Jimmy Blue – Scottish Accordionist & Bandleader
(3rd September, 1929 – 7th December, 1999
by Jack Cooper
Forgandenny Village Church in Perthshire was packed for the funeral service of Jimmy Blue which was relayed to the further 200 standing outside in the pouring rain. Robbie Shepherd of BBC Scotland read a poem written by Andy Stewart for Jimmy some years ago, a most appropriate tribute, and Jimmy’s wife, Joan, played the organ for the ceremony, concluding with ‘The Dark Island’, the haunting melody which he made known all over the world.
Born in Newton Mearns, Jimmy was 6 months old when his family moved to Rosneath Castle where his father was a gardener for Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll.
Jimmy was 14 when he bought his first accordion for £6, a Madella piano accordion. He had no formal tuition but having bought instruction booklets ‘The Mathis Method’ he labouriously worked at learning to play the box, even learning how to read and write music. He was enthralled by the playing of Will Starr and Jimmy Shand on the ‘wireless’ and discovered from neighbours, the Dalrymple family, that the magic sound was produced from a British Chromatic. The piano accordion was quickly traded in. Incidentally, one of the neighbouring family of box players was Bob Dalrymple, 5-row player, who performed many times at Fintry Accordion Club and others in that area and one of whose pupils was Gordon Shand.
In 1946 Jimmy acquired a 2-row 36 bass L’Organola and went back to the drawing board, this time with a ‘Willie Hannah’ tutor, finally graduating to a 3-row. He joined the Dalrymple family band and had his first experiences of playing at ‘gigs’. Jimmy had left school at 13 and, while helping his father who was now running his own market garden, he also worked at Rahane, a hill farm looking down on the Gareloch. He had many stories of the war years when the Americans were based close by. The U.S. boys were generous to the locals and Jimmy’s mother, embarrassed by a surfeit of butter when other families were rationed to 2 ounces per week, buried pounds of it in their garden! He remembered clearly standing outside their home looking with terror towards Greenock and Gourock, watching the planes and glow in the sky and hearing the terrible noise as Clydebank was bombed. Many of the stories he related were about his father’s Home Guard experiences – or L.D.V. as they were known in the early days. This stood for Local Defence Volunteers but was popularly known as ‘Look, Dook and Vanish’!
Meanwhile, Jimmy was working with horses for the Macintyre family. He loved his horses but was desperate to get into tractors and in the late forties the family decided on a move. Jimmy pressed very hard for Perthshire as this was where the music was – the Powrie Band, the Hawthorne, Adam Rennie, and Shand was in Fife, the next County! So in 1949 the family moved to a farm in Dunning and very soon Jimmy was playing with Hamish McLaren’s Band, from Auchterarder. It was through a two-band dance there that Jimmy met piano-accordionist, Mickie Ainsworth, and remarkably soon, as accordion duettists, they were broadcasting and making records. Their ‘The High Level’ still stands as one of the best recordings of this popular tune. Broadcasts with the BBC included spots in ‘Children’s Hour’, ‘Midday Music Hall’ and even ‘Starlight Serenade’ as well as many regular slots in ‘Scottish Magazine’, an overseas programme for exiled Scots.
Jimmy was the first All Scotland Champion in Bill Wilkie’s Accordion Festival in 1950, playing ‘Cameron Highlanders’, ’Fiddler’s Joy’ and ‘The Mason’s Apron’ – how often he compared his winning set with the finger numbing-technology and difficulty of the sets played by competitors at the Festivals he was to adjudicate many years later. Jimmy regained the cupin 1952, the year he became engaged to the pianist in Bill Wilkie’s Accordion Orchestra, Joan McNeill, whom he had met when accompanying Mickie to band practices. In September of that year Jimmy and Joan were asked to play at Ian Powrie’s wedding – playing at a Powrie wedding !!! Rehearsals and nerves went hand in hand but the performance, which must have been an informal audition, must have pleased because when Bill Powrie went to do his National Service in December of that year, Jimmy was invited to join Ian’s well known band. Ian and Jimmy were both working on farms, one on each side of the Earn Valley, while travelling to play at dances all over the country and broadcasting as often as once a month.
Then came television when ‘The Kilt is My Delight’ was enjoyed by all who had television sets. Having married Joan in 1955, Jimmy was now working at Netherholm Farm as a tractor driver, his father looking after the dairy. Many a morning he got home from a dance in time, to quote Norrie Williams in a previous issue, “to ca’in the neep chopper wi’ dinner suit and bow tie”.
In 1961 Andy Stewart, whose ‘Scottish soldier’ had topped the ‘Hit Parade’, was offered a summer-season of 19 weeks at Glasgow Empire and asked Ian Powrie’s Band to take part in the show. After much heart-searching – and a lot of encouragement from Joan – the decision was taken to turn professional, a risky business as there were now two young daughters to provide for. However, with dances and stage shows during the winter and an equally successful Empire season in 1962, the wolf was kept from the door. In 1963 the Andy Stewart Show with the Ian Powrie Band took off for Australia and New Zealand for thirteen weeks. The former tractorman was now becoming a world traveller and life had changed considerably. No more getting up on a frosty morning to shaw neeps or gather stones. The ‘year of the typhoid’, 1964, saw the company in H.M. Theatre, Aberdeen, packing in the crowds despite the fear of an epidemic. Andy’s story at that time was that “….only in Aberdeen could you have 264 cases of typhoid out of a tin of corned beef – because only Aberdonians could get 264 slices out of one tin!” The audiences loved it. In 1966 another tour took the company back to New Zealand and Australia and, on their return, towards the end of another successful Aberdeen season, Ian Powrie broke the news that he was emigrating to set up a business with Andy’s manager, Max Kay, in Australia. Jimmy came home from Aberdeen that night in a state of shock – but, after a completely sleepless night, by morning Joan had convinced him that he should take over the band and try to make it under his own name. This he did and very successfully too, continuing to broadcast and making several LPs.
As Andy Stewart’s backing band, he toured Ireland, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia, playing solo in the Carnagie Hall and in the Sydney Stadium and Opera House. The Band took part in many television programmes, a Grampian series and, even more successfully, ‘Scotch Corner’ produced by S.T.V. which went out on nationwide television with the band accompanying guest artistes such as Dana, Rolf Harris, Lulu, George Hamilton IV, Julie Felix and many others. Rolf Harris, who played piano accordion himself, was fascinated by the button-box and Jimmy became the proud possessor of a personal caricature of himself signed by the Australian entertainer.
Just before a long summer season in Blackpool, the Jimmy Blue Band had a wonderful experience when they took part in the film ‘Country Dance’ starring Peter O’Toole, Susannah Your and Brian Blessed. The music was recorded at Shepperton Studios in London and filming was done in Co. Wicklow. The film is shown often on Sky Television under the name ‘Brotherly Love’. During the dance in the film, the band played Jimmy’s tune ‘Bonnie Lass of Scotland’ (for which Andy had written words) and, when attending the premiere of the film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Joan and Jimmy got a great thrill when they heard an orchestral arrangement of his tune being played the morning after ‘the dance’. Jimmy and Andy co-operated on many songs, Andy giving him the words and Jimmy sitting at the piano (yes, the piano) working out tunes to suit the words. Among his favourites were ‘The Glens of Angus’ and ‘Little Girl’.
In 1977, with both daughters now married, he decided he had had enough of hotel rooms throughout the world and took on a season playing solo at ‘Pipers’, a tourist spot in Lothian Road, Edinburgh. In November of that year he became head gardener / groundsman at Kilgraston, an independent girls’ boarding school in Bridge of Earn where Joan had been Secretary since 1970. When he took over, the walled garden grew nothing but turnips, rhubarb and weeds and the grounds were sadly overgrown. Jimmy set to and not only made the lawns and parklands beautiful, but made the walled garden so productive of flowers, fruit and vegetables that, as well as supplying the school, he held a shop every week to which the villagers came to buy their produce. Jimmy got the greatest satidfaction out of making Kilgraston beautiful and did this for 15 years. However, having taken on this job, he was re-engaged at ‘Pipers’ for the 1978 season. He worked at Kilgraston during the day, came home, had dinner, slept, bathed and set off for Edinburgh SEVEN NIGHTS PER WEEK for thirty weeks! No wonder he eventually had hard surgery! Jimmy had always pushed himself to the limits. One year, he and the band, with Andy, did two shows at Dundee Palace, then piled into the Band bus – yes, Andy as well – and Jimmy drove to London where they rehearsed at the Albert Hall and performed in the ‘The Duncan Macrae Memorial Show’. Right after the show Jimmy was behind the wheel again and drove straight back to Dundee where they did another two shows before Jimmy got home to bed!
After another short season in ‘Pipers’ in 1979, Jimmy was ‘back on the road’ playing at dances with Joan on piano, Angus Fitchet on fiddle and Jackie Cooper on drums. What great nights they were, meeting so many enthusiastic and lovely people. In 1970 having ‘guested’ at Gretna Accordion Club, he suggested starting one in Perth which was duly done with great success. Other Clubs started up and, having had a chat with Bobby Harvie who suggested Clubs should ‘pool’ guest artistes, Jimmy came up with the idea of forming an Association of Accordion and Fiddle Clubs. This Association went from strength to strength as did the N.A.A.F.C. Festival, now based at Musselburgh. Jimmy was, for twenty years, Chairman of the N.A.A.F.C., a movement which honoured him in 1990, presenting him with a portrait of himself and his wife, who, he claimed, had been the biggest asset in his career.
Jimmy thoroughly enjoyed adjudicating at Festivals and competitions and was almost most encouraging towards young players. He especially enjoyed the Perth Festival in October this year when he and John Carmichael had a great day’s adjudicating together – and a great day of exchanging stories as well. Jimmy was a great observer of character and his friends and family loved to listen to his impressions and humourous anecdotes about the people he had worked with or met in his travels. In spite of travelling so much and meeting so many people, Jimmy never really got over his shyness and always found it an ordeal meeting strangers, his rather abrupt manner covering his reserve. He was at his happiest with long-standing bosom friends, and holidays in Mull with Joan, Bobby and Agnes Crowe and, sometimes, Jackie Cooper, were his idea of bliss – no sun-kissed beaches for him!
Since a heart by-pass operation in 1994, although still playing occasionally, he was never happier than in his large garden which, in the summer, was transformed into a 9-hole putting green on a lawn which Gleneagles would have envied!
On his 70th birthday in September, a beautiful sunny day, accordionists, drummers, pipers and other assorted musician friends joined in a wonderful ‘hooley’ which went on until after dark – one of many memorable musical barbecues and parties held at Forgandenny. Jimmy was proud of his two daughters, Virginia and Sandra, and his sons-in-law and, of course, his four grandchildren, Katy, Rhoda, Murray and Polly, now 19, 18, 16 and 15. He would have been amazed – and embarrassed had he known of the tributes and hundreds of cards and letters sent on his passing.
One appropriate message to Joan read – “The song has ended but the melody lingers on”.
Box and Fiddle
February 2000
Born in Newton Mearns, Jimmy was 6 months old when his family moved to Rosneath Castle where his father was a gardener for Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll.
Jimmy was 14 when he bought his first accordion for £6, a Madella piano accordion. He had no formal tuition but having bought instruction booklets ‘The Mathis Method’ he labouriously worked at learning to play the box, even learning how to read and write music. He was enthralled by the playing of Will Starr and Jimmy Shand on the ‘wireless’ and discovered from neighbours, the Dalrymple family, that the magic sound was produced from a British Chromatic. The piano accordion was quickly traded in. Incidentally, one of the neighbouring family of box players was Bob Dalrymple, 5-row player, who performed many times at Fintry Accordion Club and others in that area and one of whose pupils was Gordon Shand.
In 1946 Jimmy acquired a 2-row 36 bass L’Organola and went back to the drawing board, this time with a ‘Willie Hannah’ tutor, finally graduating to a 3-row. He joined the Dalrymple family band and had his first experiences of playing at ‘gigs’. Jimmy had left school at 13 and, while helping his father who was now running his own market garden, he also worked at Rahane, a hill farm looking down on the Gareloch. He had many stories of the war years when the Americans were based close by. The U.S. boys were generous to the locals and Jimmy’s mother, embarrassed by a surfeit of butter when other families were rationed to 2 ounces per week, buried pounds of it in their garden! He remembered clearly standing outside their home looking with terror towards Greenock and Gourock, watching the planes and glow in the sky and hearing the terrible noise as Clydebank was bombed. Many of the stories he related were about his father’s Home Guard experiences – or L.D.V. as they were known in the early days. This stood for Local Defence Volunteers but was popularly known as ‘Look, Dook and Vanish’!
Meanwhile, Jimmy was working with horses for the Macintyre family. He loved his horses but was desperate to get into tractors and in the late forties the family decided on a move. Jimmy pressed very hard for Perthshire as this was where the music was – the Powrie Band, the Hawthorne, Adam Rennie, and Shand was in Fife, the next County! So in 1949 the family moved to a farm in Dunning and very soon Jimmy was playing with Hamish McLaren’s Band, from Auchterarder. It was through a two-band dance there that Jimmy met piano-accordionist, Mickie Ainsworth, and remarkably soon, as accordion duettists, they were broadcasting and making records. Their ‘The High Level’ still stands as one of the best recordings of this popular tune. Broadcasts with the BBC included spots in ‘Children’s Hour’, ‘Midday Music Hall’ and even ‘Starlight Serenade’ as well as many regular slots in ‘Scottish Magazine’, an overseas programme for exiled Scots.
Jimmy was the first All Scotland Champion in Bill Wilkie’s Accordion Festival in 1950, playing ‘Cameron Highlanders’, ’Fiddler’s Joy’ and ‘The Mason’s Apron’ – how often he compared his winning set with the finger numbing-technology and difficulty of the sets played by competitors at the Festivals he was to adjudicate many years later. Jimmy regained the cupin 1952, the year he became engaged to the pianist in Bill Wilkie’s Accordion Orchestra, Joan McNeill, whom he had met when accompanying Mickie to band practices. In September of that year Jimmy and Joan were asked to play at Ian Powrie’s wedding – playing at a Powrie wedding !!! Rehearsals and nerves went hand in hand but the performance, which must have been an informal audition, must have pleased because when Bill Powrie went to do his National Service in December of that year, Jimmy was invited to join Ian’s well known band. Ian and Jimmy were both working on farms, one on each side of the Earn Valley, while travelling to play at dances all over the country and broadcasting as often as once a month.
Then came television when ‘The Kilt is My Delight’ was enjoyed by all who had television sets. Having married Joan in 1955, Jimmy was now working at Netherholm Farm as a tractor driver, his father looking after the dairy. Many a morning he got home from a dance in time, to quote Norrie Williams in a previous issue, “to ca’in the neep chopper wi’ dinner suit and bow tie”.
In 1961 Andy Stewart, whose ‘Scottish soldier’ had topped the ‘Hit Parade’, was offered a summer-season of 19 weeks at Glasgow Empire and asked Ian Powrie’s Band to take part in the show. After much heart-searching – and a lot of encouragement from Joan – the decision was taken to turn professional, a risky business as there were now two young daughters to provide for. However, with dances and stage shows during the winter and an equally successful Empire season in 1962, the wolf was kept from the door. In 1963 the Andy Stewart Show with the Ian Powrie Band took off for Australia and New Zealand for thirteen weeks. The former tractorman was now becoming a world traveller and life had changed considerably. No more getting up on a frosty morning to shaw neeps or gather stones. The ‘year of the typhoid’, 1964, saw the company in H.M. Theatre, Aberdeen, packing in the crowds despite the fear of an epidemic. Andy’s story at that time was that “….only in Aberdeen could you have 264 cases of typhoid out of a tin of corned beef – because only Aberdonians could get 264 slices out of one tin!” The audiences loved it. In 1966 another tour took the company back to New Zealand and Australia and, on their return, towards the end of another successful Aberdeen season, Ian Powrie broke the news that he was emigrating to set up a business with Andy’s manager, Max Kay, in Australia. Jimmy came home from Aberdeen that night in a state of shock – but, after a completely sleepless night, by morning Joan had convinced him that he should take over the band and try to make it under his own name. This he did and very successfully too, continuing to broadcast and making several LPs.
As Andy Stewart’s backing band, he toured Ireland, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia, playing solo in the Carnagie Hall and in the Sydney Stadium and Opera House. The Band took part in many television programmes, a Grampian series and, even more successfully, ‘Scotch Corner’ produced by S.T.V. which went out on nationwide television with the band accompanying guest artistes such as Dana, Rolf Harris, Lulu, George Hamilton IV, Julie Felix and many others. Rolf Harris, who played piano accordion himself, was fascinated by the button-box and Jimmy became the proud possessor of a personal caricature of himself signed by the Australian entertainer.
Just before a long summer season in Blackpool, the Jimmy Blue Band had a wonderful experience when they took part in the film ‘Country Dance’ starring Peter O’Toole, Susannah Your and Brian Blessed. The music was recorded at Shepperton Studios in London and filming was done in Co. Wicklow. The film is shown often on Sky Television under the name ‘Brotherly Love’. During the dance in the film, the band played Jimmy’s tune ‘Bonnie Lass of Scotland’ (for which Andy had written words) and, when attending the premiere of the film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Joan and Jimmy got a great thrill when they heard an orchestral arrangement of his tune being played the morning after ‘the dance’. Jimmy and Andy co-operated on many songs, Andy giving him the words and Jimmy sitting at the piano (yes, the piano) working out tunes to suit the words. Among his favourites were ‘The Glens of Angus’ and ‘Little Girl’.
In 1977, with both daughters now married, he decided he had had enough of hotel rooms throughout the world and took on a season playing solo at ‘Pipers’, a tourist spot in Lothian Road, Edinburgh. In November of that year he became head gardener / groundsman at Kilgraston, an independent girls’ boarding school in Bridge of Earn where Joan had been Secretary since 1970. When he took over, the walled garden grew nothing but turnips, rhubarb and weeds and the grounds were sadly overgrown. Jimmy set to and not only made the lawns and parklands beautiful, but made the walled garden so productive of flowers, fruit and vegetables that, as well as supplying the school, he held a shop every week to which the villagers came to buy their produce. Jimmy got the greatest satidfaction out of making Kilgraston beautiful and did this for 15 years. However, having taken on this job, he was re-engaged at ‘Pipers’ for the 1978 season. He worked at Kilgraston during the day, came home, had dinner, slept, bathed and set off for Edinburgh SEVEN NIGHTS PER WEEK for thirty weeks! No wonder he eventually had hard surgery! Jimmy had always pushed himself to the limits. One year, he and the band, with Andy, did two shows at Dundee Palace, then piled into the Band bus – yes, Andy as well – and Jimmy drove to London where they rehearsed at the Albert Hall and performed in the ‘The Duncan Macrae Memorial Show’. Right after the show Jimmy was behind the wheel again and drove straight back to Dundee where they did another two shows before Jimmy got home to bed!
After another short season in ‘Pipers’ in 1979, Jimmy was ‘back on the road’ playing at dances with Joan on piano, Angus Fitchet on fiddle and Jackie Cooper on drums. What great nights they were, meeting so many enthusiastic and lovely people. In 1970 having ‘guested’ at Gretna Accordion Club, he suggested starting one in Perth which was duly done with great success. Other Clubs started up and, having had a chat with Bobby Harvie who suggested Clubs should ‘pool’ guest artistes, Jimmy came up with the idea of forming an Association of Accordion and Fiddle Clubs. This Association went from strength to strength as did the N.A.A.F.C. Festival, now based at Musselburgh. Jimmy was, for twenty years, Chairman of the N.A.A.F.C., a movement which honoured him in 1990, presenting him with a portrait of himself and his wife, who, he claimed, had been the biggest asset in his career.
Jimmy thoroughly enjoyed adjudicating at Festivals and competitions and was almost most encouraging towards young players. He especially enjoyed the Perth Festival in October this year when he and John Carmichael had a great day’s adjudicating together – and a great day of exchanging stories as well. Jimmy was a great observer of character and his friends and family loved to listen to his impressions and humourous anecdotes about the people he had worked with or met in his travels. In spite of travelling so much and meeting so many people, Jimmy never really got over his shyness and always found it an ordeal meeting strangers, his rather abrupt manner covering his reserve. He was at his happiest with long-standing bosom friends, and holidays in Mull with Joan, Bobby and Agnes Crowe and, sometimes, Jackie Cooper, were his idea of bliss – no sun-kissed beaches for him!
Since a heart by-pass operation in 1994, although still playing occasionally, he was never happier than in his large garden which, in the summer, was transformed into a 9-hole putting green on a lawn which Gleneagles would have envied!
On his 70th birthday in September, a beautiful sunny day, accordionists, drummers, pipers and other assorted musician friends joined in a wonderful ‘hooley’ which went on until after dark – one of many memorable musical barbecues and parties held at Forgandenny. Jimmy was proud of his two daughters, Virginia and Sandra, and his sons-in-law and, of course, his four grandchildren, Katy, Rhoda, Murray and Polly, now 19, 18, 16 and 15. He would have been amazed – and embarrassed had he known of the tributes and hundreds of cards and letters sent on his passing.
One appropriate message to Joan read – “The song has ended but the melody lingers on”.
Box and Fiddle
February 2000
