of relief that we reach the end of my first season. Overall I get the impression the new format has been well received. As far as content goes we’ve set off at a cracking pace and the pressure is on to maintain the standard next season. My thanks to London based fiddler Pete Cooper for allowing me to use his recent article ‘James Scott Skinner’ as the lead article for this month’s issue and to Rod Stradling and Keith Summers of ‘Musical Traditions’ an Internet Magazine where it first appeared, for their permission to reproduce it. I explained to Pete that many of our readers would have interesting insights into J.S.S. and he would be interested to hear from anyone with anything to contribute. Please send your letters to me in the first instance.
As usual though, we finish the year as we started – ‘the cupboard is bare’ as regards good lead articles, we’ve nothing in reserve so I’m still looking for ideas and articles to carry us through the 98/99 season.
While ransacking Bob McMath’s music I came across some excellent photographs of ‘Crotchet and Jeanie’ with Robert Wilson and Will Starr in the early days of the White Heather Club. This prompted discussion on accordion music in which Bob raised interesting areas some of which I had never even heard of. Does anyone have any information on ‘the booths’ which were a feature of seaside entertainment up to the Great War. The songs of Lauder and others in the Music Halls provided many tunes we still use today. Between the wars Accordion Orchestras from various Continental countries visited the UK and the ‘big bands’ who came to Britain during the Second World War with the American Forces inspired many accordionists of that era when Ballroom and Latin American dancing were immensely popular. Some of the accordionists who learned in that scene ‘came over’ to Scottish to participate in the wider ‘White Heather Club’ which had more than one show on the road at any one time. Information or recollections on any of these areas would be welcome.
It was nice to get a chance to meet some of you at Musselburgh and hopefully I’ll meet up with the regulars and a few new faces at our Perth Weekend in June. I hope everyone has an enjoyable summer break.
Charlie Todd
James Scott Skinner (1843-1927)
Reflections on the Life and Music of One of Scotland’s Greatest Fiddle Composers
by Pete Cooper
The first Scott Skinner tune I heard was The Laird Of Drumblair, the marvellously spirited performance by fiddle player Tommy Peoples on the Bothy Band's first (1975) album. It's a classic Scots strathspey in the bright-sounding key of A with all the hallmarks of Scottish style - snap rhythms, alternating ('double tonic') phrases in A-major and B-minor and ingenious descending runs of triplets at the end. Peoples, of course, is from the north of Ireland, but as Donegal fiddler John Doherty once remarked "There is only a paper wall between Irish and Scottish music". 1 On the Bothy Band album Tommy proceeds in time-honoured fashion to convert the strathspey into a reel - a sequence subsequently recycled in a thousand pub sessions throughout the celtic music world. But what of the tune's first composition? The 'Laird' in question turns out to have been an engineering entrepreneur, William McHardy, who having made his fortune in South America returned to live in Scotland, where Skinner was a regular visitor to his house. One night as the composer lay in bed "reflecting on all the kindnesses of this friend", the tune "flashed" into his head and, having no music manuscript paper to hand, Skinner dashed it off on a sheet of soap wrapper. "Ye're no' gaun tae send that awfy-like paper tae the Laird," protested his wife. "He'll jist licht his pipe wi' it!" Send it he did, however, and was duly rewarded the following Christmas with a letter of gratitude and accompanying cheque. 2
The story comes from My Life and Adventures, first serialised in The People's Journal in 1923 and re-published in 1994 by the City of Aberdeen, in association with Graham Dixon of Wallace Music, to mark the 150th anniversary of Skinner's birth. 3 Fiddlers already have reason to be grateful to Dixon for his edition of James Hill tunes, The Lads Like Beer, and it is again thanks to his efforts that Skinner's memoirs have become available in booklet form. The text runs to over a hundred pages, illustrated with the original photos and some additional press notices and concert programmes. Its release seems unlikely either to enhance or detract from the high regard in which Skinner's music is held; and this is probably just as well, since the light it throws on his character is not entirely favourable.
Skinner cannot have been an easy man to like. Certainly he could be very pompous. Struggling for much of his life to make a half-decent living, his sense of his own value seems to have been so precarious as to require almost continuous assertion. The Life, it is true, was 'ghost-written' (by whom?), but his self-importance is more than a matter of prose style. "I have no intention," he says, "of wearying my readers with the details of my life's output of original music, which, frankly speaking, has been colossal". You feel he is shadow-boxing with some invisible adversary determined to deny his achievement, quoting, for instance, the opinion of Monti, "an Italian expert" (he of the Csardas?): "Monti was a great admirer of my work. On one occasion ... he picked up a couple of books and remarked, "Here's Bach and here's Scott Skinner. Personally I prefer Scott Skinner". 4 I am reminded of my old copy of the Bayley & Ferguson edition of Skinner's The Scottish Violinist, its pink cover famously emblazoned with the motto: 'Talent does what it can, Genius does what it must'.
His compulsive self-promotion can be wearying, but Skinner's account of a harsh and deprived childhood provides clues as to its origin. His father died when he was a baby and his mother's re-marriage was not happy. She had "a rigid belief in the scriptural adage that who spareth the rod spoileth the child", and beatings, from his mother and his school-master, "a regular martinet", seem to have been frequent. His brother Sandy, who began teaching him fiddle and cello when he was six, was also "the most rigorous of taskmasters", and meted out "humiliating punishment" whenever the child was slow. Skinner's mention of all this abuse suggests it was not just the child-rearing norm of a more punitive age and, though he says nothing himself, one can guess at a core of self-contempt beneath his later bravado.
Musically he was highly precocious. By the age of eight he was playing cello with Peter Milne, a well-known Deeside fiddle composer and - I think, significantly - "practically a father to me". (Milne was clearly not an ideal father figure. He was, for example, an opium addict - which may explain a curious remark of his: "I'm that fond o' my fiddle, I could sit in the inside o't, an' look oot.") "It was nothing unusual for Peter and me to trudge eight or ten weary miles on a slushy wet night in order to fulfill a barn engagement". And he describes a typical dance of the 1850s, held in a building with an earthen floor, lit by tallow dips mounted on wall brackets and the 'orchestra' consisting of fiddle, cello and flute. Once, returning home at five in the morning, "dragging, rather than carrying, my bass fiddle", he fell asleep against the door, too exhausted even to lift the latch, and was found there two hours later by his mother.
At twelve Skinner joined a juvenile orchestra, Dr Mark's Little Men, travelling throughout Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales. He learned to read music and his studies with Halle orchestra violinist Charles Rougier greatly extended and refined the left-hand playing technique he had acquired as a strathspey fiddler. In 1858 the Little Men performed before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace - some years later Skinner would teach Highland dancing to the children of her Balmoral tenants, as well as composing the air Our Highland Queen in her honour. By the time he left the troupe at the age of seventeen he was on his way to becoming the formidable violinist who - both through his compositions and his discovery of a way to present traditional dance music in concert performance - was to make such an impact on Scots fiddling.
He now studied under a dancing master, William Scott, and thereafter adopted 'Scott' as his own middle name. While dancing, as much as fiddle playing, would be his livelihood for years to come, was it really in homage to his instructor that he changed his name? I think he both wished to appropriate Scott, "a great scholar, highly cultured, and handsome into the bargain", as another father; and that he was already attempting to construct for himself an identity that would be peculiarly Scottish and patriotic. It was also the name, after all, of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), himself one of the great architects of Highland romanticism and still at that time a massively influential figure throughout Europe. Whatever his intentions, it was as James Scott Skinner that - after a brief interlude as a blackface minstrel under the name of 'Mr Grace Egerton' - he began his career, publishing, in 1865 and 1868, first Twelve, and then Thirty New Strathspeys and Reels.
By 1868, aged twenty five, he was working as a dance teacher to the tenantry at the palace of Balmoral. He established, with both dance and violin teaching, a practice apparently successful enough to allow him, around 1870, to marry fellow-dancer Jane Stuart, with whom he had a daughter, Jeanie, and in the early 1880s a son, Manson. He also worked hard as a performer, playing pieces by Rode, Paganini and Mozart, as much as traditional, or his own, music. A dozen years of this, he tells us, and "I had the patronage of all the big private families in Ross-shire, Inverness-shire, Elginshire and Banffshire. I was making about £750 a year, and was able to drive to and from the residences of my pupils in my own private trap, drawn by a beautiful pony. This equipment cost me about £150". His curiously specific boast may be a defence against his sense of being patronised in the more negative sense of the term. He describes having to divert a violin student who disdainfully announced "I'm tired of fiddling. Tell me a story". Even in retrospect, however, Skinner seems more flattered to have been associated with the aristocratic client than willing to acknowledge the insult and, still locked in the role of entertainer, repeats the story - quite a funny one, incidentally - for his readers. 5
As David Johnson remarks in Scottish Fiddle Music in the Eighteenth Century, "Skinner's career was out of step with his era ... Trained European musicians living in Scotland despised Scots fiddling, almost to a man". Whereas the fiddle composers of the previous century had been respected as contributors to a European mainstream, equally at ease writing minuets and sonatas or using traditional Scottish forms, the Romantics had come to prefer the view of fiddle music as the product of an untutored, preferably wild, preferably Highland, peasantry. And if folk music was primitive, almost a force of nature, what real respect could be accorded to those who performed it? In those "big private families", Skinner's status was partly that of mascot, an oddity: "jist ane o' the Almichty's curiosities". As a concert performer of 'folk' fiddle music, who at the same time viewed it from a 'superior' classical standpoint, he was also very much out on his own. His isolation from an active musical tradition in which his work could be appreciated - and its limitations recognised - may have had its inner correspondence in his lack of, and perpetual search for, a father. As it was, a quite unrealistic estimate of his own greatness was his only buttress against a nagging sense of musical and emotional fraudulence. Beneath the confidence of early success lay the threat of imminent collapse.
Yet the collapse, when it came, was displaced sideways. Skinner's account is typically melodramatic, while disclosing almost nothing: "The crash came suddenly, and in a single day I was roofless, wifeless, and penniless". It has been assumed until recently - and no doubt this was Skinner's intention - that his wife Jane suddenly died. But historian John Hargreaves, researching Skinner's life for a play presented in 1993, discovered otherwise:
'Thanks to the staff of Elgin Libraries we now know that ... on 18 April, 1885, Jane was admitted to the Elgin Lunatic Asylum ... suffering from "excitement" caused by "pecuniary embarrassment". From time to time Skinner contributed to her maintainance, though he had difficulty in keeping up regular payments. Jane Stuart died a pauper in the asylum on 5 January, 1899.' 6
While it is possible that Skinner felt it inappropriate to make such a disclosure in his memoirs, his evasiveness seems rather to betray some sense of guilt. His habitual unwillingness to acknowledge personal or emotional troubles may even, for all we know, have contributed to his wife's breakdown. He tells us that he moved to Aberdeen and "lay quiescent for a bit" until his "innate optimism reasserted itself" and he even permits himself a little joke: "It was in the Waverley Hotel I found temporary asylum (appropriate word, for I did think I was going mad!), and there I managed to maintain myself..." Jane's hospitalisation was followed by the death of Skinner's brother Sandy, whose widow, 'Madame de Lenglee', now not only joined Skinner as a dance teacher but helped bring up his children.
His personal life, not to put too fine a point on it, was largely a mess and clearly it was into his work that he put his energy. As a performer he now deliberately constructed himself as an icon of Scottishness. Returning from a tour of America in 1893, he tells us, "I made up my mind on two points. Firstly, I decided to have done with dancing. As a solo violinist I meant to stand or fall. Secondly, I decided to make the kilt my performance dress". He became in the mind of his public - and probably in his own mind, too - the 'Strathspey King', the very embodiment of the romantic Victorian version of traditional Highland culture. That this 'traditional', supposedly ancient, Highland culture, was in fact largely a retrospective invention of the later 18th and early 19th centuries, is persuasively, if provocatively, argued by Hugh Trevor Roper in Eric Hobsbawm's The Invention of Tradition. 7 The kilt itself, for example, was invented about 1730 by Thomas Rawlinson, a Quaker industrialist from Lancashire. 8 While opportunism no doubt played some part in Skinner's adoption of the trappings of this Anglo-Scottish version of the Highland tradition, I think the fantasy component of Balmoralism was part of its appeal to a man seeking refuge from his own emotional reality.
Yet illusions can be very sustaining and Skinner's output as a composer was indeed 'colossal'. His first publications were followed by The Miller O'Hirn Collection (1881), The Beauties of the Ballroom (1882), The Elgin Collection (1884), The Logie Collection (1888) and The Scottish Violinist (1900). What Alastair Hardie has called his magnum opus, The Harp & Claymore Collection was published in 1904. 9 He made some cylinder recordings in 1905 and 1910 and recorded again in 1922. Prompted by Harry Lauder, he appeared in 1911 at the London Palladium as one of The Caledonian Four and continued touring in various 'concert parties' into his early eighties, playing at the Royal Albert Hall, for example, in 1925. His very real fame as a musician was, however, bought at the cost of a stable personal life. Apart from a period of about ten years with his second wife, Gertrude Park - from the late 1890's until 1909 when she left him to go and live in Rhodesia - Skinner resided at various hotels, or else stayed with friends, until in 1922, at the age of 79, he was able to buy a house in Aberdeen. After a final, not very successful, trip to America, he died in Aberdeen in 1927.
Skinner's place in the history of Scottish fiddle music is, as Graham Dixon suggests, very much a matter of debate. Skinner may have had little capacity for self-scrutiny and perhaps chose to believe his own publicity hype rather than face painful truths, but My Life And Adventures, if not a great autobiography, may explain why opinion today is so divided. Skinner emerges as a man fervently committed, possibly for the wrong reasons, to a Victorian fantasy of 'Scottishness'. Yet the music he composed (or much of it) transcended, wonderfully, the ideology by which it was inspired. Some of his great strathspeys and airs convey more emotional truth than he could ever express in his personal relations.
It is perhaps as easy for us to be put off, as it was for Skinner to be over-impressed, by nationalist ideologues like John Blackie, whose preface to The Logie Collection describes his music as being "as native to our ears and to our hearts as the purple heather is to the brae, or the graceful tresses on the birch to the glen" - this at a time when Scotland was already one of the most heavily industrialised countries in Europe. 10 Rejecting this kind of sentimentality, the whole tartan package, some on the folk scene today reject Skinner's music itself as inauthentic, his self-conscious virtuosity an aberration from the 'real' Scottish vernacular fiddle tradition. Players like Alasdair Fraser (whose opinions about Skinner, by the way, I am not presuming to guess) have set themselves - with excellent results - the project of re-creating what they take to be an earlier, more authentic Scottish style, seeking, for example, in the Gaelic-speaking communities of Cape Breton a Highlands fiddle style (and set-dancing style, too) that was all but extinguished in Scotland itself. Certainly if one's goal were to create for Scottish folk music an equivalent of the present-day Irish session scene, then the highly individualistic Skinner may seem at best an irrelevance.
Yet ironically, although Skinner himself was of his time in swallowing the romantic account of his predecessors as 'peasant' fiddle players - he mentions rather loftily in his Guide To Bowing, for instance, that fiddlers like Neil Gow "did good work, but would have soared even higher had they received a good sound training" - he was in reality very much in their tradition, for James Oswald (1711-1769), William Marshall (1748-1833), Niel Gow (1727-1807), Nathaniel Gow (1763-1831) and the like, always prized technical accomplishment highly. To those complaining, for instance, that some of Marshall's tunes were technically too difficult "his answer was that he did not write music for bunglers, and as all his tunes could be played, he advised them to practice more, and become better players". 11 John Doherty held the view, according to Alun Evans, that Scott Skinner wrote the tricky hornpipe The Mathematician "to fool the country fiddlers".
The kind of concert presentation of Scots dance music that Skinner evolved - I mean his development of the 'concert reel' and the 'pastoral air' rather than the kilt-sporting and sword-dancing aspect of his performance - is kept alive today by violinists like Alastair Hardie, whose playing of Skinner tunes on his 150th anniversary tribute CD Compliments to 'The King', is, I have no doubt, much as Skinner would have liked it: a considered style on the cusp between 'folk' fiddle and 'classical' violin; Scottish music for the parlour or the concert hall. But what about Scottish music for the house dance, the ceilidh - and indeed the session? As a matter of fact, Skinner's music today is widely played both within and beyond Scotland - in Cape Breton, in New England and in Donegal, for example, albeit without the King's scrupulously annotated bowing patterns. Well known fiddlers as diverse as Jean Carignan and Bill Lamey, John Doherty, Tommy Peoples and Dave Swarbrick have all found inspiration in his music, along with countless others who play for private enjoyment.
Debate will continue and the publication of My Life And Adventures will have provided both Skinner enthusiasts and critics with plenty to reflect upon. His tunes, meanwhile - or many of them - seem assured of continuing life. "The best of them", as his friend George Riddell wrote in the Aberdeen Journal in 1927, "are robust, melodious and exceptionally well balanced", though it was the same critic's view that "It is not for the Strathspey composer to disport himself among the various keys, or indulge in fanciful chromatic progressions". In every tradition there exists a tension between the individual act of composition - and Skinner was nothing if not an individual claiming credit for original work - and the collective use and development of the music by large numbers of players. The balance between the two seems to vary between one tradition and another; in both Irish and Appalachian Old Time fiddle music the composers tend to be soon forgotten, submerged in the collective, while their Scottish and Swedish counterparts seem much more likely to be remembered by name. Skinner may have been, by temperament, belief and cultural location, at some considerable remove from his fellow fiddle players. In the end, however, it is they who will sustain his music and his reputation.
Pete Cooper - 5.8.97
Article MT007
Notes:
"Na." came the answer.
"Well, you're going to perdition." was the stern rejoinder.
"Eh?" exclaimed the maudlin one, waking up somewhat; "I'm in the wrang train again!"
Musselburgh Festival 1998
by Neil Copland – Festival Chairman
Saturday, 7th March, 1998 saw the 24th Annual Musselburgh Festival take place in the Brunton Halls, Musselburgh, as has become tradition. A few changes from the regular arrangements were in evidence following continuing alterations and refurbishment to the Brunton Hall complex, but these didn’t detract too much from an enjoyable day (and evening) of all that is good within the accordion and fiddle scene at the moment.
Despite horrendous snowstorms and blizzards across Scotland on the Friday night, most competitors managed to reach Musselburgh although a few from the north were snowbound and had to call off, as did one of our fiddle judges. However, after all the weeks and months of preparation by the Organising Committee, the ‘big day’ was here and ‘the show had to go on’. Entries were slightly down from 1997 (190 from 210), but the quality of playing was most certainly just as good as last year – if not even better. As usual, this was the chance for musicians and enthusiasts to renew annual friendships and catch up on all the news and gossip. One notable absentee this year was Christine Hunter (a former Festival Secretary) who sadly passed away earlier in the year. The day was therefore tinged with sadness for all of us who knew and remember Christine as a very efficient Secretary in those early days of the Festival.
The usual band of Committee members and other very loyal and willing helpers were at the Brunton Hall just after 8 a.m. to ensure an enjoyable day for competitors and visitors alike. The adjudicator’s panel this year had no fewer than three highly respected musicians making their first appearance at Musselburgh in this capacity – they were Charlie Kirkpatrick, Maurice Duncan and Joan Blue. Joining them were our ‘old’ friends John Carmichael, Jimmy Lindsay, Bill Smith and Ian Muir. In addition, to replace our snowbound judge, Jane Davidson, who was attending with her own family, was hijacked into helping out, as was our very own Committee member Angie MacEachern. Without fail, the adjudicators commented on the very high standard of playing from all competitors – young and not so young!
As the day progressed towards the climax of the competitive part of the Festival later in the afternoon, the number of people attending the event during the day was clearly up on recent years. Without doubt, this helped contribute to the superb atmosphere in and around the upstairs concourse/ bar areas and Main Hall. This year, as last year, was again like Musselburgh Festival of old – lots of people enjoying good music and a friendly chat with friends and acquaintances.
After a slight delay, the Evening Concert (this year attended by more than 175 people) and jointly compered by Jennifer Forrest and John Caskie, got under way. The concert always gives members of the public the opportunity to hear most of the new Champions. This year’s concert included the finals of the Senior Accordion (Traditional) Solo and the Open Fiddle Championship Solo. In both cases, the adjudicators were again forced to work very hard thanks to the exceptionally high standard of playing by all the finalists. John Carmichael and his Band rounded off the concert in great style. Once again, BBC Radio Scotland’s ‘Take the Floor’ team were present to record the concert as a feature for future editions of the programme. Ken Mutch commented to me after the concert, that this year was the best Musselburgh Festival Concert he had ever recorded for the BBC. Musselburgh Festival really does appreciate the continued support of Ken and the BBC Scotland team.
After a short break during which the hall was cleared and made ready for the dance, John Carmichael and his band took the stage for a first class Festival dance – John must have been tired at the end of a long day. This year, around 250 people were at the dance and what a night it was – great music, a superb atmosphere and as I’ve already said to many people, a return to the style and the fun of Musselburgh Festivals gone by. At this point, I would like to thank the many clubs and individuals who donated raffle prizes. There were so many that we were able to run a small raffle during the day as well as having one of the biggest raffles at the dance for many years.
I cannot finish without publicly thanking everyone who made Musselburgh Festival 1998 a huge success. Competitors, Teachers, Parents, appointed adjudicators (+Jane Davidson, Angie MacEachern and Ian Thomson, who all stepped in at the last minute), Jennifer Forrest, John Caskie, Committee members, all of the many volunteer helpers, Robbie Shepherd, Ken Mutch and the BBC Radio Scotland crew, Brunton Hall Box Office and Caretaking staff, Catering and Bar staff and not forgetting the very hard working Festival Secretary, Margaret Macari. To all of you, a very, very big ‘Thank You’.
I hope that everyone who attended Musselburgh Festival in 1998 enjoyed his or her day as much as I enjoyed mine. Here’s to March 1999 (Silver Jubilee) Musselburgh Festival (the first Saturday in March). It is hoped to mark this milestone event with some very special measures – see you there!!
Junior Accordion
Under 12 Traditional Accordion Solo – Pentland Cup
1) Brian MacDonald (Ayr)
2) Tom Orr (Lanark)
3) Elizabeth Stirrat (Paisley)
12 and Under 16 Traditional Solo – Jim Johnstone Cup
1) Scott Stevenson (Kirkcaldy)
2) Liam Stewart (Galston)
3) Ross Fleming (Blairgowrie)
Junior Accordion Solo Pipe Music – Bill Black Cup
1) Fraser Burke (Dundee)
2) Scott Stevenson (Kirkcaldy)
3) Liam Stewart (Galston)
Junior Traditional Duet
1) Graeme & Donna Davidson (Banchory)
2) Fiona & Kirsty Johnson (Currie)
3) Patsy Reid (Knapp) & Ingrid Hammond (Dundee)
Senior Accordion
Senior Traditional Accordion Solo – Clinkscale Cup
1) John Burns (Falkirk)
2) Janette Morrison (Forres)
3) Alexander Lindsay (Amulree)
Senior Accordion Pipe Music Solo – Bill Powrie Memorial Cup
1) Shirley Campbell (Glasgow)
2) Ian Shepherd (Dalkeith)
3) Wendy Godfrey (Perth)
Senior Overall Accordion Champion - The Bobby MacLeod Trophy
John Burns (Falkirk)
Open Buttonkey Accordion Solo – Windygates Trophy
1) Graeme MacKay (Inverness)
2) John Weaks (Glasgow)
3)
Trios – Jimmy Blue Trophy
1) Balgray Trio (Dundee)
2) Alasdair MacCuish (Paisley)
3) Lawside Trio (Dundee)
Bands – Overall Winner - Iain MacPhail Cup
Dana Quinn (Ruthwell)
Band – Rhythm Section - Arthur Easson Memorial Trophy
Dana Quinn (Ruthwell)
Own Composition – Willie Wilson Cup
1) George Burns (Kilsyth)
2) Ian Crichton (Isle of Lewis)
3) Pauline Page (Tillicoultry)
Under 12 Classical Solo – Kelso Cup
1) Elizabeth Stirrat (Paisley)
2) Tom Orr (Lanark)
3) Lorna Allison (Carluke)
Under 14 Classical Solo – Aberdeen Cup
1) Kirsty Findlater (Hamilton)
2) Caitlin O’Donnell (Peebles)
3) John Leiper (Strathaven)
Under 16 Classical Solo – Dundee shield
1) Neal Galbrailth (Paisley)
2) Ross Fleming (Blairgowrie)
3) Robert Allison (Carluke)
Open Classical Solo – Clinkscale Shield
1) Paul Chamberlain (Bowden)
2) David Nisbet (Earlston)
3) Richard Smith (Coalburn)
Under 13 Classical Duet – Beith & District A&F Club Cups (Willie Wilson Memorial Trophies)
1) Craig & Brian MacDonald (Ayr)
2) Tom Orr (Lanark) & Kirsty Johnson (Currie)
3) Lorna Allison (Carluke) & Jonathan Brown (Wishaw)
Under 16 Classical Duet - Alex MacArthur Cups
1) Richard Smith (Coalburn) & Robert Allison (Carluke)
2) Julie Hamilton (Carstairs) & Blair Gardiner (Carnwath)
3) Alastair Dunnet (Tranent) & Alison Carswell (Biggar)
Open Classical Duet – Dunfermline Cup
1) Julie Hamilton (Carstairs) & Blair Gardiner (Carnwath)
2) David Nisbet (Earlston) & Paul Chamberlain (Bowden)
3) Richard Smith (Coalburn) & Robert Allison (Carluke)
Classical Polka
Under 10 Classical Polka Solo – The Todhills Trophy
1)
2)
Under 14 Classical Polka Solo – Newtongrange Shield
1) Richard Smith (Coalburn)
2) Elizabeth Stirrat (Paisley)
3) John Leiper (Strathaven)
Open Classical Polka Solo – Tign-Na-Gorm Cup
1) Richard Smith (Coalburn)
2) David Nisbet (Earlston)
3) Ross Fleming (Blairgowrie)
Fiddle Sections
Under 12 Fiddle Solo – NAAFC Musselburgh Festival Trophy
1) Erin Smith (Aberdeen)
2) Donna Davidson (Banchory)
3) John Thow (Dundee)
Junior Fiddle Solo – MSR – Strathspey and Reel Association Cup
1) Patsy Reid (Knapp)
2) Ingrid Hammond (Dundee)
3) Graeme Davidson (Dundee)
Junior Fiddle Solo – Slow Air – Dougie Welsh Cup
1) Patsy Reid (Knapp)
2) Ingrid Hammond (Dundee)
3) Graeme Davidson (Dundee)
Senior Fiddle Solo – Slow Strathspey, MSR – St. Boswell Cup
1) Stuart Robertson (Alford)
2) Elisabeth McLay (Grangemouth)
3) Dick Rutter (Edinburgh)
Senior Fiddle Solo – Slow Air – Ron Gonella Cup
1) Elisabeth McLay (Grangemouth)
2) Stuart Robertson (Alford)
3) Dick Rutter (Edinburgh)
Open Fiddle Championship – Banchory S&R Society Trophy
1) Patsy Reid (Knapp)
2=) Elisabeth McLay (Grangemouth)
2=) Mhairi Skinner (West Lothian)
Senior Fiddle Overall Champion - The Angus Fitchet Trophy
= Elizabeth McLay (Grangemouth)
= Stuart Robertson (Alford)
Open Fiddle Groups – Lesmahagow Quaich
St John’s Stringers (Dundee)
Youngest Girl Competitor – John McQueen Medal
Erin Smith (Aberdeen)
Youngest Boy Competitor – John McQueen Medal
Jonathan Brown (Wishaw)
John Douglas
by Charlie Todd
1942, the darkest days of the War. Britain stood alone, facing the might of Nazi Germany who held Continental Europe in her iron grasp from the Channel Coast to the gates of Stalingrad. At sea German U boats, operating with apparent impunity from massive concrete lairs on the French coast, were sending one million tons of allied shipping a month to a watery grave at the bottom of the Atlantic and it appeared only a matter of time until Britain was brought to its knees.
Other than that, life in the sleepy hamlet of Lochfoot, near Dumfries, continued pretty much as it had for a hundred years and nowhere perhaps more so than Deanston Farm where the only interruption to routine during the war was the arrival of a new son to Bob and Edith (‘Bell’ to her friends) Douglas whom they names John. Hence one of ‘the best known and respected Borders musicians’ came into the world in those austere times. Fortunately, this was not to reflect on his personality.
John was born into a musical family. Dad was a fiddle and melodeon player while mum played the piano. Schooling was received at Milton Primary School and Dalbeattie and New Abbey Secondaries up to the age of 15 when full-time farming work began.
A year later however, the family uprooted and moved to Lochaber, or more specifically to the ‘Great Glen Cattle Ranch’ the brainchild of eccentric American millionaire Joseph Hobbs. Both Dad and John, during what I suppose could be called their ‘YEE HAA’ period worked as ‘cow pokes’ (my words, not John’s) when under the stern eye of Old Man Hobbs – seriously, horses and all, although when he wasn’t around they just got on with beef farming as any normal Scottish farmer would.
Not surprisingly perhaps the whole venture went bust after about three years and John moved from ‘ranching’ to ‘the plantations’ – the new ones being planted by the Forestry Commission in the Spean Bridge area in this case. Another couple of years down the line and John moved back to Dalbeattie in his native Dumfriesshire as mechanic at Carswell Mill (no, animal feedstuffs this time, not molasses).
The more observant amongst you will have noted a distinct absence of music pertaining to John up to this point and that was because there wasn’t any. He had taken lesions briefly, for three months in fact, from James Mason in Dumfries before moving to Lochaber but although he kept his Hohner Arietta it lay unused. John was therefore in his twenties when local accordionist Graham Barbour had need of a second box player. No one locally was available, so John acquired a Hohner Verdi and reading chords written out by Graham, learned in what would be termed in today’s jargon by ‘on the job training’ eventually branching out with his own band when Graham got married.
His more familiar daytime role as accordion salesman came about purely by chance in 1972. John was visiting Jimmy Clinkscale’s Melrose premises to buy a Domino Morino V when Jimmy mentioned a vacancy for a manager for the music shop they had just acquired from Len Frobisher in Dumfries. Jimmy asked John if he was interested and in due course he got the job (although he declined to say whether he bought the Morino on that first visit or waited for a staff discount!) Eighteen months later however Len bought the business back from Jimmy but John stayed on as Sales Assistant.
A couple of years down the line, around 1976, Len sold out to Thomson’s Music from Glasgow for whom John became Manager. That lasted until 1983 by which time the writing was on the wall so he left to set up his own business in Munches Street. That first business was slightly on the small side John admits or as he puts it “I could stock a Morino IV but not a V”.
Larger premises became available in Great King Street and that’s where you’ll still find him today. For me no visit to Dumfries is complete without a visit to John’s shop. In addition to being well stocked with accordions and keyboards, music, PA and accessories it’s a chance to catch up on the latest happenings, and just in case anyone reading this article is surprised by its apparently flippant tone, be prepared for John’s well developed sense of humour – he takes no prisoners.
John and wife Margaret have two of a family, John and Katrina, both of whom are competent keyboard players but show no signs of making much commercial use of their skills. Being busy running a business and playing regularly in the evenings has its drawbacks of course, and John jokes that like any busy musicians wife, Margaret regularly supplies the family with up-to-date photographs of their dad so that they’ll recognise him if they pass in the street!
In line with many bands in Dumfriesshire John uses a midi accordion, a singer and because of the shortage of drummers, a workstation to provide the rhythm for routine jobs although he covers Country Dancing with a more conventional line-up. On second box he has broadcast with Ian Muir and Max Houliston. Questioned about the highlight of his musical career he said it had to be a week long trip to Ireland in the early ‘80’s as a member of Bill Black’s Band. The ‘gigs’ were good but it’s the ‘dig’s’ that stand out in John’s memory mostly for all the wrong reasons I suspect (like the morning Bill ate three breakfasts).
Bill Smith of Banchory - Obituary
by Brian Cruickshank
It was with great sadness and a sense of loss that all musicians learned of the death of Bill Smith on 27th January, 1998. Entertainment through Scottish fiddle music was the hallmark of Bill’s life and I for one will be forever indebted for the effort that he put in over the past 22 years that I knew him.
In the next few paragraphs I will give you an insight into the type of man Bill was and also give you an idea of the inspiration that he gave everyone who came into contact with him.
As a young lad he showed great interest in fiddle music and he was also an enthusiastic member of the Boys Brigade in Huntly. At 18 Bill was called up to do his National Service in the Royal Air force. On his return he worked for some time as an ironmonger before joining the Liverpool Victoria Friendly society Insurance Co, where he was to spend the rest of his working life in Banchory for over 20 years until his retirement in 1993.
During all these years, Bill together with his wife Margaret, devoted his off-duty hours to encouraging young people – and old – to play fiddle music and also get involved with Scottish music in general. Some of these names which Bill helped to promote are as follows – Graeme Mitchell, Judith Davidson, Angela Smith, Neil Dawson, Lynn Gould, Paul Anderson, Jane Smith, myself and so many more – too many to list.
Through his enthusiasm he helped to promote the Banchory S&R Society and in turn helped to make them a success all over the world. Bill was a great organizer and he regularly arranged tours abroad. Some of the countries visited were France, Germany, Canada, Ireland and even England!
Bill was also a bit of a practical joker, and I will always remember the following incident that happened to me. Not long after joining the Society, I was working away at the cash desk in the bank when the Bank Manager handed me an official looking envelope. I duly opened it to discover Call-Up papers for the Falklands War. I instantly ran to the toilet to try and make sense of this tragic news. When I came out I received a phone call from Bill enquiring if I had been called up for the War yet!! I will not repeat the adjectives that followed on in view of his successful practical joke.
Bill was a great character and his social list of friends was extensive. I remember on Saturday in Banchory after a big charity ceilidh dance when myself, Bill and Graeme Mitchell went down to the Burnett Arms to collect all the instruments from the previous night. As it had been a very successful night and there was a genuine dryness about the mouth, so we decided to head for the lounge bar only to find out that between the three of us we did not have enough money to buy even a half pint of lager. However thanks to Bill and all his friends we left the bar three hours later will all our 62p intact and ourselves feeling rather merry to say the least.
Among some of his accolades, Bill also helped to get the popular ‘Ceol Na Fiddle’ series off the ground with Grampian Television and for the past 20 years he was the main organiser for the Fiddle Spectacular Show in Her Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen. He was also the main organiser of the Keith T.M.S.A. Festival and he was an Honorary Member of the Association.
For all his assistance and promotion of the fiddle music, I would add that Bill was awarded the Paul Harris Fellowship Award by the Rotary Club International in 1989. This in itself tells you a lot about the type of man he was. His work in promoting Scottish fiddle music lives on through the Strathspey & Reel society and also through his family, and all whom he encouraged over many happy years.
Thanks again for the life of Bill Smith.
Jim 'Broon'
by Joan & Jimmy Blue
They came from a’ the airts to Dunbarney Church in Bridge of Earn to remember and to give thanksgiving for the life of Jim Broon, as he was known. He touched so many lives, not only with his fiddle playing, but with his love of life, his sense of fun, his endless ploys, his ideas. And he did have great ideas. Who else, when being in charge of a Council ‘coup’ would dig out part of the banking and rear pigs! He had to give this up when, on his way to the market with a pig in the back seat of the car, he met his boss in Perth. And then with equipment begged or borrowed and having picked up an old baler, he started a paper collection business. He never turned folk away and gave work to quite a number of men who were unable to get work elsewhere – which may be the reason his business did not prosper as it should. While working on the ‘coup’ he arrived at our house one day with a number of storage heaters (in the days before central heating) and asked if we could use them? The heavy, brick filled heaters were carted bodily into the house and we started feeding the shilling meter. An hour and a few shillings later, Jimmy assured Jimmy Broon “what’s a few bob as long as you’re warm?” However, three hours later, having fed in £5, the storage heaters were carted bodily out again and back to the coup.
On a fun-filled touring holiday of the Highlands with Jim and his smashing wife, June, who died five years ago, we were driving through thick fog on the way to Wick when Jim suddenly started reciting “January brings the snow, makes your feet and fingers glow….” From beginning to end. On that same trip we stopped to read the inscription on a well in a remote part of Sutherland. It had been erected by the Road Surveyor “…in appreciation for the hospitality of the people in the area.” Jim immediately said “Aye, if he hadne had so much hospitality, maybe the roads would have been a lot straighter.”
Jim never ceased to surprise us. One night when driving home from a gig he gave us the whole of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, word perfect. When Jimmy was ceilidhing at Jim’s home in Kintillo with Bill Powrie and some other cronies one night, Jim produced a cooked chicken for supper. After it had been enjoyed, someone asked where it had come from, to be told “I got it aff the coup.” He was the only musician who could go to play at a dance at Aberfeldy on a Friday night and not get back till Tuesday! And if there was a dram or a ceilidh going, he was lucky if he got back on Tuesday!
We could fill a book with our memories of Jim Broon and we know that everyone who met his has stories to tell of his exploits. What a character – and how much we shall all miss him.
The Story behind the Tune Title
Following on from last month’s lead article we’ll take some of Pipe Major G. S. McLennan’s tunes this month.
The Little Cascade (Reel) – there are two versions of how the title came about. The first, believed by the late Captain D. R. MacLennan, is that one evening G. S. and his friend P/M James Robertson of Banff, went out on the town. They returned to Robertson’s quarters in the Gordon’s Depot (Castlehill Barracks) for a final dram and in the kitchen where they were sitting was a tap with an Army tin basin below it. The tap was dripping and G. S. told Robertson to be quiet as he could hear music. Robbie scoffed at his friend but at his insistence was silent and G. S. wrote down the theme notes for a tune which was to be ‘The Little Cascade’.
The second story is that in the early 1920’s sons George and John McLennan were playing in the living room of their home when their father told them to be quiet and listen to the ‘music’. He began to write what he heard and pointed out to his sons the changing time of the drips from the tap into the porcelain sink in the scullery.
King George V’s Army – having heard the G. S. composition ‘Kitchener’s Army’, a 6/8 march written in 1915 for the new Volunteer Army, the ‘old sweats’ asked him for a tune to commemorate their efforts up to that point in the war. G. S. was having a nap on his bunk and heard the drummers practising a beating for the tune ‘East Neuk of Fife’ and he composed this new tune to suit the beating he heard.
The Braemar Gathering – this tune was written by G. S. in France in 1918. He had intended playing it when ‘A’ Company of the 1st Battalion crossed the German frontier in 1918 but the C.O. asked for ‘Hielan’ Laddie’, the Regimental March at that time. Fast forward to 1950 when the Braemar Royal Highland Society held a competition and G. S.’s tune was submitted by his half-brother (G. S. having himself died in 1929) and was picked from the 165 tunes entered. G. S.’s son played it on 7th September, 1950, at the Braemar Games before H.M. George VI.
Mrs MacPherson of Inveran – one of G. S.’s close friends was Angus MacPherson of Inveran who was an excellent piper and who ran an hotel at Inveran. The tune was in honour of Angus’s wife Alice, who came from Skye.
Doornkop (Jig) – Max Houliston has this tune in a set. It commemorates the action of the 1st Battalion, the Gordon Highlanders at Doornkop, south Africa on 29th May, 1900 during the 2nd Boer War.
Captain E. B. B. Towse V.C. (6/8 march) – composed in honour of a great Gordon Hghlander who was blinded for life when he won his V.C. at Mount Thaba, South Africa on 30th June, 1900. Captain Towse with 12 men moved up to take a position on the Mount and a force of 150 Boers attempted to seize the same plateau, neither party seeing the other until they were 100m yards apart. Towse was called upon to surrender and giving a sharp reply he and his men vigorously attacked the enemy, driving them off. Towse was severely wounded, both eyes being shattered and he was blinded for life. Later he became Captain Sir Beachcroft Towse V.C., C.B.E. being knighted for his services to the blind during the First World War.
Composers Corner
John Philip Sousa (6/11/1854 – 6/3/1932)
by Lester S. Levy, Baltimore, Md
Throughout the years, particular musical groups, or occasionally individual performers, have captured the hearts of the American public. Our present youth, who most recently have related to the newer varieties of sound produced by combinations like the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead and the Beach Boys, were only a short while back shouting at the bland ballads of The Beatles or swooning over the gyrations of Elvis Presley. Their parents were willing to travel many miles for the privilege of listening to and dancing to, the strains of bands under the leadership of Benny Goodman and Paul Whitemen.
But for the men and women and children of the turn-of the-century era there was one name only that had universal appeal in the field of music – John Philip Sousa. Sousa was a cult – a joyous cult.
From 1880 – when, at the age of 26, he was appointed leader of the United States Marina Band – to 1919, when he left the United States Navy at the end of World War 1, he was the symbol of all that was thrilling in American music. Between his devotion to these two Government services, there was a long and honourable career as bandmaster to the American public and as composer of some of the most stirring music ever written.
Sousa’s father was of Portuguese ancestry; his mother was German, but there was nothing old-worldly about either their son or his melodic genius. Born in Washington, in 1854, he started to master the violin at the age of seven and in six years had progressed to the point where he was offered a position with a band attached to a circus. Sousa’s father circumvented this dubious form of employment by arranging to enlist him in the Marine Band as an apprentice.
Five years with the Marines was enough for the would-be conductor. He managed to withdraw from its band and within months was leading a small traveling orchestra and indulging in his first attempts at composition. At twenty, he was finding music publishers willing to accept his material which, at the outset, consisted of songs and miscellaneous pieces, with an occasional attempt at light opera. The marches – the works which would win him a permanent place in American musical history – came a bit later on.
Once again the Marine Band lured him back into Government service – this time as bandmaster, a position which he filled under 5 Presidents. It was during this period, when Sousa’s band was performing at the most important Government functions that the earliest of his great marches were presented to the public.
His first real hit came in 1886. It was ‘The Gladiator’, a march which was to set the style for the many successful works to follow. From coast to coast, bands included it in their repertoire. At one big parade in Philadelphia, seventeen marching bands were heard playing ‘The Gladiator’.
Within the next few years, while Sousa was still in his early thirties, he turned out many of his greatest marches – ‘Semper Fidelis’, the stirring march adopted by the Marine Corps, ‘The High School Cadets’, ‘The Washington Post’.
A march dedicated to a newspaper was a fanciful idea and it came about because of the newspaper’s interest in encouraging literary expression in the public schools. In 1889 the Post staged a contest and offered prizes for the best essays written by pupils and it arranged to award the prizes in the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution, where the participants and visitors were to be entertained by musical selections by the Marine Band. Several days before the event, one of the proprietors pf the Post asked Sousa to write a march in celebration of the contest. Sousa was delighted to oblige. ‘The Washington Post March’, performed for the first time on June 15, 1889, before twenty thousand children and their parents and friends, proved to be one of the half-dozen greatest that Souza ever wrote.
At this time the dancing masters of the country were endeavouring to introduce a new ballroom dance which they called the ‘two-step’ and they agreed that ‘The Washington Post’ was the tune which would ensure the new dance’s popularity! The success of the two-step was assured forthwith. On the ballroom floor the waltz was soon relegated to second place.
Like another famous American composer, Stephen Foster, young Sousa was no businessman when it came to disposing of his wares. Some of his finest early marches were sole to Harry Coleman, a shrewd Philadelphia publisher, for $35 apiece. The enormous profits which resulted brought Sousa not an extra penny, but enabled Coleman to build reed and brass instrument factories from the proceeds of the sale of Sousa marches.
As leader of the Marine Band, Sousa was hardly in the front rank of well-to-do Americans. His salary was in the region of $1,500 a year. Small wonder that when he was offered a fourfold increase in salary and a profit-sharing arrangement if he would conduct a band of his own, he was unable to resist and for the second time in his life he decided to sever his connection with the United States Government. So, in 1892, Sousa’s resignation as leader of the Marine Band was accepted with regret, and he set about organizing his own great band. His prestige attracted the finest individual performers among the country’s brass and woodwind instrumentalists. The band was a leading attraction at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. During that same year it enjoyed the unusual distinction of performing with Walter Damrosch and the New York Philharmonic Symphony in Carnegie Hall.
And now Sousa began to realise that his compositions had enormous potential value. The year after the birth of his new band, he signed a contract with the published John Church of Cincinnati in which he was guaranteed the usual royalties to which a composer is entitled. One of the first marches composed after this arrangement had been entered into was ‘The Liberty Bell’, which within a few years netted Sousa $35,000. On other later marches his income was many times that amount.
The greatest of Sousa’s marches was conceived late in 1896 as he was on a homeward trip after a European vacation. As Sousa paced the deck (he wrote in his autobiography, Marching Along) he “began to sense the rhythmic beat of a band playing within my brain….Throughout the voyage, that imaginary band continued to unfold the same themes, echoing the most distinct melody. I did not transfer a note of that music to paper while I was on the steamer, but when we reached shore I set down the measures that my brain-band had been playing for me”.
The composition born to Sousa on shipboard was ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’, probably the greatest and most widely performed popular march ever written. No important parade today would be complete without a rendition of this exciting work.
Back and forth across the country went Sousa and his trombonists, bassoonists, French-horn players, trumpeters, clarinetists, tuba players, saxophonists, oboists, cornetists and drummers. The largest horn was a helicon tuba which wound round the musician’s body, with a huge bell which violently blared the music ahead of other instrumentalists. Sousa disliked this sound effect and designed a great horn with an upright bell, which diffused the tone to his satisfaction. The new instrument was given the name ‘Sousaphone’ by its manufacturer, the Wurlitzer Company and it is still an integral part of a brass band.
Sousa was not satisfied to confine his concerts to the United States. The band toured Europe four times and in 1911 they took an ambitious trip around the world, bringing the great marches to South Africa and Australia, To New Zealand and the Fiji Islands and Hawaii, where, Sousa relates, he was decked with so many leis that his ears were hidden.
Sousa’s friends and admirers included people famous in many fields. They ranged from Bob Fitzsimmons and John L. Sullivan, the prizefighters, to Admiral George Dewey, the hero of the Spanish-American War, to King Edward VII of England, to Thomas A. Edison. When Leopold Stokowski, who later would become maestro of the Philadelphia Orchestra, first arrived in the United States, he attended a concert of Sousa’s at New York’s Hippodrome. Later, Stokowski said that the music swept him off his feat. The rhythm of Sousa stirred him, he recognised it as unique. From that time on, said Stokowski, he always wanted to meet ‘that musician with the pirate’s beard’.
The beard was an important part of Sousa’s physiognomy until he joined the Navy upon America’s entrance into World War 1 in 1917. A short stocky man, his appearance might have been undistinguished had it not been for the trip spade beard which, appearing above the high collar of the Marine dress uniform, seemed to enhance his martial image. During the 25 year period when the band was Sousa’s own and not the Marine’s or the Navy’s, the beard was, in a way, Sousa’s personal trademark. Always neat, with never a hair out of place, it was of a piece with his music, meticulous, flawless, clean-cut. Yet he removed it without a moment’s hesitation soon after he joined the Navy. If it had been something of an affectation throughout the years, it had no place during wartime. From 1917 on, the trim gray moustache sufficed to compliment Sousa’s dignified bearing and polished showmanship.
Every Sousa march has a unique personality and every Sousa far has his own favourites from among the more than one hundred marches that Sousa composed during his lifetime. ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’ will be at the top of most lists and close behind will come ‘Semper Fidelis’ and ‘The Washington Post’ and the ‘Manhattan Beach’ and ‘The High School Cadets’ and ‘El Capitan’, the unforgettable melody from his light opera of that name.
Record Review
Shetlands Young Heritage – Bridging the Gap – SYHCD002
Abbey Newton (Cello) - Crossing to Scotland – Kilburne Records CUL110D
Book Review
The Jimmy Shand Story by Ian Cameron – Scottish Cultural Press
Letters to the Editor
Take the Floor – Saturdays at 6.30pm with Robbie Shepherd
4th Apr 98 – Ian Muir SDB
11th Apr 98 – George Stirrat SDB
18th Apr 98 – Jennifer Forrest SDB
25th Apr 98 – OB McTavish’s Kitchen, Oban – Hector McFadyen SDB and Guests
2nd May 98 – Jim Lindsay SDB
9th May 98 – Michael Garvin SDB
16th May 98 – Kenny Thomson SDB
23rd May 98 – OB (tbc)
30th May 98 – Duncan Black SDB
6th June 98 – Wayne Robertson SDB
13th June 98 – Alistair Hunter SDB
20th June 98 – tbc
27th June 98 – OB (tbc)
CLUB DIARY
Aberdeen (Dee Motel) – 28th Apr 98 – Ian Muir Trio
Alnwick (White Swan Hotel) – members only 8th Apr 98 – Wayne Robertson & Gill Simpson
Annan (St Andrew’s Social Club) - 19th Apr 98 – Jock Borthwick SDB
Arbroath (Viewfield Hotel) - 5th Apr 98 – Ian Muir Trio
Armadale (Masonic Hall) – 2nd Apr 98 – Sandy Legget SDB
Ayr (Gartferry Hotel) – 5th Apr 98 – William Bradley SDB
Balloch (St. Kessog’s Hall) – 19th Apr 98 – Graeme Mitchell SDB
Banchory (Burnett Arms Hotel) – 27th Apr 98 – Duncan Black SDB
Banff & District (Banff Springs Hotel) – 22nd Apr 98 – Kathleen, Ian, Dougie & Stevie
Beith & District (Hotel de Croft, Dalry) – 20th Apr 98 – Sandy Nixon SDB
Belford (Community Club) – 30th Apr 98 – David Vernon
Biggar (Municipal Hall) – 12th Apr 98 – Robin Brock SDB
Blairgowrie (Moorfield Hotel) - 14th Apr 98 – Tom Alexander
Bromley (Trinity United Reform Church) - 21st Apr 98 - Amarylis
Button Key (Windygates Institute) – 9th Apr 98 – Donal Ring Irish Night
Campbeltown (Royal or Argyll Hotel) - tbc
Campsie (Glazert House Hotel) - 7th Apr 98 – John Carmichael SDB
Carlisle (Border Regiment Club, Carlisle Castle) - 2nd Apr 98 – Graham Barbour
Castle Douglas (Ernespie House Hotel) – 21st Apr 98 – Johnny Duncan
Coalburn (Miners’ Welfare) - 16th Apr 98 – John Douglas SDB
Crathes (Crathes Hall, Banchory) -
Crieff & District (Arduthie Hotel) 2nd Apr 98 – James Coutts SDB
Dalriada (Argyll Arms Hotel, Lochgilphead) 21st Apr 98 - tbc
Dingwall (National Hotel) – 1st Apr 98 – Roger Donson SDB
Dunblane (Westlands Hotel) – 21st Apr 98 – Charlie Kirkpatrick Trio
Dunfermline (Headwell Bowling Club) – 14th Apr 98 – Club night
Dunoon & Cowal (McColl’s Hotel) tbc
East Kilbride (Sweepers, Cambuslang) –
Ellon (Station Hotel) – 21st apr 98 – Davie Stewart & Rab Smillie
Fintry (Fintry Sports Centre) – 28th Apr 98 – Charlie Kirkpatrick Trio
Forfar (Plough Inn) - 26th Apr 98 – Glencraig SDB
Forres (Brig Motel) – 8th Apr 98 – West Telferton Cale SDB
Fort William (Alexandra Hotel) –
Galashiels (Abbotsford Arms Hotel) – 2nd Apr 98 - tbc
Galston (Barr Castle Social Club) –
Glendale (Black Bull Hotel – Wooler) – 16th Apr 98 – Jim & Jean McConnachie +AGM
Glenfarg (Lomond Hotel) - 1st Apr 98 – Gordon Pattullo
Glenrothes (Victoria Hall, Coaltown of Balgownie) - 28th Apr 98 - tbc
Gretna (Halcrow Stadium) - 15th Apr 98 – Charlie Kirkpatrick Trio
Highland (Drumossie Hotel) – 20th Apr 98 – Iain Anderson (Gartocharn)
Inveraray (Loch Fyne Hotel) - 7th Apr 98 – Bobby Harvey & Ivor Britton
Islay (White Hart Hotel) -
Isle of Skye – (The Royal Hotel, Portree) - 2nd Apr 98 – Jock Fraser & Lindsay Weir
Islesteps (The Embassy Hotel) – 7th Apr 98 – James Coutts SDB
Kelso (Ednam House Hotel) – 29th Apr 98 – Graham Barbour
Kintore (Torryburn Hotel) – 1st Apr 98 - tbc
Lanark (Masonic Hall) - 23rd Apr 98 - tbc
Langholm (Crown Hotel) –
Lesmahagow (Masonic Hall) – 9th Apr 98 – Lothian SDB
Lewis & Harris (Stornoway Legion) - 2nd Apr 98 – Donnie & Diane
Livingston (Cairn Hotel) - 21st apr 98 – Strathmore Sound
Lockerbie (Queen’s Hotel) - 28th Apr 98 – Alan Gardiner Duo
Mauchline (Sorn Village Hall)
Montrose (Park Hotel) – 1st Apr 98 – Dick Black Band
Muirhead (Belmont Arms, Meigle) - 15th Apr 98 – local artistes
Newtongrange (Dean Tavern) – 12th Apr 98 - Competitions
North East (Royal British Legion, Keith) – 7th Apr 98 – Lynne Christie SDB
Oban (McTavish’s Kitchen) – 2nd Apr 98 – Roger Dobson SDB
Orkney (Ayre Hotel, Kirkwall) –
Peebles (Green Tree Hotel) – 30th Apr 98 – Webster Craig SDB
Perth (Salutation Hotel) – 28th Apr 98 – Addie Harper Jnr Band
Premier NI (Camlin Function Rooms) - 7th Apr 98 - tbc
Reading Fiddlers (Piggot School) -
Renfrew (Masonic Hall, Broadloan) – 14th Apr 98 – William Bradley SDB
Rothbury (Queen’s Head) - 2nd Apr 98 – Carlyle Family Band
Selkirk (Cricket Club) -
Shetland (Shetland Hotel, Lerwick) - 9th Apr 98 – David Cunningham Jnr SDB
Stirling (Terraces Hotel) - 12th Apr 98 – Fraser McGlynn Duo
Sutherland (Rogart Hall) - tbc
Thornhill (Masonic Hall) - 8th Apr 98 – Gordon Pattullo
Thurso (Pentland Hotel) – 6th Apr 98 – Wyris Sound
Turriff (Royal Oak Hotel) – 2nd Apr 98 – Dick Black
Tynedale (Hexham Ex Service Club) – 7th Apr 98 - tbc
Wick (McKay’s Hotel) – 7th Apr 98 – West Telferton Cale SDB
Yarrow (Gordon Arms) - 15th Apr 98 – David Wilson SDB
THERE WERE CLUB REPORTS FROM :-
1. Aberdeen
2. Alnwick
3. Annan
4. Arbroath
5. Balloch
6. Banchory
7. Banff & District
8. Beith & District
9. Biggar
10. Bromley
11. Button Key
12. Campsie
13. Castle Douglas
14. Coalburn
15. Crieff & District
16. Dingwall & District
17. Dunblane
18. Dunfermline & District
19. Dunoon & Cowal
20. East Kilbride
21. Fintry
22. Forfar
23. Forres
24. Galashiels
25. Galston
26. Glendale
27. Glenrothes & District
28. Gretna
29. Highland
30. Inveraray & District
31. Isle of Skye
32. Kintore
33. Ladybank
34. Lanark
35. Lesmahagow
36. Livingston
37. Lockerbie
38. Montrose
39. Muirhead
40. Newtongrange
41. North East
42. Oban
43. Peebles
44. Perth
45. Renfrew
46. Shetland
47. Stirling
48. Thornhill
49. Thurso
50. Turriff
51. Tynedale
52. Wick
53. Yarrow
CLUB DIRECTORY AS AT SEPT 1997
(Clubs didn’t necessarily notify the Assoc when they closed so the following may not be entirely correct. Only the clubs submitting the reports or in the Club Diary above were definitely open.)
1. Aberdeen A&F Club (1975 – present)
2. Alnwick A&F Club (Aug 1975 – present)
3. Annan A&F Club (joined Assoc in 1996 but started 1985 – present)
4. Arbroath A&F Club (1991? – present)
5. Armadale A&F Club (Oct 1978? or 80) originally called Bathgate Club (for 2 months) Closed
6. Ayr A&F Club (Nov 1983 – per Nov 83 edition) Closed
7. Balloch A&F Club (Sept 1972 – per January 1978 issue – present)
8. Banchory A&F Club (1978 – present)
9. Banff & District A&F Club (Oct 1973 – present)
10. Beith & District A&F Club (Sept 1972 – per first edition – present)
11. Belford A&F Club (joined Sept 1982)
12. Biggar A&F Club (Oct 1974 – present)
13. Blairgowrie A&F Club (
14. Bromley A&F Club
15. Button Key A&F Club (
16. Campbeltown A&F Club (
17. Campsie A&F Club (Nov 95 – present)
18. Carlisle A&F Club (joined Sept 1993 -
19. Castle Douglas A&F Club (c Sept 1980 – present)
20. Coalburn A&F Club (
21. Crieff A&F Club (cSept 1981)
22. Dalriada A&F Club (Feb 1981)
23. Dingwall & District A&F Club (May 1979 – per first report)
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The main features in the above issue were as follows (this is not a comprehensive detail of all it contained. The Club reports, in particular, are too time consuming at this stage to retype).
Editorial
Well, it’s with a sigh of relief that we reach the end of my first season. Overall I get the impression the new format has been well received. As far as content goes we’ve set off at a cracking pace and the pressure is on to maintain the standard next season. My thanks to London based fiddler Pete Cooper for allowing me to use his recent article ‘James Scott Skinner’ as the lead article for this month’s issue and to Rod Stradling and Keith Summers of ‘Musical Traditions’ an Internet Magazine where it first appeared, for their permission to reproduce it. I explained to Pete that many of our readers would have interesting insights into J.S.S. and he would be interested to hear from anyone with anything to contribute. Please send your letters to me in the first instance.
As usual though, we finish the year as we started – ‘the cupboard is bare’ as regards good lead articles, we’ve nothing in reserve so I’m still looking for ideas and articles to carry us through the 98/99 season.
While ransacking Bob McMath’s music I came across some excellent photographs of ‘Crotchet and Jeanie’ with Robert Wilson and Will Starr in the early days of the White Heather Club. This prompted discussion on accordion music in which Bob raised interesting areas some of which I had never even heard of. Does anyone have any information on ‘the booths’ which were a feature of seaside entertainment up to the Great War. The songs of Lauder and others in the Music Halls provided many tunes we still use today. Between the wars Accordion Orchestras from various Continental countries visited the UK and the ‘big bands’ who came to Britain during the Second World War with the American Forces inspired many accordionists of that era when Ballroom and Latin American dancing were immensely popular. Some of the accordionists who learned in that scene ‘came over’ to Scottish to participate in the wider ‘White Heather Club’ which had more than one show on the road at any one time. Information or recollections on any of these areas would be welcome.
It was nice to get a chance to meet some of you at Musselburgh and hopefully I’ll meet up with the regulars and a few new faces at our Perth Weekend in June. I hope everyone has an enjoyable summer break.
Charlie Todd
James Scott Skinner (1843-1927)
Reflections on the Life and Music of One of Scotland’s Greatest Fiddle Composers
by Pete Cooper
The first Scott Skinner tune I heard was The Laird Of Drumblair, the marvellously spirited performance by fiddle player Tommy Peoples on the Bothy Band's first (1975) album. It's a classic Scots strathspey in the bright-sounding key of A with all the hallmarks of Scottish style - snap rhythms, alternating ('double tonic') phrases in A-major and B-minor and ingenious descending runs of triplets at the end. Peoples, of course, is from the north of Ireland, but as Donegal fiddler John Doherty once remarked "There is only a paper wall between Irish and Scottish music". 1 On the Bothy Band album Tommy proceeds in time-honoured fashion to convert the strathspey into a reel - a sequence subsequently recycled in a thousand pub sessions throughout the celtic music world. But what of the tune's first composition? The 'Laird' in question turns out to have been an engineering entrepreneur, William McHardy, who having made his fortune in South America returned to live in Scotland, where Skinner was a regular visitor to his house. One night as the composer lay in bed "reflecting on all the kindnesses of this friend", the tune "flashed" into his head and, having no music manuscript paper to hand, Skinner dashed it off on a sheet of soap wrapper. "Ye're no' gaun tae send that awfy-like paper tae the Laird," protested his wife. "He'll jist licht his pipe wi' it!" Send it he did, however, and was duly rewarded the following Christmas with a letter of gratitude and accompanying cheque. 2
The story comes from My Life and Adventures, first serialised in The People's Journal in 1923 and re-published in 1994 by the City of Aberdeen, in association with Graham Dixon of Wallace Music, to mark the 150th anniversary of Skinner's birth. 3 Fiddlers already have reason to be grateful to Dixon for his edition of James Hill tunes, The Lads Like Beer, and it is again thanks to his efforts that Skinner's memoirs have become available in booklet form. The text runs to over a hundred pages, illustrated with the original photos and some additional press notices and concert programmes. Its release seems unlikely either to enhance or detract from the high regard in which Skinner's music is held; and this is probably just as well, since the light it throws on his character is not entirely favourable.
Skinner cannot have been an easy man to like. Certainly he could be very pompous. Struggling for much of his life to make a half-decent living, his sense of his own value seems to have been so precarious as to require almost continuous assertion. The Life, it is true, was 'ghost-written' (by whom?), but his self-importance is more than a matter of prose style. "I have no intention," he says, "of wearying my readers with the details of my life's output of original music, which, frankly speaking, has been colossal". You feel he is shadow-boxing with some invisible adversary determined to deny his achievement, quoting, for instance, the opinion of Monti, "an Italian expert" (he of the Csardas?): "Monti was a great admirer of my work. On one occasion ... he picked up a couple of books and remarked, "Here's Bach and here's Scott Skinner. Personally I prefer Scott Skinner". 4 I am reminded of my old copy of the Bayley & Ferguson edition of Skinner's The Scottish Violinist, its pink cover famously emblazoned with the motto: 'Talent does what it can, Genius does what it must'.
His compulsive self-promotion can be wearying, but Skinner's account of a harsh and deprived childhood provides clues as to its origin. His father died when he was a baby and his mother's re-marriage was not happy. She had "a rigid belief in the scriptural adage that who spareth the rod spoileth the child", and beatings, from his mother and his school-master, "a regular martinet", seem to have been frequent. His brother Sandy, who began teaching him fiddle and cello when he was six, was also "the most rigorous of taskmasters", and meted out "humiliating punishment" whenever the child was slow. Skinner's mention of all this abuse suggests it was not just the child-rearing norm of a more punitive age and, though he says nothing himself, one can guess at a core of self-contempt beneath his later bravado.
Musically he was highly precocious. By the age of eight he was playing cello with Peter Milne, a well-known Deeside fiddle composer and - I think, significantly - "practically a father to me". (Milne was clearly not an ideal father figure. He was, for example, an opium addict - which may explain a curious remark of his: "I'm that fond o' my fiddle, I could sit in the inside o't, an' look oot.") "It was nothing unusual for Peter and me to trudge eight or ten weary miles on a slushy wet night in order to fulfill a barn engagement". And he describes a typical dance of the 1850s, held in a building with an earthen floor, lit by tallow dips mounted on wall brackets and the 'orchestra' consisting of fiddle, cello and flute. Once, returning home at five in the morning, "dragging, rather than carrying, my bass fiddle", he fell asleep against the door, too exhausted even to lift the latch, and was found there two hours later by his mother.
At twelve Skinner joined a juvenile orchestra, Dr Mark's Little Men, travelling throughout Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales. He learned to read music and his studies with Halle orchestra violinist Charles Rougier greatly extended and refined the left-hand playing technique he had acquired as a strathspey fiddler. In 1858 the Little Men performed before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace - some years later Skinner would teach Highland dancing to the children of her Balmoral tenants, as well as composing the air Our Highland Queen in her honour. By the time he left the troupe at the age of seventeen he was on his way to becoming the formidable violinist who - both through his compositions and his discovery of a way to present traditional dance music in concert performance - was to make such an impact on Scots fiddling.
He now studied under a dancing master, William Scott, and thereafter adopted 'Scott' as his own middle name. While dancing, as much as fiddle playing, would be his livelihood for years to come, was it really in homage to his instructor that he changed his name? I think he both wished to appropriate Scott, "a great scholar, highly cultured, and handsome into the bargain", as another father; and that he was already attempting to construct for himself an identity that would be peculiarly Scottish and patriotic. It was also the name, after all, of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), himself one of the great architects of Highland romanticism and still at that time a massively influential figure throughout Europe. Whatever his intentions, it was as James Scott Skinner that - after a brief interlude as a blackface minstrel under the name of 'Mr Grace Egerton' - he began his career, publishing, in 1865 and 1868, first Twelve, and then Thirty New Strathspeys and Reels.
By 1868, aged twenty five, he was working as a dance teacher to the tenantry at the palace of Balmoral. He established, with both dance and violin teaching, a practice apparently successful enough to allow him, around 1870, to marry fellow-dancer Jane Stuart, with whom he had a daughter, Jeanie, and in the early 1880s a son, Manson. He also worked hard as a performer, playing pieces by Rode, Paganini and Mozart, as much as traditional, or his own, music. A dozen years of this, he tells us, and "I had the patronage of all the big private families in Ross-shire, Inverness-shire, Elginshire and Banffshire. I was making about £750 a year, and was able to drive to and from the residences of my pupils in my own private trap, drawn by a beautiful pony. This equipment cost me about £150". His curiously specific boast may be a defence against his sense of being patronised in the more negative sense of the term. He describes having to divert a violin student who disdainfully announced "I'm tired of fiddling. Tell me a story". Even in retrospect, however, Skinner seems more flattered to have been associated with the aristocratic client than willing to acknowledge the insult and, still locked in the role of entertainer, repeats the story - quite a funny one, incidentally - for his readers. 5
As David Johnson remarks in Scottish Fiddle Music in the Eighteenth Century, "Skinner's career was out of step with his era ... Trained European musicians living in Scotland despised Scots fiddling, almost to a man". Whereas the fiddle composers of the previous century had been respected as contributors to a European mainstream, equally at ease writing minuets and sonatas or using traditional Scottish forms, the Romantics had come to prefer the view of fiddle music as the product of an untutored, preferably wild, preferably Highland, peasantry. And if folk music was primitive, almost a force of nature, what real respect could be accorded to those who performed it? In those "big private families", Skinner's status was partly that of mascot, an oddity: "jist ane o' the Almichty's curiosities". As a concert performer of 'folk' fiddle music, who at the same time viewed it from a 'superior' classical standpoint, he was also very much out on his own. His isolation from an active musical tradition in which his work could be appreciated - and its limitations recognised - may have had its inner correspondence in his lack of, and perpetual search for, a father. As it was, a quite unrealistic estimate of his own greatness was his only buttress against a nagging sense of musical and emotional fraudulence. Beneath the confidence of early success lay the threat of imminent collapse.
Yet the collapse, when it came, was displaced sideways. Skinner's account is typically melodramatic, while disclosing almost nothing: "The crash came suddenly, and in a single day I was roofless, wifeless, and penniless". It has been assumed until recently - and no doubt this was Skinner's intention - that his wife Jane suddenly died. But historian John Hargreaves, researching Skinner's life for a play presented in 1993, discovered otherwise:
'Thanks to the staff of Elgin Libraries we now know that ... on 18 April, 1885, Jane was admitted to the Elgin Lunatic Asylum ... suffering from "excitement" caused by "pecuniary embarrassment". From time to time Skinner contributed to her maintainance, though he had difficulty in keeping up regular payments. Jane Stuart died a pauper in the asylum on 5 January, 1899.' 6
While it is possible that Skinner felt it inappropriate to make such a disclosure in his memoirs, his evasiveness seems rather to betray some sense of guilt. His habitual unwillingness to acknowledge personal or emotional troubles may even, for all we know, have contributed to his wife's breakdown. He tells us that he moved to Aberdeen and "lay quiescent for a bit" until his "innate optimism reasserted itself" and he even permits himself a little joke: "It was in the Waverley Hotel I found temporary asylum (appropriate word, for I did think I was going mad!), and there I managed to maintain myself..." Jane's hospitalisation was followed by the death of Skinner's brother Sandy, whose widow, 'Madame de Lenglee', now not only joined Skinner as a dance teacher but helped bring up his children.
His personal life, not to put too fine a point on it, was largely a mess and clearly it was into his work that he put his energy. As a performer he now deliberately constructed himself as an icon of Scottishness. Returning from a tour of America in 1893, he tells us, "I made up my mind on two points. Firstly, I decided to have done with dancing. As a solo violinist I meant to stand or fall. Secondly, I decided to make the kilt my performance dress". He became in the mind of his public - and probably in his own mind, too - the 'Strathspey King', the very embodiment of the romantic Victorian version of traditional Highland culture. That this 'traditional', supposedly ancient, Highland culture, was in fact largely a retrospective invention of the later 18th and early 19th centuries, is persuasively, if provocatively, argued by Hugh Trevor Roper in Eric Hobsbawm's The Invention of Tradition. 7 The kilt itself, for example, was invented about 1730 by Thomas Rawlinson, a Quaker industrialist from Lancashire. 8 While opportunism no doubt played some part in Skinner's adoption of the trappings of this Anglo-Scottish version of the Highland tradition, I think the fantasy component of Balmoralism was part of its appeal to a man seeking refuge from his own emotional reality.
Yet illusions can be very sustaining and Skinner's output as a composer was indeed 'colossal'. His first publications were followed by The Miller O'Hirn Collection (1881), The Beauties of the Ballroom (1882), The Elgin Collection (1884), The Logie Collection (1888) and The Scottish Violinist (1900). What Alastair Hardie has called his magnum opus, The Harp & Claymore Collection was published in 1904. 9 He made some cylinder recordings in 1905 and 1910 and recorded again in 1922. Prompted by Harry Lauder, he appeared in 1911 at the London Palladium as one of The Caledonian Four and continued touring in various 'concert parties' into his early eighties, playing at the Royal Albert Hall, for example, in 1925. His very real fame as a musician was, however, bought at the cost of a stable personal life. Apart from a period of about ten years with his second wife, Gertrude Park - from the late 1890's until 1909 when she left him to go and live in Rhodesia - Skinner resided at various hotels, or else stayed with friends, until in 1922, at the age of 79, he was able to buy a house in Aberdeen. After a final, not very successful, trip to America, he died in Aberdeen in 1927.
Skinner's place in the history of Scottish fiddle music is, as Graham Dixon suggests, very much a matter of debate. Skinner may have had little capacity for self-scrutiny and perhaps chose to believe his own publicity hype rather than face painful truths, but My Life And Adventures, if not a great autobiography, may explain why opinion today is so divided. Skinner emerges as a man fervently committed, possibly for the wrong reasons, to a Victorian fantasy of 'Scottishness'. Yet the music he composed (or much of it) transcended, wonderfully, the ideology by which it was inspired. Some of his great strathspeys and airs convey more emotional truth than he could ever express in his personal relations.
It is perhaps as easy for us to be put off, as it was for Skinner to be over-impressed, by nationalist ideologues like John Blackie, whose preface to The Logie Collection describes his music as being "as native to our ears and to our hearts as the purple heather is to the brae, or the graceful tresses on the birch to the glen" - this at a time when Scotland was already one of the most heavily industrialised countries in Europe. 10 Rejecting this kind of sentimentality, the whole tartan package, some on the folk scene today reject Skinner's music itself as inauthentic, his self-conscious virtuosity an aberration from the 'real' Scottish vernacular fiddle tradition. Players like Alasdair Fraser (whose opinions about Skinner, by the way, I am not presuming to guess) have set themselves - with excellent results - the project of re-creating what they take to be an earlier, more authentic Scottish style, seeking, for example, in the Gaelic-speaking communities of Cape Breton a Highlands fiddle style (and set-dancing style, too) that was all but extinguished in Scotland itself. Certainly if one's goal were to create for Scottish folk music an equivalent of the present-day Irish session scene, then the highly individualistic Skinner may seem at best an irrelevance.
Yet ironically, although Skinner himself was of his time in swallowing the romantic account of his predecessors as 'peasant' fiddle players - he mentions rather loftily in his Guide To Bowing, for instance, that fiddlers like Neil Gow "did good work, but would have soared even higher had they received a good sound training" - he was in reality very much in their tradition, for James Oswald (1711-1769), William Marshall (1748-1833), Niel Gow (1727-1807), Nathaniel Gow (1763-1831) and the like, always prized technical accomplishment highly. To those complaining, for instance, that some of Marshall's tunes were technically too difficult "his answer was that he did not write music for bunglers, and as all his tunes could be played, he advised them to practice more, and become better players". 11 John Doherty held the view, according to Alun Evans, that Scott Skinner wrote the tricky hornpipe The Mathematician "to fool the country fiddlers".
The kind of concert presentation of Scots dance music that Skinner evolved - I mean his development of the 'concert reel' and the 'pastoral air' rather than the kilt-sporting and sword-dancing aspect of his performance - is kept alive today by violinists like Alastair Hardie, whose playing of Skinner tunes on his 150th anniversary tribute CD Compliments to 'The King', is, I have no doubt, much as Skinner would have liked it: a considered style on the cusp between 'folk' fiddle and 'classical' violin; Scottish music for the parlour or the concert hall. But what about Scottish music for the house dance, the ceilidh - and indeed the session? As a matter of fact, Skinner's music today is widely played both within and beyond Scotland - in Cape Breton, in New England and in Donegal, for example, albeit without the King's scrupulously annotated bowing patterns. Well known fiddlers as diverse as Jean Carignan and Bill Lamey, John Doherty, Tommy Peoples and Dave Swarbrick have all found inspiration in his music, along with countless others who play for private enjoyment.
Debate will continue and the publication of My Life And Adventures will have provided both Skinner enthusiasts and critics with plenty to reflect upon. His tunes, meanwhile - or many of them - seem assured of continuing life. "The best of them", as his friend George Riddell wrote in the Aberdeen Journal in 1927, "are robust, melodious and exceptionally well balanced", though it was the same critic's view that "It is not for the Strathspey composer to disport himself among the various keys, or indulge in fanciful chromatic progressions". In every tradition there exists a tension between the individual act of composition - and Skinner was nothing if not an individual claiming credit for original work - and the collective use and development of the music by large numbers of players. The balance between the two seems to vary between one tradition and another; in both Irish and Appalachian Old Time fiddle music the composers tend to be soon forgotten, submerged in the collective, while their Scottish and Swedish counterparts seem much more likely to be remembered by name. Skinner may have been, by temperament, belief and cultural location, at some considerable remove from his fellow fiddle players. In the end, however, it is they who will sustain his music and his reputation.
Pete Cooper - 5.8.97
Article MT007
Notes:
- Notes by Alun Evans to The Floating Bow, Claddagh Records CCF31CD
- My Life and Adventures, p.92
- And available from City of Aberdeen, Arts & Recreation Division, Central Library, Rosemount Viaduct, Aberdeen, Scotland, AB9 1GU at £5.00 (1994 price)
- My Life and Adventures, p.88.
- It's about a drunk who gets into a train with the famous evangelists Moody and Sankey. The drunk, trying to get home to a place 'on the Don side,' first boards a train for Stonehaven and is ejected by the guard. Then he stumbles onto a train to Ballater and is again told it's the wrong one. Finally he sits down in a compartment with the preachers who are heading for a series of revival meetings in Peterhead. "Naturally, in his drunken state, the man made himself a bit of a nuisance", says Skinner. "Moody gazed at him, more in pity than in condemnation, and then spoke slowly and deliberately:
"Na." came the answer.
"Well, you're going to perdition." was the stern rejoinder.
"Eh?" exclaimed the maudlin one, waking up somewhat; "I'm in the wrang train again!"
- Article in Leopard magazine
- "Indeed, the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention. Before the later years of the seventeenth century, the Highlanders of Scotland did not form a distinct people... Even under the oppressive rule of England in the 17th and 18th centuries, Celtic Ireland remained, culturally, an historic nation, while Celtic Scotland was, at best, its poor sister. It had - could have - no independent tradition." Hugh Trevor-Roper, 'The Highland Tradition of Scotland' in The Invention of Tradition.
- Highlanders unable to afford the 'trews' worn by their chieftains had, according to Trevor-Roper, hitherto worn the breacan, a plaid divided by a belt around the waist, which, as Rawlinson observed when he established a furnace to smelt iron-ore outside Inverness in 1727, was "a cumbrous, unwieldy habit". With the help of a regimental tailor stationed nearby, he separated the skirt from the plaid, "converting it into a distinct garment, with pleats already sewn". In the following decade this practical garment, the kilt, became a popular form of dress. It was banned, however, as being a sort of badge of revolt, after the 1745 uprising, and when the prohibition was at last revoked - initially among the Scottish army regiments - it was, wrongly, assumed to have been worn in the Western Highlands from time immemorial.
- And may indeed not have been his only work to have come to fruition that year. According to a report in The Deeside Piper And Herald of July 2, 1993 - headline 'Strathspey King Had "Secret Love Child"' - Scott Skinner is claimed to have "hit the high notes with a young English girl called Lily Maud Hodgkinson during a visit to Stoke-on-Trent in 1904". Lily's illegitimate son, Manson Walter Hodgkinson - the same first name as Skinner's acknowledged son - was born on November 24, 1904 and it was this man's son, Kenneth, now in his sixties, who in 1988 first traced the Skinner connection, though he'd known since his teens that his grandfather was "a travelling Scots fiddler".
- I was amused in this context by the scene in the film Trainspotting where some of the characters, seeking purpose and meaning outside the Edinburgh heroin scene, take a walk in the countryside - and find the physical reality (perhaps in contrast to some residual Romantic fantasy?) almost totally uninspiring.
- John Glen, 1891, quoted by Mary Anne Alburger in Scottish Fiddlers & Their Music.
Musselburgh Festival 1998
by Neil Copland – Festival Chairman
Saturday, 7th March, 1998 saw the 24th Annual Musselburgh Festival take place in the Brunton Halls, Musselburgh, as has become tradition. A few changes from the regular arrangements were in evidence following continuing alterations and refurbishment to the Brunton Hall complex, but these didn’t detract too much from an enjoyable day (and evening) of all that is good within the accordion and fiddle scene at the moment.
Despite horrendous snowstorms and blizzards across Scotland on the Friday night, most competitors managed to reach Musselburgh although a few from the north were snowbound and had to call off, as did one of our fiddle judges. However, after all the weeks and months of preparation by the Organising Committee, the ‘big day’ was here and ‘the show had to go on’. Entries were slightly down from 1997 (190 from 210), but the quality of playing was most certainly just as good as last year – if not even better. As usual, this was the chance for musicians and enthusiasts to renew annual friendships and catch up on all the news and gossip. One notable absentee this year was Christine Hunter (a former Festival Secretary) who sadly passed away earlier in the year. The day was therefore tinged with sadness for all of us who knew and remember Christine as a very efficient Secretary in those early days of the Festival.
The usual band of Committee members and other very loyal and willing helpers were at the Brunton Hall just after 8 a.m. to ensure an enjoyable day for competitors and visitors alike. The adjudicator’s panel this year had no fewer than three highly respected musicians making their first appearance at Musselburgh in this capacity – they were Charlie Kirkpatrick, Maurice Duncan and Joan Blue. Joining them were our ‘old’ friends John Carmichael, Jimmy Lindsay, Bill Smith and Ian Muir. In addition, to replace our snowbound judge, Jane Davidson, who was attending with her own family, was hijacked into helping out, as was our very own Committee member Angie MacEachern. Without fail, the adjudicators commented on the very high standard of playing from all competitors – young and not so young!
As the day progressed towards the climax of the competitive part of the Festival later in the afternoon, the number of people attending the event during the day was clearly up on recent years. Without doubt, this helped contribute to the superb atmosphere in and around the upstairs concourse/ bar areas and Main Hall. This year, as last year, was again like Musselburgh Festival of old – lots of people enjoying good music and a friendly chat with friends and acquaintances.
After a slight delay, the Evening Concert (this year attended by more than 175 people) and jointly compered by Jennifer Forrest and John Caskie, got under way. The concert always gives members of the public the opportunity to hear most of the new Champions. This year’s concert included the finals of the Senior Accordion (Traditional) Solo and the Open Fiddle Championship Solo. In both cases, the adjudicators were again forced to work very hard thanks to the exceptionally high standard of playing by all the finalists. John Carmichael and his Band rounded off the concert in great style. Once again, BBC Radio Scotland’s ‘Take the Floor’ team were present to record the concert as a feature for future editions of the programme. Ken Mutch commented to me after the concert, that this year was the best Musselburgh Festival Concert he had ever recorded for the BBC. Musselburgh Festival really does appreciate the continued support of Ken and the BBC Scotland team.
After a short break during which the hall was cleared and made ready for the dance, John Carmichael and his band took the stage for a first class Festival dance – John must have been tired at the end of a long day. This year, around 250 people were at the dance and what a night it was – great music, a superb atmosphere and as I’ve already said to many people, a return to the style and the fun of Musselburgh Festivals gone by. At this point, I would like to thank the many clubs and individuals who donated raffle prizes. There were so many that we were able to run a small raffle during the day as well as having one of the biggest raffles at the dance for many years.
I cannot finish without publicly thanking everyone who made Musselburgh Festival 1998 a huge success. Competitors, Teachers, Parents, appointed adjudicators (+Jane Davidson, Angie MacEachern and Ian Thomson, who all stepped in at the last minute), Jennifer Forrest, John Caskie, Committee members, all of the many volunteer helpers, Robbie Shepherd, Ken Mutch and the BBC Radio Scotland crew, Brunton Hall Box Office and Caretaking staff, Catering and Bar staff and not forgetting the very hard working Festival Secretary, Margaret Macari. To all of you, a very, very big ‘Thank You’.
I hope that everyone who attended Musselburgh Festival in 1998 enjoyed his or her day as much as I enjoyed mine. Here’s to March 1999 (Silver Jubilee) Musselburgh Festival (the first Saturday in March). It is hoped to mark this milestone event with some very special measures – see you there!!
Junior Accordion
Under 12 Traditional Accordion Solo – Pentland Cup
1) Brian MacDonald (Ayr)
2) Tom Orr (Lanark)
3) Elizabeth Stirrat (Paisley)
12 and Under 16 Traditional Solo – Jim Johnstone Cup
1) Scott Stevenson (Kirkcaldy)
2) Liam Stewart (Galston)
3) Ross Fleming (Blairgowrie)
Junior Accordion Solo Pipe Music – Bill Black Cup
1) Fraser Burke (Dundee)
2) Scott Stevenson (Kirkcaldy)
3) Liam Stewart (Galston)
Junior Traditional Duet
1) Graeme & Donna Davidson (Banchory)
2) Fiona & Kirsty Johnson (Currie)
3) Patsy Reid (Knapp) & Ingrid Hammond (Dundee)
Senior Accordion
Senior Traditional Accordion Solo – Clinkscale Cup
1) John Burns (Falkirk)
2) Janette Morrison (Forres)
3) Alexander Lindsay (Amulree)
Senior Accordion Pipe Music Solo – Bill Powrie Memorial Cup
1) Shirley Campbell (Glasgow)
2) Ian Shepherd (Dalkeith)
3) Wendy Godfrey (Perth)
Senior Overall Accordion Champion - The Bobby MacLeod Trophy
John Burns (Falkirk)
Open Buttonkey Accordion Solo – Windygates Trophy
1) Graeme MacKay (Inverness)
2) John Weaks (Glasgow)
3)
Trios – Jimmy Blue Trophy
1) Balgray Trio (Dundee)
2) Alasdair MacCuish (Paisley)
3) Lawside Trio (Dundee)
Bands – Overall Winner - Iain MacPhail Cup
Dana Quinn (Ruthwell)
Band – Rhythm Section - Arthur Easson Memorial Trophy
Dana Quinn (Ruthwell)
Own Composition – Willie Wilson Cup
1) George Burns (Kilsyth)
2) Ian Crichton (Isle of Lewis)
3) Pauline Page (Tillicoultry)
Under 12 Classical Solo – Kelso Cup
1) Elizabeth Stirrat (Paisley)
2) Tom Orr (Lanark)
3) Lorna Allison (Carluke)
Under 14 Classical Solo – Aberdeen Cup
1) Kirsty Findlater (Hamilton)
2) Caitlin O’Donnell (Peebles)
3) John Leiper (Strathaven)
Under 16 Classical Solo – Dundee shield
1) Neal Galbrailth (Paisley)
2) Ross Fleming (Blairgowrie)
3) Robert Allison (Carluke)
Open Classical Solo – Clinkscale Shield
1) Paul Chamberlain (Bowden)
2) David Nisbet (Earlston)
3) Richard Smith (Coalburn)
Under 13 Classical Duet – Beith & District A&F Club Cups (Willie Wilson Memorial Trophies)
1) Craig & Brian MacDonald (Ayr)
2) Tom Orr (Lanark) & Kirsty Johnson (Currie)
3) Lorna Allison (Carluke) & Jonathan Brown (Wishaw)
Under 16 Classical Duet - Alex MacArthur Cups
1) Richard Smith (Coalburn) & Robert Allison (Carluke)
2) Julie Hamilton (Carstairs) & Blair Gardiner (Carnwath)
3) Alastair Dunnet (Tranent) & Alison Carswell (Biggar)
Open Classical Duet – Dunfermline Cup
1) Julie Hamilton (Carstairs) & Blair Gardiner (Carnwath)
2) David Nisbet (Earlston) & Paul Chamberlain (Bowden)
3) Richard Smith (Coalburn) & Robert Allison (Carluke)
Classical Polka
Under 10 Classical Polka Solo – The Todhills Trophy
1)
2)
Under 14 Classical Polka Solo – Newtongrange Shield
1) Richard Smith (Coalburn)
2) Elizabeth Stirrat (Paisley)
3) John Leiper (Strathaven)
Open Classical Polka Solo – Tign-Na-Gorm Cup
1) Richard Smith (Coalburn)
2) David Nisbet (Earlston)
3) Ross Fleming (Blairgowrie)
Fiddle Sections
Under 12 Fiddle Solo – NAAFC Musselburgh Festival Trophy
1) Erin Smith (Aberdeen)
2) Donna Davidson (Banchory)
3) John Thow (Dundee)
Junior Fiddle Solo – MSR – Strathspey and Reel Association Cup
1) Patsy Reid (Knapp)
2) Ingrid Hammond (Dundee)
3) Graeme Davidson (Dundee)
Junior Fiddle Solo – Slow Air – Dougie Welsh Cup
1) Patsy Reid (Knapp)
2) Ingrid Hammond (Dundee)
3) Graeme Davidson (Dundee)
Senior Fiddle Solo – Slow Strathspey, MSR – St. Boswell Cup
1) Stuart Robertson (Alford)
2) Elisabeth McLay (Grangemouth)
3) Dick Rutter (Edinburgh)
Senior Fiddle Solo – Slow Air – Ron Gonella Cup
1) Elisabeth McLay (Grangemouth)
2) Stuart Robertson (Alford)
3) Dick Rutter (Edinburgh)
Open Fiddle Championship – Banchory S&R Society Trophy
1) Patsy Reid (Knapp)
2=) Elisabeth McLay (Grangemouth)
2=) Mhairi Skinner (West Lothian)
Senior Fiddle Overall Champion - The Angus Fitchet Trophy
= Elizabeth McLay (Grangemouth)
= Stuart Robertson (Alford)
Open Fiddle Groups – Lesmahagow Quaich
St John’s Stringers (Dundee)
Youngest Girl Competitor – John McQueen Medal
Erin Smith (Aberdeen)
Youngest Boy Competitor – John McQueen Medal
Jonathan Brown (Wishaw)
John Douglas
by Charlie Todd
1942, the darkest days of the War. Britain stood alone, facing the might of Nazi Germany who held Continental Europe in her iron grasp from the Channel Coast to the gates of Stalingrad. At sea German U boats, operating with apparent impunity from massive concrete lairs on the French coast, were sending one million tons of allied shipping a month to a watery grave at the bottom of the Atlantic and it appeared only a matter of time until Britain was brought to its knees.
Other than that, life in the sleepy hamlet of Lochfoot, near Dumfries, continued pretty much as it had for a hundred years and nowhere perhaps more so than Deanston Farm where the only interruption to routine during the war was the arrival of a new son to Bob and Edith (‘Bell’ to her friends) Douglas whom they names John. Hence one of ‘the best known and respected Borders musicians’ came into the world in those austere times. Fortunately, this was not to reflect on his personality.
John was born into a musical family. Dad was a fiddle and melodeon player while mum played the piano. Schooling was received at Milton Primary School and Dalbeattie and New Abbey Secondaries up to the age of 15 when full-time farming work began.
A year later however, the family uprooted and moved to Lochaber, or more specifically to the ‘Great Glen Cattle Ranch’ the brainchild of eccentric American millionaire Joseph Hobbs. Both Dad and John, during what I suppose could be called their ‘YEE HAA’ period worked as ‘cow pokes’ (my words, not John’s) when under the stern eye of Old Man Hobbs – seriously, horses and all, although when he wasn’t around they just got on with beef farming as any normal Scottish farmer would.
Not surprisingly perhaps the whole venture went bust after about three years and John moved from ‘ranching’ to ‘the plantations’ – the new ones being planted by the Forestry Commission in the Spean Bridge area in this case. Another couple of years down the line and John moved back to Dalbeattie in his native Dumfriesshire as mechanic at Carswell Mill (no, animal feedstuffs this time, not molasses).
The more observant amongst you will have noted a distinct absence of music pertaining to John up to this point and that was because there wasn’t any. He had taken lesions briefly, for three months in fact, from James Mason in Dumfries before moving to Lochaber but although he kept his Hohner Arietta it lay unused. John was therefore in his twenties when local accordionist Graham Barbour had need of a second box player. No one locally was available, so John acquired a Hohner Verdi and reading chords written out by Graham, learned in what would be termed in today’s jargon by ‘on the job training’ eventually branching out with his own band when Graham got married.
His more familiar daytime role as accordion salesman came about purely by chance in 1972. John was visiting Jimmy Clinkscale’s Melrose premises to buy a Domino Morino V when Jimmy mentioned a vacancy for a manager for the music shop they had just acquired from Len Frobisher in Dumfries. Jimmy asked John if he was interested and in due course he got the job (although he declined to say whether he bought the Morino on that first visit or waited for a staff discount!) Eighteen months later however Len bought the business back from Jimmy but John stayed on as Sales Assistant.
A couple of years down the line, around 1976, Len sold out to Thomson’s Music from Glasgow for whom John became Manager. That lasted until 1983 by which time the writing was on the wall so he left to set up his own business in Munches Street. That first business was slightly on the small side John admits or as he puts it “I could stock a Morino IV but not a V”.
Larger premises became available in Great King Street and that’s where you’ll still find him today. For me no visit to Dumfries is complete without a visit to John’s shop. In addition to being well stocked with accordions and keyboards, music, PA and accessories it’s a chance to catch up on the latest happenings, and just in case anyone reading this article is surprised by its apparently flippant tone, be prepared for John’s well developed sense of humour – he takes no prisoners.
John and wife Margaret have two of a family, John and Katrina, both of whom are competent keyboard players but show no signs of making much commercial use of their skills. Being busy running a business and playing regularly in the evenings has its drawbacks of course, and John jokes that like any busy musicians wife, Margaret regularly supplies the family with up-to-date photographs of their dad so that they’ll recognise him if they pass in the street!
In line with many bands in Dumfriesshire John uses a midi accordion, a singer and because of the shortage of drummers, a workstation to provide the rhythm for routine jobs although he covers Country Dancing with a more conventional line-up. On second box he has broadcast with Ian Muir and Max Houliston. Questioned about the highlight of his musical career he said it had to be a week long trip to Ireland in the early ‘80’s as a member of Bill Black’s Band. The ‘gigs’ were good but it’s the ‘dig’s’ that stand out in John’s memory mostly for all the wrong reasons I suspect (like the morning Bill ate three breakfasts).
Bill Smith of Banchory - Obituary
by Brian Cruickshank
It was with great sadness and a sense of loss that all musicians learned of the death of Bill Smith on 27th January, 1998. Entertainment through Scottish fiddle music was the hallmark of Bill’s life and I for one will be forever indebted for the effort that he put in over the past 22 years that I knew him.
In the next few paragraphs I will give you an insight into the type of man Bill was and also give you an idea of the inspiration that he gave everyone who came into contact with him.
As a young lad he showed great interest in fiddle music and he was also an enthusiastic member of the Boys Brigade in Huntly. At 18 Bill was called up to do his National Service in the Royal Air force. On his return he worked for some time as an ironmonger before joining the Liverpool Victoria Friendly society Insurance Co, where he was to spend the rest of his working life in Banchory for over 20 years until his retirement in 1993.
During all these years, Bill together with his wife Margaret, devoted his off-duty hours to encouraging young people – and old – to play fiddle music and also get involved with Scottish music in general. Some of these names which Bill helped to promote are as follows – Graeme Mitchell, Judith Davidson, Angela Smith, Neil Dawson, Lynn Gould, Paul Anderson, Jane Smith, myself and so many more – too many to list.
Through his enthusiasm he helped to promote the Banchory S&R Society and in turn helped to make them a success all over the world. Bill was a great organizer and he regularly arranged tours abroad. Some of the countries visited were France, Germany, Canada, Ireland and even England!
Bill was also a bit of a practical joker, and I will always remember the following incident that happened to me. Not long after joining the Society, I was working away at the cash desk in the bank when the Bank Manager handed me an official looking envelope. I duly opened it to discover Call-Up papers for the Falklands War. I instantly ran to the toilet to try and make sense of this tragic news. When I came out I received a phone call from Bill enquiring if I had been called up for the War yet!! I will not repeat the adjectives that followed on in view of his successful practical joke.
Bill was a great character and his social list of friends was extensive. I remember on Saturday in Banchory after a big charity ceilidh dance when myself, Bill and Graeme Mitchell went down to the Burnett Arms to collect all the instruments from the previous night. As it had been a very successful night and there was a genuine dryness about the mouth, so we decided to head for the lounge bar only to find out that between the three of us we did not have enough money to buy even a half pint of lager. However thanks to Bill and all his friends we left the bar three hours later will all our 62p intact and ourselves feeling rather merry to say the least.
Among some of his accolades, Bill also helped to get the popular ‘Ceol Na Fiddle’ series off the ground with Grampian Television and for the past 20 years he was the main organiser for the Fiddle Spectacular Show in Her Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen. He was also the main organiser of the Keith T.M.S.A. Festival and he was an Honorary Member of the Association.
For all his assistance and promotion of the fiddle music, I would add that Bill was awarded the Paul Harris Fellowship Award by the Rotary Club International in 1989. This in itself tells you a lot about the type of man he was. His work in promoting Scottish fiddle music lives on through the Strathspey & Reel society and also through his family, and all whom he encouraged over many happy years.
Thanks again for the life of Bill Smith.
Jim 'Broon'
by Joan & Jimmy Blue
They came from a’ the airts to Dunbarney Church in Bridge of Earn to remember and to give thanksgiving for the life of Jim Broon, as he was known. He touched so many lives, not only with his fiddle playing, but with his love of life, his sense of fun, his endless ploys, his ideas. And he did have great ideas. Who else, when being in charge of a Council ‘coup’ would dig out part of the banking and rear pigs! He had to give this up when, on his way to the market with a pig in the back seat of the car, he met his boss in Perth. And then with equipment begged or borrowed and having picked up an old baler, he started a paper collection business. He never turned folk away and gave work to quite a number of men who were unable to get work elsewhere – which may be the reason his business did not prosper as it should. While working on the ‘coup’ he arrived at our house one day with a number of storage heaters (in the days before central heating) and asked if we could use them? The heavy, brick filled heaters were carted bodily into the house and we started feeding the shilling meter. An hour and a few shillings later, Jimmy assured Jimmy Broon “what’s a few bob as long as you’re warm?” However, three hours later, having fed in £5, the storage heaters were carted bodily out again and back to the coup.
On a fun-filled touring holiday of the Highlands with Jim and his smashing wife, June, who died five years ago, we were driving through thick fog on the way to Wick when Jim suddenly started reciting “January brings the snow, makes your feet and fingers glow….” From beginning to end. On that same trip we stopped to read the inscription on a well in a remote part of Sutherland. It had been erected by the Road Surveyor “…in appreciation for the hospitality of the people in the area.” Jim immediately said “Aye, if he hadne had so much hospitality, maybe the roads would have been a lot straighter.”
Jim never ceased to surprise us. One night when driving home from a gig he gave us the whole of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, word perfect. When Jimmy was ceilidhing at Jim’s home in Kintillo with Bill Powrie and some other cronies one night, Jim produced a cooked chicken for supper. After it had been enjoyed, someone asked where it had come from, to be told “I got it aff the coup.” He was the only musician who could go to play at a dance at Aberfeldy on a Friday night and not get back till Tuesday! And if there was a dram or a ceilidh going, he was lucky if he got back on Tuesday!
We could fill a book with our memories of Jim Broon and we know that everyone who met his has stories to tell of his exploits. What a character – and how much we shall all miss him.
The Story behind the Tune Title
Following on from last month’s lead article we’ll take some of Pipe Major G. S. McLennan’s tunes this month.
The Little Cascade (Reel) – there are two versions of how the title came about. The first, believed by the late Captain D. R. MacLennan, is that one evening G. S. and his friend P/M James Robertson of Banff, went out on the town. They returned to Robertson’s quarters in the Gordon’s Depot (Castlehill Barracks) for a final dram and in the kitchen where they were sitting was a tap with an Army tin basin below it. The tap was dripping and G. S. told Robertson to be quiet as he could hear music. Robbie scoffed at his friend but at his insistence was silent and G. S. wrote down the theme notes for a tune which was to be ‘The Little Cascade’.
The second story is that in the early 1920’s sons George and John McLennan were playing in the living room of their home when their father told them to be quiet and listen to the ‘music’. He began to write what he heard and pointed out to his sons the changing time of the drips from the tap into the porcelain sink in the scullery.
King George V’s Army – having heard the G. S. composition ‘Kitchener’s Army’, a 6/8 march written in 1915 for the new Volunteer Army, the ‘old sweats’ asked him for a tune to commemorate their efforts up to that point in the war. G. S. was having a nap on his bunk and heard the drummers practising a beating for the tune ‘East Neuk of Fife’ and he composed this new tune to suit the beating he heard.
The Braemar Gathering – this tune was written by G. S. in France in 1918. He had intended playing it when ‘A’ Company of the 1st Battalion crossed the German frontier in 1918 but the C.O. asked for ‘Hielan’ Laddie’, the Regimental March at that time. Fast forward to 1950 when the Braemar Royal Highland Society held a competition and G. S.’s tune was submitted by his half-brother (G. S. having himself died in 1929) and was picked from the 165 tunes entered. G. S.’s son played it on 7th September, 1950, at the Braemar Games before H.M. George VI.
Mrs MacPherson of Inveran – one of G. S.’s close friends was Angus MacPherson of Inveran who was an excellent piper and who ran an hotel at Inveran. The tune was in honour of Angus’s wife Alice, who came from Skye.
Doornkop (Jig) – Max Houliston has this tune in a set. It commemorates the action of the 1st Battalion, the Gordon Highlanders at Doornkop, south Africa on 29th May, 1900 during the 2nd Boer War.
Captain E. B. B. Towse V.C. (6/8 march) – composed in honour of a great Gordon Hghlander who was blinded for life when he won his V.C. at Mount Thaba, South Africa on 30th June, 1900. Captain Towse with 12 men moved up to take a position on the Mount and a force of 150 Boers attempted to seize the same plateau, neither party seeing the other until they were 100m yards apart. Towse was called upon to surrender and giving a sharp reply he and his men vigorously attacked the enemy, driving them off. Towse was severely wounded, both eyes being shattered and he was blinded for life. Later he became Captain Sir Beachcroft Towse V.C., C.B.E. being knighted for his services to the blind during the First World War.
Composers Corner
John Philip Sousa (6/11/1854 – 6/3/1932)
by Lester S. Levy, Baltimore, Md
Throughout the years, particular musical groups, or occasionally individual performers, have captured the hearts of the American public. Our present youth, who most recently have related to the newer varieties of sound produced by combinations like the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead and the Beach Boys, were only a short while back shouting at the bland ballads of The Beatles or swooning over the gyrations of Elvis Presley. Their parents were willing to travel many miles for the privilege of listening to and dancing to, the strains of bands under the leadership of Benny Goodman and Paul Whitemen.
But for the men and women and children of the turn-of the-century era there was one name only that had universal appeal in the field of music – John Philip Sousa. Sousa was a cult – a joyous cult.
From 1880 – when, at the age of 26, he was appointed leader of the United States Marina Band – to 1919, when he left the United States Navy at the end of World War 1, he was the symbol of all that was thrilling in American music. Between his devotion to these two Government services, there was a long and honourable career as bandmaster to the American public and as composer of some of the most stirring music ever written.
Sousa’s father was of Portuguese ancestry; his mother was German, but there was nothing old-worldly about either their son or his melodic genius. Born in Washington, in 1854, he started to master the violin at the age of seven and in six years had progressed to the point where he was offered a position with a band attached to a circus. Sousa’s father circumvented this dubious form of employment by arranging to enlist him in the Marine Band as an apprentice.
Five years with the Marines was enough for the would-be conductor. He managed to withdraw from its band and within months was leading a small traveling orchestra and indulging in his first attempts at composition. At twenty, he was finding music publishers willing to accept his material which, at the outset, consisted of songs and miscellaneous pieces, with an occasional attempt at light opera. The marches – the works which would win him a permanent place in American musical history – came a bit later on.
Once again the Marine Band lured him back into Government service – this time as bandmaster, a position which he filled under 5 Presidents. It was during this period, when Sousa’s band was performing at the most important Government functions that the earliest of his great marches were presented to the public.
His first real hit came in 1886. It was ‘The Gladiator’, a march which was to set the style for the many successful works to follow. From coast to coast, bands included it in their repertoire. At one big parade in Philadelphia, seventeen marching bands were heard playing ‘The Gladiator’.
Within the next few years, while Sousa was still in his early thirties, he turned out many of his greatest marches – ‘Semper Fidelis’, the stirring march adopted by the Marine Corps, ‘The High School Cadets’, ‘The Washington Post’.
A march dedicated to a newspaper was a fanciful idea and it came about because of the newspaper’s interest in encouraging literary expression in the public schools. In 1889 the Post staged a contest and offered prizes for the best essays written by pupils and it arranged to award the prizes in the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution, where the participants and visitors were to be entertained by musical selections by the Marine Band. Several days before the event, one of the proprietors pf the Post asked Sousa to write a march in celebration of the contest. Sousa was delighted to oblige. ‘The Washington Post March’, performed for the first time on June 15, 1889, before twenty thousand children and their parents and friends, proved to be one of the half-dozen greatest that Souza ever wrote.
At this time the dancing masters of the country were endeavouring to introduce a new ballroom dance which they called the ‘two-step’ and they agreed that ‘The Washington Post’ was the tune which would ensure the new dance’s popularity! The success of the two-step was assured forthwith. On the ballroom floor the waltz was soon relegated to second place.
Like another famous American composer, Stephen Foster, young Sousa was no businessman when it came to disposing of his wares. Some of his finest early marches were sole to Harry Coleman, a shrewd Philadelphia publisher, for $35 apiece. The enormous profits which resulted brought Sousa not an extra penny, but enabled Coleman to build reed and brass instrument factories from the proceeds of the sale of Sousa marches.
As leader of the Marine Band, Sousa was hardly in the front rank of well-to-do Americans. His salary was in the region of $1,500 a year. Small wonder that when he was offered a fourfold increase in salary and a profit-sharing arrangement if he would conduct a band of his own, he was unable to resist and for the second time in his life he decided to sever his connection with the United States Government. So, in 1892, Sousa’s resignation as leader of the Marine Band was accepted with regret, and he set about organizing his own great band. His prestige attracted the finest individual performers among the country’s brass and woodwind instrumentalists. The band was a leading attraction at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. During that same year it enjoyed the unusual distinction of performing with Walter Damrosch and the New York Philharmonic Symphony in Carnegie Hall.
And now Sousa began to realise that his compositions had enormous potential value. The year after the birth of his new band, he signed a contract with the published John Church of Cincinnati in which he was guaranteed the usual royalties to which a composer is entitled. One of the first marches composed after this arrangement had been entered into was ‘The Liberty Bell’, which within a few years netted Sousa $35,000. On other later marches his income was many times that amount.
The greatest of Sousa’s marches was conceived late in 1896 as he was on a homeward trip after a European vacation. As Sousa paced the deck (he wrote in his autobiography, Marching Along) he “began to sense the rhythmic beat of a band playing within my brain….Throughout the voyage, that imaginary band continued to unfold the same themes, echoing the most distinct melody. I did not transfer a note of that music to paper while I was on the steamer, but when we reached shore I set down the measures that my brain-band had been playing for me”.
The composition born to Sousa on shipboard was ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’, probably the greatest and most widely performed popular march ever written. No important parade today would be complete without a rendition of this exciting work.
Back and forth across the country went Sousa and his trombonists, bassoonists, French-horn players, trumpeters, clarinetists, tuba players, saxophonists, oboists, cornetists and drummers. The largest horn was a helicon tuba which wound round the musician’s body, with a huge bell which violently blared the music ahead of other instrumentalists. Sousa disliked this sound effect and designed a great horn with an upright bell, which diffused the tone to his satisfaction. The new instrument was given the name ‘Sousaphone’ by its manufacturer, the Wurlitzer Company and it is still an integral part of a brass band.
Sousa was not satisfied to confine his concerts to the United States. The band toured Europe four times and in 1911 they took an ambitious trip around the world, bringing the great marches to South Africa and Australia, To New Zealand and the Fiji Islands and Hawaii, where, Sousa relates, he was decked with so many leis that his ears were hidden.
Sousa’s friends and admirers included people famous in many fields. They ranged from Bob Fitzsimmons and John L. Sullivan, the prizefighters, to Admiral George Dewey, the hero of the Spanish-American War, to King Edward VII of England, to Thomas A. Edison. When Leopold Stokowski, who later would become maestro of the Philadelphia Orchestra, first arrived in the United States, he attended a concert of Sousa’s at New York’s Hippodrome. Later, Stokowski said that the music swept him off his feat. The rhythm of Sousa stirred him, he recognised it as unique. From that time on, said Stokowski, he always wanted to meet ‘that musician with the pirate’s beard’.
The beard was an important part of Sousa’s physiognomy until he joined the Navy upon America’s entrance into World War 1 in 1917. A short stocky man, his appearance might have been undistinguished had it not been for the trip spade beard which, appearing above the high collar of the Marine dress uniform, seemed to enhance his martial image. During the 25 year period when the band was Sousa’s own and not the Marine’s or the Navy’s, the beard was, in a way, Sousa’s personal trademark. Always neat, with never a hair out of place, it was of a piece with his music, meticulous, flawless, clean-cut. Yet he removed it without a moment’s hesitation soon after he joined the Navy. If it had been something of an affectation throughout the years, it had no place during wartime. From 1917 on, the trim gray moustache sufficed to compliment Sousa’s dignified bearing and polished showmanship.
Every Sousa march has a unique personality and every Sousa far has his own favourites from among the more than one hundred marches that Sousa composed during his lifetime. ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’ will be at the top of most lists and close behind will come ‘Semper Fidelis’ and ‘The Washington Post’ and the ‘Manhattan Beach’ and ‘The High School Cadets’ and ‘El Capitan’, the unforgettable melody from his light opera of that name.
Record Review
Shetlands Young Heritage – Bridging the Gap – SYHCD002
Abbey Newton (Cello) - Crossing to Scotland – Kilburne Records CUL110D
Book Review
The Jimmy Shand Story by Ian Cameron – Scottish Cultural Press
Letters to the Editor
Take the Floor – Saturdays at 6.30pm with Robbie Shepherd
4th Apr 98 – Ian Muir SDB
11th Apr 98 – George Stirrat SDB
18th Apr 98 – Jennifer Forrest SDB
25th Apr 98 – OB McTavish’s Kitchen, Oban – Hector McFadyen SDB and Guests
2nd May 98 – Jim Lindsay SDB
9th May 98 – Michael Garvin SDB
16th May 98 – Kenny Thomson SDB
23rd May 98 – OB (tbc)
30th May 98 – Duncan Black SDB
6th June 98 – Wayne Robertson SDB
13th June 98 – Alistair Hunter SDB
20th June 98 – tbc
27th June 98 – OB (tbc)
CLUB DIARY
Aberdeen (Dee Motel) – 28th Apr 98 – Ian Muir Trio
Alnwick (White Swan Hotel) – members only 8th Apr 98 – Wayne Robertson & Gill Simpson
Annan (St Andrew’s Social Club) - 19th Apr 98 – Jock Borthwick SDB
Arbroath (Viewfield Hotel) - 5th Apr 98 – Ian Muir Trio
Armadale (Masonic Hall) – 2nd Apr 98 – Sandy Legget SDB
Ayr (Gartferry Hotel) – 5th Apr 98 – William Bradley SDB
Balloch (St. Kessog’s Hall) – 19th Apr 98 – Graeme Mitchell SDB
Banchory (Burnett Arms Hotel) – 27th Apr 98 – Duncan Black SDB
Banff & District (Banff Springs Hotel) – 22nd Apr 98 – Kathleen, Ian, Dougie & Stevie
Beith & District (Hotel de Croft, Dalry) – 20th Apr 98 – Sandy Nixon SDB
Belford (Community Club) – 30th Apr 98 – David Vernon
Biggar (Municipal Hall) – 12th Apr 98 – Robin Brock SDB
Blairgowrie (Moorfield Hotel) - 14th Apr 98 – Tom Alexander
Bromley (Trinity United Reform Church) - 21st Apr 98 - Amarylis
Button Key (Windygates Institute) – 9th Apr 98 – Donal Ring Irish Night
Campbeltown (Royal or Argyll Hotel) - tbc
Campsie (Glazert House Hotel) - 7th Apr 98 – John Carmichael SDB
Carlisle (Border Regiment Club, Carlisle Castle) - 2nd Apr 98 – Graham Barbour
Castle Douglas (Ernespie House Hotel) – 21st Apr 98 – Johnny Duncan
Coalburn (Miners’ Welfare) - 16th Apr 98 – John Douglas SDB
Crathes (Crathes Hall, Banchory) -
Crieff & District (Arduthie Hotel) 2nd Apr 98 – James Coutts SDB
Dalriada (Argyll Arms Hotel, Lochgilphead) 21st Apr 98 - tbc
Dingwall (National Hotel) – 1st Apr 98 – Roger Donson SDB
Dunblane (Westlands Hotel) – 21st Apr 98 – Charlie Kirkpatrick Trio
Dunfermline (Headwell Bowling Club) – 14th Apr 98 – Club night
Dunoon & Cowal (McColl’s Hotel) tbc
East Kilbride (Sweepers, Cambuslang) –
Ellon (Station Hotel) – 21st apr 98 – Davie Stewart & Rab Smillie
Fintry (Fintry Sports Centre) – 28th Apr 98 – Charlie Kirkpatrick Trio
Forfar (Plough Inn) - 26th Apr 98 – Glencraig SDB
Forres (Brig Motel) – 8th Apr 98 – West Telferton Cale SDB
Fort William (Alexandra Hotel) –
Galashiels (Abbotsford Arms Hotel) – 2nd Apr 98 - tbc
Galston (Barr Castle Social Club) –
Glendale (Black Bull Hotel – Wooler) – 16th Apr 98 – Jim & Jean McConnachie +AGM
Glenfarg (Lomond Hotel) - 1st Apr 98 – Gordon Pattullo
Glenrothes (Victoria Hall, Coaltown of Balgownie) - 28th Apr 98 - tbc
Gretna (Halcrow Stadium) - 15th Apr 98 – Charlie Kirkpatrick Trio
Highland (Drumossie Hotel) – 20th Apr 98 – Iain Anderson (Gartocharn)
Inveraray (Loch Fyne Hotel) - 7th Apr 98 – Bobby Harvey & Ivor Britton
Islay (White Hart Hotel) -
Isle of Skye – (The Royal Hotel, Portree) - 2nd Apr 98 – Jock Fraser & Lindsay Weir
Islesteps (The Embassy Hotel) – 7th Apr 98 – James Coutts SDB
Kelso (Ednam House Hotel) – 29th Apr 98 – Graham Barbour
Kintore (Torryburn Hotel) – 1st Apr 98 - tbc
Lanark (Masonic Hall) - 23rd Apr 98 - tbc
Langholm (Crown Hotel) –
Lesmahagow (Masonic Hall) – 9th Apr 98 – Lothian SDB
Lewis & Harris (Stornoway Legion) - 2nd Apr 98 – Donnie & Diane
Livingston (Cairn Hotel) - 21st apr 98 – Strathmore Sound
Lockerbie (Queen’s Hotel) - 28th Apr 98 – Alan Gardiner Duo
Mauchline (Sorn Village Hall)
Montrose (Park Hotel) – 1st Apr 98 – Dick Black Band
Muirhead (Belmont Arms, Meigle) - 15th Apr 98 – local artistes
Newtongrange (Dean Tavern) – 12th Apr 98 - Competitions
North East (Royal British Legion, Keith) – 7th Apr 98 – Lynne Christie SDB
Oban (McTavish’s Kitchen) – 2nd Apr 98 – Roger Dobson SDB
Orkney (Ayre Hotel, Kirkwall) –
Peebles (Green Tree Hotel) – 30th Apr 98 – Webster Craig SDB
Perth (Salutation Hotel) – 28th Apr 98 – Addie Harper Jnr Band
Premier NI (Camlin Function Rooms) - 7th Apr 98 - tbc
Reading Fiddlers (Piggot School) -
Renfrew (Masonic Hall, Broadloan) – 14th Apr 98 – William Bradley SDB
Rothbury (Queen’s Head) - 2nd Apr 98 – Carlyle Family Band
Selkirk (Cricket Club) -
Shetland (Shetland Hotel, Lerwick) - 9th Apr 98 – David Cunningham Jnr SDB
Stirling (Terraces Hotel) - 12th Apr 98 – Fraser McGlynn Duo
Sutherland (Rogart Hall) - tbc
Thornhill (Masonic Hall) - 8th Apr 98 – Gordon Pattullo
Thurso (Pentland Hotel) – 6th Apr 98 – Wyris Sound
Turriff (Royal Oak Hotel) – 2nd Apr 98 – Dick Black
Tynedale (Hexham Ex Service Club) – 7th Apr 98 - tbc
Wick (McKay’s Hotel) – 7th Apr 98 – West Telferton Cale SDB
Yarrow (Gordon Arms) - 15th Apr 98 – David Wilson SDB
THERE WERE CLUB REPORTS FROM :-
1. Aberdeen
2. Alnwick
3. Annan
4. Arbroath
5. Balloch
6. Banchory
7. Banff & District
8. Beith & District
9. Biggar
10. Bromley
11. Button Key
12. Campsie
13. Castle Douglas
14. Coalburn
15. Crieff & District
16. Dingwall & District
17. Dunblane
18. Dunfermline & District
19. Dunoon & Cowal
20. East Kilbride
21. Fintry
22. Forfar
23. Forres
24. Galashiels
25. Galston
26. Glendale
27. Glenrothes & District
28. Gretna
29. Highland
30. Inveraray & District
31. Isle of Skye
32. Kintore
33. Ladybank
34. Lanark
35. Lesmahagow
36. Livingston
37. Lockerbie
38. Montrose
39. Muirhead
40. Newtongrange
41. North East
42. Oban
43. Peebles
44. Perth
45. Renfrew
46. Shetland
47. Stirling
48. Thornhill
49. Thurso
50. Turriff
51. Tynedale
52. Wick
53. Yarrow
CLUB DIRECTORY AS AT SEPT 1997
(Clubs didn’t necessarily notify the Assoc when they closed so the following may not be entirely correct. Only the clubs submitting the reports or in the Club Diary above were definitely open.)
1. Aberdeen A&F Club (1975 – present)
2. Alnwick A&F Club (Aug 1975 – present)
3. Annan A&F Club (joined Assoc in 1996 but started 1985 – present)
4. Arbroath A&F Club (1991? – present)
5. Armadale A&F Club (Oct 1978? or 80) originally called Bathgate Club (for 2 months) Closed
6. Ayr A&F Club (Nov 1983 – per Nov 83 edition) Closed
7. Balloch A&F Club (Sept 1972 – per January 1978 issue – present)
8. Banchory A&F Club (1978 – present)
9. Banff & District A&F Club (Oct 1973 – present)
10. Beith & District A&F Club (Sept 1972 – per first edition – present)
11. Belford A&F Club (joined Sept 1982)
12. Biggar A&F Club (Oct 1974 – present)
13. Blairgowrie A&F Club (
14. Bromley A&F Club
15. Button Key A&F Club (
16. Campbeltown A&F Club (
17. Campsie A&F Club (Nov 95 – present)
18. Carlisle A&F Club (joined Sept 1993 -
19. Castle Douglas A&F Club (c Sept 1980 – present)
20. Coalburn A&F Club (
21. Crieff A&F Club (cSept 1981)
22. Dalriada A&F Club (Feb 1981)
23. Dingwall & District A&F Club (May 1979 – per first report)
24. Dunblane & District A&F Club (1971 – present)
25. Dunfermline & District A&F Club (1974 – per first edition)
26. Dunoon & Cowal A&F Club (
27. East Kilbride A&F Club (Sept 1980)
28. Ellon A&F Club (
29. Etterick & Yarrow (Jan 1989 -
30. Fintry A&F Club (Dec 1972 – reformed Jan 1980 – present)
31. Forfar A&F Club (
32. Forres A&F Club (Jan 1978)
33. Fort William A&F Club (21st Oct 1980 – per Dec 1980 B&F)
34. Galashiels A&F Club (joined Sept 1982 - present)
35. Galston A&F Club (Oct 1969 – per first edition – closed March 2006)
36. Glendale Accordion Club (Jan 1973)
37. Glenfarg A&F Club (formed 1988 joined Assoc Mar 95 -
38. Glenrothes A&F Club (Mar 93?
39. Gretna A&F Club (1991) Known as North Cumbria A&F Club previously (originally called Gretna when started in June 1966 but later had to move to venues in the North of England and changed name. No breaks in the continuity of the Club)
40. Highland A&F Club (Inverness) (Nov 1973 – present)
41. Inveraray A&F Club (Feb 1991 - present)
42. Islay A&F Club (23 Apr 93 -
43. Islesteps A&F Club (Jan 1981 – present – n.b. evolved from the original Dumfries Club)
44. Isle of Skye A&F Club (June 1983 – present)
45. Kelso A&F Club (May 1976 – present)
46. Kintore A&F Club (
47. Ladybank A&F Club (joined Apr 98 but formed
48. Lanark A&F Club (joined Sept 96 – present)
49. Langholm A&F Club (Oct 1967 - present)
50. Lesmahagow A&F Club (Nov 1979 – closed May 2005)
51. Lewis & Harris A&F Club (Aug 1994 -
52. Livingston A&F Club (Sept 1973 – present)
53. Lockerbie A&F Club (Nov 1973 - present)
54. Mauchline A&F Club (Sept 1983 - present)
55. Montrose A&F Club (joined Sept 1982 - present)
56. Muirhead A&F Club (Dec 1994 -
57. Newtongrange A&F Club (joined Sept 1977 - present)
58. North East A&F Club aka Keith A&FC (Sept 1971 - present)
59. Oban A&F Club (Nov 1975 - present)
60. Orkney A&F Club (Mar 1978 - present)
61. Peebles A&F Club (26 Nov 1981 - present)
62. Perth & District A&F Club (Aug 1970 - present)
63. Premier A&F Club NI (April 1980)
64. Renfrew A&F Club (1984 -
65. Rothbury Accordion Club (7th Feb 1974) orig called Coquetdale
66. Reading Scottish Fiddlers (cMarch 1997
67. Selkirk A&F Club (
68. Shetland A&F Club (Sept 1978 - present)
69. Stirling A&F Club (Oct 1991 - )
70. Sutherland A&F Club (
71. Thornhill A&F Club (joined Oct 1983 – see Nov 83 edition – closed April 2014)
72. Thurso A&F Club (Oct 1981 - present)
73. Turriff A&F Club (March 1982 - present)
74. Tynedale A&F Club (Nov 1980 - present)
75. Vancouver
76. Wick A&F Club (Oct 1975 - present)
Not on official list at the start of the season (closed, did not renew membership or omitted in error?)
77. Acharacle & District A&F Club (cMay 1988)
78. Bonchester Accordion Club (Closed?)
79. Bridge of Allan (Walmer) A&F Club (Walmer Hotel, Bridge of Allan) (c March 1982)
80. Brigmill A&F Club (Oct 1990) Closed
81. Buchan A&F Club
82. Callander A&F Club (
83. Campbeltown & District A&F Club (c Dec 1980)
84. Cleland (cNov 1981 – March 1985) originally called Drumpellier A&F Club (for 2 months)
85. Club Accord
86. Coquetdale A&F Club (Feb 1974 or c1976/77 – 1981/2? – became Rothbury?)
87. Coupar Angus A&F Club (cSept 1978 - ?)
88. Cumnock A&F Club (October 1976 - forced to close cDec 1982 - see Jan 83 Editorial)
89. Denny & Dunipace A&F Club (Feb 1981)
90. Derwentside A&F Club
91. Dornoch A&F Club (first mention in directory 1986)
92. Dumfries Accordion Club (Oughtons) (April 1965 at the Hole in the Wa’)
93. Dunbar Cement Works A&F Club (Closed?)
94. Dundee & District A&F Club (1970? – 1995?)
95. Edinburgh A&F Club (Apr 1981) prev called Chrissie Leatham A&F Club (Oct 1980)
96. Falkirk A&F Club (Sept 1978 - )
97. Gorebridge (cNov 1981) originally called Arniston A&F Club (for 2 months)
98. Greenhead Accordion Club (on the A69 between Brampton and Haltwistle)
99. Kirriemuir A&F Club (cSept 1981)
100. M.A.F.I.A. (1966 – 1993?)
101. Monklands A&F Club (Nov 1978 – closed cApril 1983)
102. Morecambe A&F Club (joined Sept 1982)
103. Mull A&F Club
104. Newcastleton Accordion Club
105. New Cumnock A&F Club (cMarch 1979)
106. Newton St Boswells Accordion Club (17th Oct 1972 see Apr 1984 obituary for Angus Park)
107. Ormiston Miners’ Welfare Society A&F Club (closed April 1992 – per Sept Editorial)
108. Renfrew A&F Club (original club 1974/5 lapsed after a few years then again in 1984)
109. Straiton Accordion Club (c1968 – closed March 1979)
110. Stranraer & District Accordion Club (1974 – per first edition)
111. Torthorwald A&F Club (near Dumfries)
112. Tranent A&F Club
113. Walmer (Bridge of Allan) A&F Club
114. Wellbank A&F Club
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