07/09/2021
We're delighted to see this excellent web resource by Ewan McVicar and the Alan Lomax archive celebrating the 70th anniversary of this key event for which Hamish was compère. Fascinating to hear modern versions of many of the songs and tunes.
August 30, 2021, was the 70-year anniversary of the 1951 Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh, the seminal event that heralded and generated the Scottish Folk Revival of the 1960s. Alan Lomax was on hand to record it in the Oddfellows Hall, and thus able to preserve a document of a legendary concert that alerted the astonished urban audience to the continuing vitality of Scotland’s heritage of traditional song. People in the rich folk culture of the Gaelic-speaking West, or speaking the Doric accent of the North East, still held and sang their vibrant old ballads and songs of work, but the Central Belt city folk thought the songs entombed in old books. Until the Ceilidh.
To commemorate the Ceilidh’s anniversary, Scottish folklorist Ewan McVicar has curated a new exhibit on the Lomax Digital Archive that annotates the Ceilidh program song-by-song, pairing them with more recent interpretations by revival singers in Scotland and further afield. We're especially chuffed that two new recordings have been provided exclusively for the exhibit, by the fine singers Christine Kydd and Alasdair Roberts (also a peerless guitarist/composer).
There is also a new episode of our Been All Around This World podcast presenting the (near) entirety of Lomax's recordings of the Ceilidh, which functions as an audio accompaniment to the exhibit. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
This painting was done by Michael McVeigh for the cover of the 2004 CD edition of selections from the Ceilidh. The radical poet, translator, singer, and folk-song collector Hamish Henderson, who MC’d and helped organize the concert, is at the mic, his shadow reminding us of his saying, “The devil is in the music’.” In the picture are Hamish’s dog Sandy, and at bottom left poets Sorley MacLean and Norman McCaig. When asked about the equine beast leaning beside the interval tea and cakes, the artist said “Perhaps the Highlander brought it because he was lonely?”
