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February 9, 2023
Geoffrey D. Morrison's Playlist for His Novel "Falling Hour"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Geoffrey D. Morrison's Falling Hour is an impressive debut, an existential and innovative novel that dazzles with every page.
Jen Craig wrote of the book:
"In Falling Hour, an immensity is condensed into a single day, a single park, a single empty frame. To themes of loss and dispossession that recall in scope and sensitivity the work of Teju Cole and W.G. Sebald, Morrison brings the attentive eye of a poet and a truly impish sense of the absurd."
In his own words, here is Geoffrey D. Morrison's Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Falling Hour:
In Falling Hour, a 31-year-old data-entry clerk named Hugh Dalgarno wanders alone in a park in an unnamed Southwestern Ontario town. He is there to sell a picture frame he found in the street, but the buyer never arrives. In fact, no one arrives, and no cars drive by, and after a time even airplanes stop crossing above him in the sky. But a red-winged blackbird is singing, and its song sets Hugh down a long and tangled pathway in his mind. Hugh thinks his brain is broken, and his thoughts tend to spin outwards in a “superfine fray” of digressions, allusions, repetitions, and returns. He comes to understand that, for obscure metaphysical reasons, he cannot leave the park. While he waits - no longer sure what for - he reflects, in a state of elegy and rage, on failed risings and falling angels, monsters of capital and empires of dust.
Hugh was born in Aberdeen in the Northeast of Scotland, but raised on the West Coast of Canada by a great-aunt and great-uncle who left Aberdeen in the early 1970s. As he wanders the park, Hugh is anchored by the Scottish and Irish songs he learned from his guardians. Being products of an oral folk tradition, many of these songs set different words to the same melodies, and even two interpretations of the same song might have markedly different words or arrangements. Each bears the thumbprint of a different moment in time, so that a song like “The Bonnie Lass o’ Fyvie,” which is set in a village near where Hugh’s rural ancestors lived, becomes just one piece of an articulated song cycle as it crosses centuries and oceans and turns into “The Maid of Fife,” “Fennario,” “Peggy-O,” and so on.
In creating this playlist, I included almost every song Hugh mentions by name, and a number of others, thematically resonant with the book, that I felt he would know. My mother is from Aberdeen and came to Canada in the early 1980s, so many of the traditional songs on this playlist are ones I was familiar with as a child. Where possible, I have provided the identifying number from the Roud Folk Song Index.
The Rising of the Moon
Roud #9634
Performed by The Dubliners
The song that tied the whole thing together for me. Hugh has his own cryptic little internal symbolic order - he can’t stop thinking of birds and snails and frames and farms and fibres and jig-dolls and threads and rivers. And at a certain crucial point in articulating this internal order I needed Hugh to refer to a song about the moon. But the usual suspects didn’t say the things I hoped they would. I felt quite desperate. There was a moon-sized hole in my book. I swear to you that in my desperation I simply Googled “songs about the moon.” I got a remarkably perceptive listicle, as listicles go. It named “The Rising of the Moon” as one such song, and described how the chorus becomes almost a mantra, an incantation, for the hopeful pike-armed revolutionaries gathered at night in 1798 for the United Irishmen’s revolt. The listicle also explained how the song had the same melody as “The Wearing of the Green.” I played the Dubliners’ version of “The Rising of the Moon” and realized that it also had the same melody as “The Orange and the Green,” a song I had heard my mother singing when I was small. I swear to you I started to cry. The coincidence rocked me to my core and told me that the music that had been so meaningful for me all those years ago could serve as a kind of guiding (moon)light for the whole book.
Nicky Tams
Roud #1875
Written by G. S. Morris
Performed by Jean Redpath
The titular “nicky tams” were the trousers of an Aberdeenshire farmworker around the Edwardian period, so called because they bore an ironic resemblance to the knickerbockers of the toffs. This version is sung by Jean Redpath, one of the undisputed legends of Scottish singing in the last century. Her unaccompanied versions have such an intimacy - if she sings something serious, or sad, a chill goes down your spine. If she sings something funny, as here, you can feel her elbowing you in the ribs.
My grandfather, Robert Wilson Mortimer, sang this song. He was born in 1915 and grew up on farms in several villages in the Northeast of Scotland: Keith Hall and Pitcaple, both near Inverurie, and Netherley, in the Mearns. His parents were tenant farmers who lost all their animals to foot and mouth disease twice. Bob helped his parents with farm work while also going to school, and in fact was the only one of his brothers to stay on at school to the age of 18. He had hoped to continue his education at university, but the Depression was on and there was no way it could happen. He became a lorry driver for an electrical company instead, and remained in this line of work for most of his life. Nearing retirement age, he gave up driving and became a porter in both a hotel and the Aberdeen University Medical Library. As a man who had always valued higher education without having the opportunity to study himself, I think this latter job meant a lot to him.
Like many people of his generation in Aberdeenshire, Bob memorized an incredible number of Doric (ie Northeast Scots) songs and poems by heart. “Nicky Tams” was one of them. My mum tells me he would recite it at weddings, astonishing everyone with this feat of memory. He passed this sensibility on to my mother, his only child, who passed it on to me. It’s a strange thing to go around all your life with these things in your head, especially when you are thousands of miles and a hundred years away from the place and the people that first gave them context. It’s so strange I had to turn it into a novel.
The Battle of Harlaw
Roud #2861
Performed by Old Blind Dogs
Another one my grandfather committed to memory. The battle itself took place not far from Inverurie, in 1411. Old Blind Dogs are a group from Aberdeen who always do things a little differently from the norm - hence, in this case, the bongos. They have an ease, a rambling good-naturedness, which is a welcome change from some of the stiffer renditions of traditional songs.
Erin Go Bragh
Roud #1627
Dick Gaughan
One of the most fascinating songs on this playlist, from one of the greatest folk albums of all time, as played by one of Scottish and Irish music’s most phenomenal and artistically complete interpreters. You'd think a song called “Erin Go Bragh” would be about Ireland, or someone Irish, but you’d be wrong. It introduces us to one “Duncan Campbell from the shire o’ Argyll,” a well-travelled Highlander who has come to Edinburgh for work. A bigot policeman thinks he’s Irish by the cut of his hair. Rather than correct the bobby’s mistake, Campbell doubles down - “So what if I was?” he says, in so many words, adding that “there’s many’s a bold hero from Erin Go Bragh.” When words fail, he kills the copper right then and there. On the run from the law, he makes “Erin Go Bragh” his alias. The song is especially fascinating for its sketching out of continuities and alliances between Highlanders and Irish, ones which run deeper than the supposed divisions of sect (Argyll isn’t especially Catholic). Gaughan has both Highland and Irish ancestors, which I’m sure was on his mind in choosing this one for A Handful of Earth. But also, can’t he sing? And also also, can’t he play? Damn, can he ever.
This is a bothy song (“bothies” were the stone buildings where farm labourers lived and made music) that’s been attested to for a long time, but I could’ve sworn Gaughan had written it himself. That’s one of the miracles of this kind of music. People who weren’t even babies when songs were first sung sometimes fit into them like an old pair of shoes.
Off to Dublin in the Green
Roud #24601
Performed by The Dubliners
My mother’s mother’s mother, Henrietta Dalgarno, sang this one, and my mother sang it too. Henrietta was an Aberdonian born at the end of the nineteenth century - a millworker who married a wool spinner and raised 11 children. She was nominally Protestant but hardly devout. Much of the historical and political background for my book came from reflecting on what might have brought her to sing an Irish rebel song. Orangeism never really caught on in the Northeast, and visitors from Scotland’s Central Belt often remark with surprise at the absence of the usual loaded questions about school and football. In fact, Aberdeen supporters once got in trouble for chanting that the Rangers’ manager was a “sad Orange bastard.” So it may have been easier for a woman like Henrietta to embrace Irishness as a kindred culture without sectarian baggage. But it’s also just a great song, and in 1966 it was used in an ad campaign for Carling beer, so it may have been as simple as that. Henrietta had a zest for life, and my mum’s memories of her are incredibly fond. She loved to watch wrestling and scream at the TV when a masked fighter’s identity was about to be revealed.
The Bonny Lass of Fyvie
Roud #545
Performed by John Strachan
A song my mother used to sing when I was little. I forgot nearly all the words as an adult, but remembered just enough to accidentally rediscover it by a means very similar to the one Hugh describes in the book. It becomes a very important song for Hugh.
This version is an Alan Lomax recording of John Strachan, who finishes up by telling the Yank ethnomusicologist, “But that’s a good een, an affa fine tune. I’m affa pleased ye like that.” It is affa fine, but I feel a bit sour about Strachan. He was a rich farmer who made out well in the collapse and consolidation of Aberdeenshire agriculture after the First World War, whereas my grandfather’s family were poor farmers who did not, and were driven into the cities. But, got to hand it to him, he sings a nice Fyvie-O, if not the nicest. My gold standard version is still Jean Redpath’s, which is unfortunately not on Spotify, but which you can hear here.
The Orange and the Green
Written by Anthony Murphy
Performed by The Irish Rovers
In some ways the ground zero of the song landscape of this book, because, of the three songs Hugh mentions which share this melody, it is the one I heard my mother singing growing up. I think she heard it in the version from the Irish Rovers which appears on their 1967 album The Unicorn. The speaker’s father is a Protestant from Ulster, and his mother is a Catholic from Cork, and as such he is caught up in “that awful colour problem of the Orange and the Green.”
My favourite verse nearly became the epigraph for Falling Hour:
One day me ma’s relations came round to visit me
Just as my father’s kinfolk were all sitting down to tea.
I tried to smooth things over, but they all began to fight,
And me being strictly neutral, I bashed everyone in sight.
Come Out Ye Black and Tans
Written by Dominic Behan
Performed by The Wolfe Tones
The quintessential Irish rebel song, which has had a remarkable second life on the internet. There’s a great viral video of an Irish guest on a Chinese variety show singing it acapella for a mostly non-Anglophone audience who nevertheless go absolutely crazy for it. The song is just that good. I’ve even heard a club remix.
The Black and Tans were a British paramilitary force, infamous for their brutality against civilians, who were sent to support the counterinsurgency in Ireland during the War of Independence from 1919 to 1921. Technically a special reserve of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), they were assembled so quickly that some were given the black uniforms of the police and others the tan uniforms of the army - hence, “Black and Tans.” Their ranks were comprised of the kind of men who had fought in the First World War and liked it, which should really tell you something.
The song explicitly links the Tans’ repression in Ireland with British colonialism elsewhere in the world, blasting Britain for its unfair fights against foes without modern weapons. “Come out and fight me like a man,” goes the chorus, and you feel that, finally, on behalf of oppressed people the world over, some small modicum of justice will be done.
I’m a Man Youse Don’t Meet Every Day
Roud #975
Performed by Jeannie Robertson
Though a mainstay of the Northeast of Scotland, this song may in fact be Irish in origin, and has proved to be just as popular with Irish bands - the Pogues do a wonderful version, with Cait O’Riordan singing. In fact, some of the best interpreters of this song have been women. It makes an appearance in The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), when all the musicians on the island are in the pub for a “session,” and the singer is a woman in that scene as well.
Here, the Aberdeen-born singer Jeannie Robertson sings it unaccompanied in a 1963 recording that every subsequent interpretation owes so much to. There’s a bittersweetness to her version, as though the uncommon man and his promises are a rare island of respite in a long, hard, life.
Maid of Fife - Live from the Ulster Hall, Belfast
Roud #545
Performed by The Clancy Brothers
The Clancy Brothers sing “The Bonny Lass o’ Fyvie,” but they call it “The Maid of Fife,” but in the song itself they sing “Fyvie.” Make it make sense! I can’t. That said, I like this version, and Hugh mentions it in the book. He notices that someone in the crowd asks the Clancys “what army?” and remarks that in a place like Belfast this was a loaded question.
The Clancys mostly get the place names right, but note how they say “Ethanside,” with a long “e” sound. It should be “Ythanside,” with a long “i” sound, as in Strachan and Redpath’s versions.
MacPherson’s Rant
Roud #2160
Performed by Davie Stewart
Davie Stewart was a Highland Traveller who grew up in the Northeast and spent part of his youth as a farm labourer. He busked all over Scotland and Ireland, and became an indispensable source of songs and knowledge for Alan Lomax, the American ethnomusicologist whose recordings helped spread interest in folk music on both sides of the Atlantic. Stewart’s 1957 interview with Lomax is full of insights about Traveller life, farm work, and even the difference between Scottish and Irish folk music. (Stewart notes with surprise that Irish audiences always wanted Scottish musicians to sing Harry Lauder’s comic songs). You’ll have noticed how often I mention songs that are somehow both Irish and Scottish, or journeyed from one place to the other. Historically it was so often because of Traveller communities and other itinerant workers that this was so.
Here Stewart sings “MacPherson’s Rant” (also known as “MacPherson’s Lament”), a song which Hugh discusses in some detail in the book. While Hugh is a Dalgarno, his great-uncle Jimmy is a MacPherson, and Hugh suspects Jimmy was named after the man in the song. The song’s James or Jamie MacPherson was an outlaw and famous fiddler in the 17th century, the son of a laird and a Traveller woman, who was executed in Banff. The lyrics purport, at least in part, to be his death song below the gallows tree. In its second-most dramatic verse, he looks out at the crowd, some of whom he knows have come to haggle over his worldly possessions after his death, and breaks his beloved fiddle in two so none of them can have it. In its most dramatic verse, a horseman is seen coming over the brig of Banff with a reprieve for MacPherson, but the callous authorities put the town clock fifteen minutes ahead so they can carry out the sentence before he gets there. The bastards.
As I wrote a book that is itself a kind of extended rant in the face of - perhaps death, perhaps life-in-death, perhaps something even stranger - I kept coming back to this song for inspiration.
Stewart’s rendering is raw and wild as a storm.
John MacLean’s March
Written by Hamish Henderson
Performed by Alistair Hulett
One of Hamish Henderson’s many prodigious compositions - this time in celebration of John MacLean, “the Scottish Lenin,” a schoolteacher, orator, and educator of the working class who was instrumental in building Glasgow’s “Red Clydeside.” MacLean suffered greatly for his opposition to the First World War; he was sentenced to penal servitude and was often on hunger strike while inside. Though he was released in 1918, his death at 44 in 1923 has been attributed to the ill effects of his captivity.
Alistair Hulett’s rendering of Henderson’s song has a glorious brightness to it. The line about sleeping on the floor so the weary campaigner can have a bed always gets me a bit choked up.
Pretty Peggy-O
Roud #545
Performed by Bob Dylan
Baby Dylan, all of 21 at the time of recording and still telling tall tales that he was from Gallup, New Mexico, leans into his “ramblin’” persona on this track when he tells us, “Been around this whole country, but I never yet found Fennario.” Indeed. You can’t. It’s Fyvie-O. I always found it interesting that young Bob, at the time a real devotee of The Clancy Brothers, played the American version of a song that The Clancys play in its Scottish form. I wondered if they ever talked about this, and so I had Hugh wonder about it too. It’s nice to have a character who shares your wonders.
Arthur McBride
Roud #2355
Performed by Paul Brady and Andy Irvine
A gorgeous, tender, melodic ballad about beating the ever-loving shit out of some British Army recruiters on Christmas morning. The references to France and the king suggest a Napoleonic vintage, and it was indeed at this time that working-class communities across Britain and Ireland were beginning to resist conscription. It was most likely an Irish song to begin with, but it spread outwards from there. The American folkorist James Madison Carpenter recorded Aberdeenshire farmworker Alex Campbell singing it in the 1930s.
Sir Patrick Spens
Roud #41
Performed by Fairport Convention
Along with Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention were one of the late 1960s British folk acts who most successfully melded traditional songs with psychedelic rock arrangements. Here they interpret a ballad about grimly accepting an assignment from your boss even though you know whoever floated your name for the job was trying to do you in.
You really feel for poor Patrick here - “For I was never a very good seaman, nor ever do intend to be,” he says, in his consternation, but he grimly does as he is told. There’s a beautiful verse describing earthlight on a waxing crescent moon:
Last night I saw the new moon tare
With the old moon in her hair
And that is a sign since we were born
That means there’ll be a deadly storm
Note that this is a different rendering from the one famously quoted by Coleridge at the start of “Dejection: An Ode”:
Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon,
With the old Moon in her arms;
And I fear, I fear, my Master dear!
We shall have a deadly storm.
Also, damn, imagine being given a toast by a mermaid who tells you you’re dead.
Peggy O
Roud #545
Performed by The Grateful Dead
The final destination for “The Bonny Lass of Fyvie.” Musically I think this version is very lovely but lyrically I think it is terrifying, in a way that Hugh elaborates on in the book. You’ll note that, at the chilling line, “destroy all the people in the airy-o,” someone whistles their approval. What the hell is that?
The Battle of Otterburn
Roud #3293
Performed by The Wolfhound
Another Grandpa Bob specialty, though I myself only ever heard him recite it, not sing it. He did the version that has the hauntingly surreal verse,
But I have dreamed a dreary dream,
Beyond the Isle of Skye;
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I.
I was only about nine years old when I heard his recitation, but I never forgot it, and I especially never forgot that verse in particular. If my entire artistic life could be distilled into a single moment in time, I think it would be that one. Everything I have ever tried to do is all there in one way or another.
There’s a beautiful version on Fyre & Sword: Songs of the Border Reivers, but it is sadly no longer on Spotify for some reason. It is longer and has quite a different narrative than the one sung by the Wolfhound. In the long version, the Scottish Lord Douglas dies from wounds suffered in combat with the English Lord Percy. At his own request, he is buried in secret under a bracken bush so that his death will not cause panic among his soldiers. His nephew, Hugh Montgomery, carries out the deed, and then defeats Percy in combat. Percy wishes to yield, and Montgomery at first tells him to yield to the bracken bush. The defeated Percy is still proud enough to refuse such terms, but says he would yield to either Douglas or Montgomery - and once he realizes it’s Montgomery he’s speaking to, he does. Montgomery, “a courteous knight,” accepts.
The short version is a more straightforward tale of Lord Douglas, who remains unscathed, defeating Lord Percy as Lady Percy watches from a tower. The dramatic tension therefore shifts to the repeated rebuke of the Jardines who would not come and help Douglas in his victory.
Hugh thinks about this version because he’s taken by the fact that The Wolfhound, who were Irish Republicans in Belfast (they were famously snuck into Long Kesh under assumed names to play a concert for political prisoners there) would play a Scottish song on an album called Ireland Boys Hurrah!
McPherson’s Lament
Roud #2160
Performed by The Clancy Brothers
People have accused the Clancys of “stage Irishness,” and, sure, fine, but this hammy quality is also sometimes their greatest strength. The Clancys at their best understand the drama. Oldest brothers Tom and Paddy were actors first, not singers.
I also think The Clancys made the right artistic choice to cut the verse where McPherson bemoans how he was betrayed by a woman in particular. It’s the dumbest part of the song.
Freedom Come All Ye
Written by Hamish Henderson
Performed by Luke Kelly
Luke Kelly was in The Dubliners but also had a distinguished solo career. He gets the Scots lyrics just right, and in fact had a grandmother from the Hebrides.
What moves me about this song, written by Hamish Henderson in 1960, is that it uses the language of a traditional Scots ballad to express a modern message of revolutionary internationalism. So the speaker looks upon “the great glen o’ the warld” and sees a time coming soon when Scotland will stand in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world rather than taking the side of the oppressor:
Broken faimlies in lands we’ve herriet,
Will curse Scotland the Brave nae mair, nae mair;
Black and white, ane til ither mairriet,
Mak the vile barracks o’ their maisters bare.
It also makes explicit reference to the anti-Apartheid cause, ending with the hope that
a black boy frae yont Nyanga
Dings the fell gallows o’ the burghers doon.
Nyanga is a township in the Western Cape. It was a site of major anti-Apartheid protests the year the song was written.
For me, this song represents the radical current within the self-conception of Scottish people - one I believe Hugh aspires to, and which he learned from his aunt and uncle. I see it in the ordinary Glaswegians of many backgrounds who blocked the way of the police trying to deport immigrants last year.
Bennachie
Roud #5404
Performed by Old Blind Dogs
Old Blind Dogs again, this time with a song often also known as “Where Gadie Rins.” Bennachie is essentially the first great foothill of the Grampian Mountains. The “back o’ Bennachie” featured in the song was home to a storied community of crofters who lived there without paying rent to a landlord. It would have been within sight for many of my farming ancestors.
The 51st Highland Division’s Farewell to Sicily
Written by Hamish Henderson
Performed by Dick Gaughan
Grandpa Bob was in the 51st. More specifically, he was a driver in the Signals. And he was in Sicily in the Second World War just as Hamish Henderson was. In his memories of the war written as an old man, Bob’s language echoes the song: “Its goodbye Mt. Etna goodbye to the people of Sicily (very friendly but they were so sorry about the mess we left…)”
Hamish Henderson was a truly gifted songwriter, but his own recording of this song has a blithe briskness that doesn’t seem to do his own words justice. It’s really Gaughan’s to sing, and he draws it out into nearly twelve minutes of aching, hungover melancholy.
Green
By Hiroshi Yoshimura
Hiroshi Yoshimura was a pioneering ambient experimental artist who achieved unexpected posthumous regard through, of all things, the Youtube algorithm. Hugh describes “listening to Japanese ambient music” as one of the few things he does these days while not working - the others being reading, keeping his plants alive, finding second-hand clothes to buy, and studying his own memories. It is good music for keeping a crisis at bay, hibernating, or just beginning to poke a few tentative shoots out of the earth.
The Yoshimura piece Hugh mentions by name, while remembering the feeling of an evening in May, is the lovely “Wet Land,” which is unfortunately not on Spotify yet. As a substitute, I naturally picked “Green,” not least because early in the process of editing this book André Alexis pointed out to me that I use the word “green” something like 85 times.
Noise Pop Interlude - “Youtube playlists of languorous and echoing music”
This is the part of the playlist where we take a little break from folk. Hugh has a memory of “the winter difficulties,” a time in his early twenties when he would struggle out of bed on dark mornings and take a bus, a train, and a bus to get to his distant commuter campus (I never name it, but if you read between the lines you will see it is the same one I went to - Simon Fraser University, just outside of Vancouver on Burnaby Mountain). He says that at this time one of his few creative outlets was the making of “Youtube playlists of languorous and echoing music,” and cites “Sex Church, the Chills, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Dum Dum Girls” as examples. So, here they are.
Deep One Perfect Morning
By The Jesus and Mary Chain
The JAMC are formed around brothers Jim and William Reid of the Greater Glasgow “new town” of East Kilbride, two self-described “benefits scroungers” who spent years on the dole fine-tuning their sound until they were ready for the spotlight.
On Darklands, their second album, they ease up on the ear-splitting distortion that was such a hallmark of Psychocandy, and for my money produce a more sonically fulfilling record. The themes are more satisfying on this album, too. In songs like “Deep One Perfect Morning” and “Nine Million Rainy Days”, they capture something true about lumpenprole late bloomers who’ve spent a lot of time waiting around for things to happen. Plus look at these lines:
I’m picking at the pieces
Of a world that keeps turning
The screws in my mind
If that’s not Hugh Dalgarno, I don’t know what is.
Baby Don’t Go
By Dum Dum Girls
Originally a Sonny and Cher number, but transformed by the Dum Dums into a small masterpiece of washed-out, Lynchian longing. Never mind that the Dum Dums are from LA; this sound is the Pacific Northwest to me. And the kind of song you resonate with if you grow up without much money, wearing second-hand clothes, and can’t wait to get away.
Dull Light
By Sex Church
A local Vancouver noise band active about ten years ago, though I never saw them live. They mostly specialized in dissonant minor chord numbers, but every release would also have some melodic throwback to '60s garage, and these songs were far and away my favourites. The one I loved most was called The Floor, but it’s not on Spotify. This one’s nice too.
Pink Frost
By The Chills
Incredibly weird and disturbing lyrics with a pretty arrangement. Along with The Clean, The Chills were one of the standout bands of New Zealand’s Dunedin Sound. Dunedin is small university town on the South Island, stereotypically a grey, chilly place, that used its isolation to foster an underground music explosion all its own. I’ve seen it described as one of the three poles of indie pop, along with Glasgow and Olympia, Washington. It strikes me that these are all drizzly, depressive climates. So is Vancouver, for that matter.
There Goes Norman
By The Undertones
I love The Undertones. I think they’re better than The Buzzcocks, The Damned, and The Sex Pistols, and just as good as The Clash and The Ramones. They’re funny and real and write about everyday working-class life. They grew up in Derry during The Troubles, but in comparison to a band like Stiff Little Fingers might seem willfully unpolitical. However, I don’t think that’s true; their politics are just, well, an undertone.
This song is about a creep who waits in the darkness at night in a park. Hugh thinks about it because he is worried that he will be taken for such a person as night falls. As it turns out, no one ever arrives to take him for anything. But he notes that the name “Norman” was almost always given to Protestants in the six counties (in the poem “Whatever You Say Say Nothing,” Seamus Heaney lists it along with “Ken” and “Sidney” as names which “signalled Prod”) and sees a quiet subtext in the choice.
No Gods & Precious Few Heroes
Written by Brian McNeill
Performed by Dick Gaughan
A splash of cold water in the face. We have heard many songs of heroes and legendary deeds, but here is one about a national mythos fossilizing into kitsch. There are some great digs at Bonnie Prince Charlie from a proletarian perspective.
Flowers of the Forest
Roud #3812
Performed by Fairport Convention
Here Fairport Convention sing “Flowers of the Forest,” a Scottish lament with lyrics about the 1513 defeat at Flodden. Note how pointedly we learn that “The English by guile for once won the day” (my emphasis).
This tune has often been played on the pipes at funerals, usually with a somewhat different metre than in Fairport’s rendering. It’s the titular music played at the end of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, when protagonist Christina Guthrie’s new minister husband eulogizes the death of the peasantry after the First World War.
Fairport’s version is mysterious and utterly captivating thanks to the electric dulcimer.
Letter from America
By The Proclaimers
I always get a bit emotional about this one. The Proclaimers, twin brothers from Edinburgh named Craig and Charlie Reid, are of course best known for their pub-rock standard “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles),” but their work outside of the big hit has always shown an activist, Scottish nationalist sensibility. In “Throw the R Away,” they joke about the “Saxon ears” of someone who tells them their “accent is bad.” And in “Letter from America” they sing about the outmigrations that have dispersed so many Scottish people across the globe. At first they name places wracked by the Highland Clearances of the 19th century - “Lochaber no more” (itself the name of a famous pipe tune), “Lewis no more, Sutherland no more, Skye no more.” But near the end, they start to name factories: “Bathgate no more, Linwood no more, Methil no more, Irvine no more.” These plants, which had once employed thousands of skilled workers, closed in the fallout of Thatcherism and widespread deindustrialization. It was around the time these plants closed that my mother came to Canada as a nanny in the early '80s.
This song is apparently still a huge draw for The Proclaimers while on tour outside of Scotland, but less so at home. As is so often the case, immigrants and their descendents become crystallized in a time and an attitude that the home country has moved on from.
Jock Stuart
Roud #975
Performed by The McCalmans
Sending us out on a bright note with The McCalmans’ rendering of “A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day,” this time going under the title “Jock Stuart.” An observation I thought I’d save for the end is that, unlike so many other ballads from the Scottish and Irish singing traditions, there’s really no story, no tension, no conflict in the lyrics to this one. No one dies. No one turns into a burning hot coal due to elfin magic. No one gets consumption or scarlet fever or sent to Australia for stealing corn or rising up against the king. It’s about a guy who’s telling you he’s really great, that he loves a good time, and that drinks are on the house. So be easy and free.
Geoffrey D. Morrison is author of the poetry chapbook Blood-Brain Barrier and coauthor of the experimental short fiction collection Archaic Torso of Gumby. His debut novel, Falling Hour, is forthcoming in February, 2023 from Coach House Books. He lives on unceded Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh territory.
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