The two songsters – Burns and Hamish – were culturally, politically and socially singing from the same page; both taking a strong stance against the social and literary hierarchies of their day. As we observed much earlier, they were met with stiff opposition (Part 1: 19 January 2022).
This takes us back to our original discussion of Scots as the ‘corrupt Dialect’
of which Hume speaks, and the benighted musical predilections of the Scottish populace to which G F Graham refers. For the sake of comparison, we might cite the long-standing argument between, say, Hebrew and Yiddish. But that does not approximate the bitter, all pervasive polarity between ‘art’ and folk culture within our nation. For the debate is not simply binary. Quintessentially, and this affects human interaction in Scotland at so many levels, it is intellectual, social and psychological.
In 1816, Graham touches upon all that when he contrasts the normally ‘enlightened’ populace of the nation with the ignorant, sentimental rabble that (inexplicably to his mind) favours worthless Scottish melodies that move ‘the hearts and affections of Scotsmen’. A century or so later, Hugh MacDiarmid, who took an idiosyncratically elitist stance with his ‘synthetic Scots’ poems, argued along the same lines in a flyting with Hamish Henderson published in The Scotsman. Fulminating wildly against Scots song and the oral tradition, MacDiarmid reflected:
The demand everywhere today is for higher and higher intellectual levels.
Why should we be concerned then with songs which reflect the educational
limitations, the narrow lives, the poor literary abilities, of a peasantry we
have happily outgrown?
He goes on to assert that great art is a matter of ‘complexity’ â more like a symphony than a simple folk song: the ‘aim of all great poetry’ being ‘human wholeness’. Another of our illustrious poets, Edwin Muir, in his Scott And Scotland, would join him in extending this destructive national myth: another version of the distorted historical perspective we observed in Hume and the literati of the 18th-century and embodied in simple, facile shibboleths that appear again and again like a mutating virus in our thinking. That post-Freudian rhetoric of psychological mumbo jumbo: terms like: ‘wholeness’; ‘fragment’; ‘division’; ‘homogeneous language’. Destructive, self-fulfilling mumbo jumbo at that. We are reminded of the auld Scot’s saw: ‘Gie a dug an ill name and hang him’. To quote Muir:
… (a) homogeneous language is the only means yet discovered for expressing the response of a whole people, emotional and intellectual… And since some time in the 16th century Scotland has lacked such a language… Scottish poetry exists in a vacuum: it neither acts on the rest of literature nor reacts to it: and consequently it has shrunk to the level of anonymous folk-song… it expresses therefore only a fragment of the Scottish mind⦠For, reduced to its simplest terms, this linguistic division means that Scotsmen feel in one language and think in another…
Hamish would have none of this, throwing Gramsci and Lorca back at them. In short, and this is a quote from his planned BBC lectures on the ballad, he maintains that the opposite is true: namely, that Scots ‘folk art’ is:
… the most allusive, the most fleeting, and at the same time the most integral and faithful manifestation of the human spirit…
He would actually write to Muir, assuring him that his literary and linguistic assertions were badly mistaken:
I’m inclined to think that the folk poetry of Scotland is superior to most ‘art’
poetry. I am sure now that nothing should be said about the language problem facing Scottish writers until an exhaustive study has been made of the language of the old anonymous folk poetry…
Thus, we have a mythos, based upon extreme bias and false premises, that has, for so long, done our critical thinking for us. It was natural, then, for Hugh MacDiarmid and his followers to damn the poetry and song of the Vernacular Revival, and to damn Burns in particular. MacDiarmid would urge his fellow poets and linguists: ‘Not Burns â Dunbar’ for a return to the ‘human wholeness’ of the medieval tradition. Thus Edwin Muir would argue:
If Henryson and Dunbar had written prose they would have written in the same language as they used for poetry, for their minds were still whole.
Wrong on three accounts. Wrong historically. Wrong psychologically. Wrong critically â especially as regards Robert Burns. To quote Hamish:
Throughout Scottish history there has been a constant interplay between the folk tradition and the learned literary tradition â an interplay more constant and fruitful with us than in the literatures of most other European countries. Burns is the pre-eminent example of a poet who understood and recreated in his own work the folk tradition of the people. If the renaissance in Scottish arts and letters is to be carried a stage further, our poets and writers could maybe do worse than go to school with the folksingers…
All this has been touched upon in my first essay: the matter of ‘duality’ and the question of ‘wholeness’. Suffice it to say that Burns and Hamish totally disagreed with the Muir and MacDiarmid premise. Furthermore, they believed that Scots language, even given its fragmented history, or because of its historical admixture with English (from the Union of the Crowns, 1603, and the 1707 Union) was a potent medium for literature and song.
Hamish, no doubt our greatest cultural spokesman on Scots language, will turn the argument of the decriers of Scots folk-song on its head, citing the immense richness of the mixed (and inclusive) language of the oral tradition â especially as it appears in the ballads. In this respect, the whole unhomogeneous Scots language tradition of flux and fragmentation becomes a tremendous strength (as Yiddish language was for Issac B Singer). Not a weakness but a subtle, supple ‘instrument’ of human expression. In his analysis, he all but says that English is a dialect of Scots. Historically speaking, he has a point.
… ballad-Scots (is)… a flexible formulaic language which grazes ballad-English… and yet is clearly identifiable as a distinct folk-literary lingo. (It admirably manifests) a ‘curious bilingualism’ in one language which greatly extends its range and demonstrably makes it a much suppler instrument than the rather wooden ‘ballad-English’ (And here he has a final surgical riposte) In the folk field, as well as in the less sure-footed literary Lallans, Scots may be said to ‘include English and go beyond it’.
How very like Burns these arguments are. Burns, who, in a letter to Thomson of 1792, would demand:
Apropos, if you are for English verses, there is, on my part, an end of the matter. Whether in the simplicity of the Ballad, or the pathos of the Song, I can only hope to please myself in being allowed at least a sprinkling of our native tongue.
Burns, who in another letter, and with a knowledge of the tradition much like Hamish’s own, will argue:
But let me remark to you, in the sentiment & style of our Scottish airs, there is a pastoral simplicity, a something that one may call, the Doric style & dialect of vocal music, to which a dash of our native tongue & manners is particularly, nay peculiarly apposite.
What the poet is no doubt demanding in his own song composition (namely, an ‘intermixture’ of languages) is Hamish’s ‘curious bilingualism’ writ large. Furthermore, it is in this sense that all the interesting cultural polarities and tensions cited earlier can be seen as a creative, liberating artistic amalgam wholly representative of who we are â a ‘healthy hybrid’, as Hamish would have it.
Scotland was, from day one, a cultural and linguistic mix with its Celts of all kin-kind (Picts, Brythonic tribes, Scotti); its Angles, Vikings, Flemings and French. With Scotland’s European, Germanic and Latinate roots, all Scottish literature in fact reveals characteristics of MacDiarmid’s treasured medieval tradition. For Middle Scots poetry is itself a linguistic amalgam which reflects Scotland’s geographical and cultural position: a rich mix of high and low registers of Scots; aureate Latin, Old French and more. But this is a subject beyond the sphere of this appreciation.
Hamish called for a return to the socially and culturally integrating ‘art’ â folk synthesis against the decriers of Burns and of Scots song. That is what he argued, and Burns achieves in spades. We have only to look at something like John Anderson, my jo to see how the poet could make both an intimate statement (couthie, not insular) and, at the same time, a universal statement about the human condition. And he accomplishes this, in great part, through the use of a powerful linguistic hybrid: colloquial Scots idioms plus the high register of Scots plus straight Neoclassical English â all labouring to express the compassion of an old wifie for her failing husband.
John Anderson my jo, John, (dear)
When we were first acquent (acquainted â from Old French)
Your locks were like the raven, (Neoclassical English)
Your bonie brow was brent (unwrinkled â from Ancient Anglian)
Moreover, Burns, who knows his King James bible so well, employs anaphora (rhetorical repetition) extensively to shore-up the power of the woman’s dramatic monologue. A highly crafted, monumental ‘art’ in that respect alone. Just look at the rhetorical patterns:
John Anderson ma jo, John (ll. 1, 8, 9, 16)
(And the constantly ringing â throughout)
John… John… John
Your locks wereâ¦Your locks are (ll. 3, 6)
(Poignantly emphasising the then-now contrast)
But noo… But blessins (ll. 5, 7)
And hand… And sleep (ll. 14, 15)
(Like emotive heartbeats)
As with My luve is like a red, red rose, and in accordance with his principle of ‘ballad simplicity’, he mainly uses monosyllables for reflective emphasis on each word:
But… noo… your… brow… is… beld… John (l.5)
And… hand… in… hand… we’ll… go (l.15)
Like the medieval makar, Henryson, Burns is well-schooled in the principle sound = sense: eg, all those interlocked alliterative b’s in Verse 1 that give us an animated picture of the auld wifie’s emotionally breathless utterance (buh… buh… buh):
bonie… brow… brent… But… brow… beld… blessings
We have spoken of the language of music. Let us now consider the music of language: of equal import in Hamish’s and Burns’s reworking of the vernacular tradition. The subtle use of language as sound and sense; rhetorical pattern; rhythm; interlocked alliteration; internal rhyme; registers of language and their intonation patterns (so like actual speech). This was the legacy of the Scots medieval tradition of poetry and balladry. And all this was integral to Burns’s theory of ‘ballad simplicity’. In this connection, it was the simplicity and directness of the oral tradition that was for both poets something that could not be achieved in any other fashion.
Take, for example, Hamish’s The Speakin Hert, with its unmitigated directness and brutality â very like a medieval ballad. All the charm, you might say, of The Twa Corbies or The Border Wida’s Lament. To summarise The Speakin Hert: a lad loves a lassie who really does not care for him at all. So she abuses him, brutally ordering him to cut-out his mother’s heart. Carrying-out the bizarre task, he drops the heart; and it speaks to him with great compassion in his mum’s voice, the point being that a mother’s love is without limit.
Here as well we have the linguistic subtlety of the ballads where the words themselves bring both the character of the cruel lassie and the brutality of the scene to life (sound = sense). Note, for instance in Verses II-III (though this pervades the entire ballad), the extensive use of hard guttural g’s in relation to the cruel lassie and the use of harsh t’s, th’s and tch’s in relation to the brutal act she orchestrates:
gae… rogue… gillie… gae… rogue… dug… gaed… young… gillie… gaed… young… / fetch… tae… thyme… fetch… tae… mither’s… hert… tae… Tae… mither’s… thyme… Tae… mither’s… cut… hert…
Says, she gae fetch tae me ye rogue (go)
Hi the haw, the gillieflour, hi the thyme
Says, she gae fetch tae me ye rogue
Your mither’s hert for tae feed ma dug (mother’s heart, to, dog)
Tae his mither’s hoose gaed this young man (house, went)
Hi the haw, the gillieflour, hi the thyme
Tae his mither’s hoose gaed this young man
He cut oot her hert an awa he ran (out, away)
Note as well the bitter irony deftly embedded in the refrains that accompany this moving tale of ‘love’: ‘Hi the haw, the gillieflour, hi the thyme’. For, in medieval literature, the ‘gillieflour’ is a symbol of love and romance; thyme, a symbol of chivalry and courage. The irony is further reinforced by the soft, gentle melody: one might say, a sweet sounding ballad refrain laced with arsenic. A subtle way of saying: this, you know, is not the way things should be. Where are true love, loyalty and chivalry?
Furthermore, the refrain is set in relief by the repeated rhetorical pattern (it appears in the second line of every verse) and, equally, by the alliterative h’s which suggest the breathlessness of the son perpetrating the heinous act of matricide: ‘Hi… haw… hi…’.
Rhythmically, monosyllables set into relief the interlocked rhetorical patterns that recur between every line one and three of the verses: for example, in verses I and II where the monosyllables necessarily force the singer both to enunciate and to dwell on each word in following the brutal storyline:
A… puir… lad… an… a… lad… sae… trim
………………………………………………….
Says… she… gae… fetch… tae… me… ye… rogue
By contrast, words like ‘mi-ther’s… trip-pit… stot-tit… gree-tin’ (in verses III to the end) are disyllables that move the action of the ballad forward intensely. Moreover, like the title itself (Spea-kin Hert), and that recurring refrain (gil-lie… flo-ur), they aurally become an all pervasive heartbeat throbbing throughout the whole piece. This is neatly crafted stuff. As an example of the music of language, Hamish’s ballad is, like Burns’s ‘… red rose’, masterly. Something of a mini masterpiece.
So, a new poetic voice here? Or an old mixed voice wholly representative of the poet’s wide experience with the Travellers and the oral tradition, the ‘art’ poetry of Europe and the Scottish tradition in literature and song? Really, it is a bit of both. Looking backwards historically, Hamish maintained, as we noted, that a synthesis of ‘art’ and folk was, in fact, the norm in the Scottish literary tradition. He discerned:
A curious, and perhaps unique collaboration, over the centuries between the non-literate ballad tradition (of the Travellers) and the individual creative efforts of sophisticated literary characters (like Scott and Hogg) who were close… to the rural springs of Scots folk culture.
Looking forwards, and in terms of his vision of a cultural revolution in Scotland, Ireland and Britain, he would insist:
… the time has come for contemporary art-poets to renew their energies â not in debate in university seminar rooms, not in the pages of small magazines, but in direct contact with the folk poets. Intellectual enquiry is one thing, art something else.
For Hamish, Burns was the ultimate model of these principles. And we see this most clearly in Auld Lang Syne, a song of national and international import. Significantly, it is a song that arose out of the oral tradition, having enjoyed several incarnations over the centuries. Burns himself tells us as much as he provides a fleeting glimpse of his modus operandi â bringing together folk and ‘art’ elements in equal measure. In a letter of 1788 to Frances Dunlop, he, pawkily, reminds us that he is, in his own terms, a ‘composer’; not a mere ‘collector’ (as he is so often described).
Those (songs) marked Z, I have given to the world as old verses to their respective tunes; but, in fact, of a good many of them, little more than the Chorus is ancient; tho there is no reason for telling everybody this piece of intelligence.
In fact, Auld Lang Syne has his artistic hallmarks all over it. Apropos of our earlier discussion of Scottish culture as a unique blend of opposites, dualities and tensions, the song is, at once, national and international; couthie and philosophical; colloquial and formal.
It is a simple story set in a pub, one might imagine: drinks in hand; a serious philosophical natter well underway on the nature of ‘acquaintances’ which, in Burns’s day, often referred to friendship. A simple story. But the poet has two serious objectives in mind. He wishes to make a universal statement about human brotherhood and, at the same time, a more intimate statement about what the Scottish experience of brotherhood should be. To that end, he employs three subtle techniques with his neatly crafted music of language. All of them relate to stopping the flow of the lines and making us reflect on each word. In this connection, note the superabundance of monosyllables (about 197 of them, if you count the choruses):
For… Auld… Lang… Syne… Ma… Jo
For… Auld… Lang… Syne…
We’ll… tak… a… cup… o… etc
Arguably, ‘Au-ld’ and ‘La-ng’, in following the melodic line, are sung as disyllables; but, that only enhances the effect of the all-pervasive, reflective single syllable words. Furthermore, end stop words and lines (hard t’s and p’s) have the same effect. Examples abound in the song, as in the introductory verses and chorus. Here we have the words ‘forgot… brocht… tae… forgot’ (hard t’s â Verse I ); that critical word ‘yet’ in the chorus; the ‘pint stowp’ and ‘yet’ â once again (hard p’s and t’s â Verse II):
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brocht tae mind
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
…………………………
We’ll tak a cup o kindness yet
And surely ye’ll be your pint stowp
…………………………..
And we’ll tak a cup o kindness yet
Thirdly, and we have already underlined the importance of this, Burns uses anaphora in encouraging us to ponder the gravity of the repeated lines and in creating a haunting intonement beneath them. That is precisely the effect rhetorical repetition has in the King James bible. Think of these familiar, intoning lines from Ecclesiastes:
To every thing there is a season And a time to every purpose
under the heaven
A time to be born And a time to die…
A time to kill And a time to heal… etc
Notice those intoning repetitions:
To every… To every…
A time to… A time to… A time to…
The words create a plangent refrain which lingers in our consciousness. They stop us in our tracks; convey us to a higher plane of thought and reflection. That is why they are read at funerals. Well, the whole of Auld Lang Syne runs along these lines rhetorically. To cite just a few examples:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot (twice â Verse I) (old times gone by)
…………………………………………………………………………….
For auld lang syne (three times â Chorus)
……………………………………………………………………………..
And there’s…. And gie’s… And… we’ll (three times â Verse V)
Three subtle techniques of language. How does Burns forge them together in serving his two intentions of making a universal statement and, at the same time, an intimate Scottish statement? Quite simply, like all great Scots poets over the centuries, he becomes a master alchemist, a makar, who blends together all those fragments of his linguistic and cultural heritage. In so doing, he creates a paradigm of the language of music and the music of language, drawing upon a conflation of Scots dialects and registers of language; Old English, Neoclassical English, the English of the King James bible. In short, he achieves what Ralph Waldo Emerson said of him in a journal entry of 1840:
… (Burns) has made the Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only example in history of a language made classic by the genius of a single man
Verse V is a prime example. And I take the liberty of quoting this exactly as many of us would sing it.
An there’s a haun, ma trusty fiere! (hand, my, friend)
An gie’s a haun o thine! (give me)
An we’ll tak a richt gude-willie-waucht (take, strong draft)
For auld lang syne
What we have here is a linguistic hybrid that only a master song-writer could have created. For instance, he uses the expression ‘trusty fiere’. In his day, he would have said ‘leal freen’, and it would have scanned exactly the same way. But Burns wants to make a monumental statement, a highly serious statement. So he uses two antiquated words for effect: ‘trusty’, from Elizabethan English, and ‘fiere’, which he would have known from Scottish epic poetry â Barbour’s Brus.
Then there is that outrageous ‘gie’s a haun o thine’ which naebody would ever have said in any dialect of Scots. Can we imagine, say, a joiner from Leith, saying anything other than ‘gie’s yer haun’? But, again, Burns wants a memorable quality to these lines. He does not even say ‘gie’s thine haun’. Rather, he uses a syntax more reminiscent of John Milton, his favourite English poet, than to that of a Scots fermer in the 1780s. This is what Hamish means by a liberating tradition that balances, in equal measure, a blend of ‘art’ and folk.
So: a mixture of registers of Scots and English language for the objectives Burns has in mind in making both a universal statement and an intimate Scottish statement. From a different perspective, the poet achieves the same objective even in the verses where he is, unashamedly, the classic 18th-century poet of the Scots Vernacular Revival. Take these lines from Verses III and IV, where he nostalgically reflects upon a close childhood friendship that has had to endure prolonged separation from his friend overseas.
We twa hae rin aboot the braes, (two have run about hillsides)
And pou’d the gowans fine; (pulled the lovely daisies)
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fitt, (many, foot)
Sin auld lang syne. (Since)
We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn, (two have paddled in the stream)
Frae mornin sun till dine; (From, tea time)
But seas atween us braid hae roar’d (between, have roared widely)
Sin auld lang syne.
This is colloquial Scots all right, but consider how the intimate reflection is accompanied by the music of language: the long ringing vowel sounds and plangent ‘l’s’ that Burns so characteristically uses in his pastoral songs. My Luve is like a red, red rose is the prime example with its long a’s, e’s,ee’s, o’s, oo’s, i’s, y’s that evoke the lover’s idyllic thoughts and sentiments. And here to the fore, those same musically ringing long vowels:
Hae… aboot… braes… fine… weary… lang… syne… paidl’d…
Frae… dine… seas… atween… braid… hae… lang… syne
Again, almost like a haunting intonement running through these lines. Note as well that the poet does not depict a particular scene here but a generalised landscape. It is not Bonnie Doon, Sweet Afton, Craigieburn-Wood, but an idyllic pastoral, like a Claude Lorraine painting, that remains forevermore unnamed: an idealised scene frozen in time like Keats’s Grecian Urn. It is Scotland, and it is everywhere. And that makes it a universal human landscape to which all mankind/womankind can identify â where’er they bide in the world. A true Scottish international vision.
Structurally, Auld Lang Syne is a masterpiece. Like the old ballads, the whole of time is compressed within the space of its five short verses. In fact, there are at least three time frames operating here. With that opening rhetorical question in Verse I, it posits a timeless philosophical probing. It begs the question: is that the way of things, then, do we just forget human relations â our ‘acquaintance’? In Verses II & III, it introduces the simple past; when the two mates were young; when they ‘ran aboot the braes… paidl’d i’ the burn’. So, the timeless and the simple past. In Verses II & V, we have the here and now â the present: the one verse where it is agreed that the two lads should both buy a drink and toast their friendship; the other where they grasp hands with more serious sentiments in mind. And with the monumental language here, this hand clasp becomes a timeless symbol of universal brotherhood. If nothing else, that is the point that has been taken worldwide when people grasp their hands in friendship at the singing of Auld Lang Syne on 31 December.
The only problem, and this has everything to do with the marriage of the language of music and the music of language, is that the song is sung, universally, to the wrong tune. We said earlier that a reel was an unremitting breathless tension; thus Burns so often uses reels for his songs of rising, anticipatory sexual thoughts. O John come kiss me noo, noo, noo and Duncan Gray are the obvious examples we cited. In fact, the only time Burns fully uses the popular melody which most people would recognise as Auld Lang Syne is with a song about impotence: O can ye labour lea. A song, appropriately, set to a reel as the frustrated lassie excoriates the ‘young man’ â in no uncertain terms, over his failure to perform:
O can ye labour lea, young man (delve in untilled ground)
O can ye labour lea?
Gae back the gate ye cam again (Go, way, came)
Ye’se never scorn me (You will)
Now, O can ye labour lea is set to a typical reel with its intervals not exceeding a perfect 4th musically. That is so the reel can move along smoothly and intensely. By contrast, Burns originally set Auld Lang Syne, in The Scots Musical Museum (1796), to a melody closely wedded to his more reflective words; a slow air with its wider intervals of a major and minor 6th. Intervals more bittersweet in character; intervals that he would have recognised as a slight dissonance from his knowledge of older music. Intervals that would have underlined the more pensive, philosophical character of the song, and, in fact, prevented its ever moving along like a reel.
That is why, even in the 1960s, the interval of a 6th is used, effectively, for the film Love Story. Recall that, for Burns, form = meaning: the language of music. Thus, George Thomson created a new tradition of the song, three years after the poet’s death, when he set it to the reel. That version is permanently in place. And it would be daft to argue otherwise. But, for the sheer beauty of words and music, Burns’s Auld Lang Syne, set to its beautiful air, is, undoubtedly, one of the greatest, most meaningful songs ever written.
For Ralph Vaughan Williams, the song-writer’s achievement, overall, is unsurpassed. And, no doubt, he would have had Auld Lang Syne in mind when he states in a lecture published in the 1930s: ‘… there can be no greater original genius than Burns…’.
Unfortunately, we shall never know what Vaughan Williams would have made of the achievement of Hamish Henderson. He died in 1958, two years before The Freedom Come All Ye ever saw the light. What we can safely assert is that so much of Burns’s gift of song and, indeed, his cultural legacy were passed on to the one man, in Vaughan Williams’s terms, capable of continuing to compose songs at the same magical level. That man was Hamish Henderson.
Like Auld Lang Syne, Hamish’s The Freedom Come All Ye is a beautiful hybrid: a rich amalgam of ‘art’ and folk; high and low registers of language; intimate national reflection and profound universal statement. It is, at once, rooted in the Scots oral tradition and in the high literary ‘art’ of Europe. Take the title itself: The Freedom Come All Ye. From the Declaration of Arbroath through to John Barbour’s 14th-century epic poem, The Brus (fredome is a noble thing); right through to Robert Burns and beyond, ‘freedom’ is a central preoccupation running throughout Scottish history. And it is noteworthy that the first part of the title â ‘The Freedom…’, is quite deliberately vernacular Scots: like ‘the schule’; the Gaelic; ‘the cald’. It is, in this respect, a direct address to the Scots nation, reminding us, in a more intimate way than his formal writings that (to quote one of the letters):
Freedom is never, but never a gift from the above; it has to be won anew by its own exercise.
Intimate, direct; Scottish. But, simultaneously, European and international, especially for a lifelong socialist, an assiduous student of German language and literature, who knew fine Die Freiheit (literally, ‘The Freedom’): the Berlin daily newspaper that waxed and waned from 1918 to 1931 with its determined resistance to fascism. Moreover, on the subject of freedom, German literature was never far from Hamish’s mind: one of his most profound quotes on the subject being, as he formally claimed, ‘After Heine’:
Freedom, which has only become man here and there, must pass into the mass itself, into the lowest strata of society and become people.
The second part of the title is, equally, pregnant with suggestion and allusion. One thinks of all those Scottish, American and Irish common street ballads that begin ‘Come All Ye’ (‘jolly sailors… heroes… maidens… bachelors… etc’). Whole collections of them, like Come All Ye: Famous Old Irish Songs from the Northwest of Ireland. The point is: the second part of the title was just as conspicuously present in appealing to a broader populace than just that of our countrymen. And, generally speaking, Hamish was never one to miss an allusion, implied or otherwise. So much for Edwin Muir’s insistence that Scots folk-song exists in a ‘vacuum’.
Furthermore, there is a sense in which the song, as a conscious work of poetic artistry (like Burns’s My luve is like a red, red rose), draws upon a more generalised tradition of ‘art’ poetry and song: so many conventional images from the deep bubbling pool of English, European and Scottish literature. These are not so much clearly defined allusions as stock images that add a texture and depth to The Freedom Come All Ye. Of these, one might, for instance, think of Thomas Campion’s ‘garden… Where roses and white lilies grow… all pleasant fruits do flow…’. (like ‘roses an geans… turn tae blume’).
Moreover, for a serious song-writer and scholar, Hamish was particularly interested in the way history impinges upon the tradition of song and balladry; especially the broad, pan-European political movements like the Reformation or Jacobitism. So there is always a sense in which his songs reflect and relate to these wider socio-political movements. He spent a lifetime exploring the principle that:
… folk music and the ballad… give us as nothing else can, a conception of community in its process of change and development.
Indeed, some of his most captivating lectures trace the course of songs like Wha wudna fecht for Chairlie through to Sodge ye the cotton spinners and onwards to songs of the Boer War and World War I: that is, from the Jacobite upheaval through to workers’ protest songs in Glasgow and, ultimately, humourous songs that served as emotional release valves for soldiers suffering from the after-effects of internecine war.
Such composition is part of what he thought of as a cultural continuum: derived not so much from a conscious process as from an unconscious one â a delving back into what Hamish often called the ‘great ballad zone’ for a sense of continuity; social cohesion. Human wholeness. Certainly, The Freedom Come All Ye falls into that category. Since it is something of a socialist rallying cry, there is a general sense in which it belongs to this wider tradition.
For example, in the 18th-century, John Francis Wade penned an English version of the 17th-century Latin song Adeste Fidelis: ‘O come all ye faithful’ â according to Professor Zon of Durham University, a secretly coded Jacobite Birth-Ode written in praise of the newly born Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1720 and, itself, a rallying cry for the old cause to grow ‘joyful and triumphant’. The very folklore of such an allusion would have appealed to Hamish.
Moreover, as a ‘Piskie’, interested enough in formal religion to have stayed at the Dry Drayton Anglican Church Rectory during his Cambridge University years, and who became very close to Canon Allan Armstrong, Hamish was never far from his Episcopal and Jacobite leanings and ponderings.
Certainly, a couple of the parallels between the two songs may only be obvious parallels; but, they would certainly have occurred to him, and, in that respect, informed his art: the similarity between ‘O come all ye’ and ‘So come aa ye’; the biblical references, in Wade’s song, to ‘Bethlehem’ (meaning England and a restored Jacobite kingdom) and, in Hamish’s song, to the Garden of Eden â ‘… aa the bairns o Adam’ (Scotland, MacLean and international socialism).
Musically speaking, the John MacLellan tune, The Bloody Fields of Flanders, is itself deeply rooted in tradition, and neatly underpins the more reflective words of the song. It is, essentially, a pipe version of Bonnie Glenshee, a song from Hamish’s own boyhood home of fondest memory (Glenshee, where he asked for his ashes to be scattered) and a tune that he heard on the Anzio beachhead in 1943 as the Scottish troops were gradually pushing the Germans right back to Rome. Very much a tune, as a ¾ retreat march for the ceremonial amassing of the troops, associated with victory and determination in Hamish’s own mind and in the minds of all those soldiers and partisans engaged in the Italian campaign.
With its bittersweet, pentatonic tonality and its gentler character of the retreat ¾ (having a bit less compulsion than a conventional pipe march), it is the perfect medium for conveying both serious reflection, as in Verse II, for example, and a rallying cry, as in the final verse of the song. A striking example of the language of music.
Here too, the linguistic mix is so reminiscent of Burns. The hybridised nature of his Scots: for example, the formal, high register words from the medieval tradition â like ‘herriet’ (‘lands we’ve herriet’) from old Scots law; the ‘fell… gallows’, with its echo of Barbour’s Brus; the fresh appearance of expressions from the oral tradition â like ‘heelster-gowdie’ (‘the cloods heelster-gowdie owre the bay’); the various colloquial idioms that make the song feel like an ongoing conversation with the Scottish community at large â ‘mair nor’ (‘mair nor a roch win blawin’); ‘Nae mair’ (‘Nae mair will oor bonnie callants’).
In addition, we must recall that Hamish fought a desperate rearguard action to prevent the vernacular’s lapsing into pidgin-Scots with so many misguided folk falsifying the tradition as they self-consciously Scotticise every English word and expression in their midst. Never mind the fact that, like Dutch and German, for example, Scots and English are cognate languages, sharing a similar vocabulary. Hence, the word in Scots is indeed ‘freedom’ â not ‘unyokin’; ‘parliament’ â not ‘the muckle-hoose’.
As Gramsci said of Sardinian dialect in relation to Italian: the far more significant differences between two tongues is manifested in their idioms; not in their vocabulary. We must recall as well that Hamish, quite rightly, argued for a hybridised use of poetic language: the use of English (or Zulu, in the case of ‘Rivonia’) where appropriate to the song. As he insisted:
In the folk field, as well as in the less sure-footed literary Lallans, Scots may be said to ‘include Engish and go beyond it’.
Hence his subtle interweaving of English for effect. For example, ‘they rogues’ (Verse I), so prententious and full of themselves, are described in reductive, ironical English as arrogantly strutting about ‘fresh and gay’ (not in Scots, ‘fers an blythe’); and their ill pranks are said to ‘sport an play’. Not at all the language the contemporary Scotticisers would have made of it with their over-the-shoulder self-consciousness. And the ‘great glen’ remains the ‘great glen’; not the ‘muckle glen’ or the ‘meikle glen’ which, in truth, it never was and never will be.
Moreover, our poet wants/needs the monosyllables of the two guttural g’s (‘great glen’) for his carefully crafted alliteration pattern in slating his ‘rogues’: ‘great… glen… gar… gang… gallus… gay’. Here, a symphony of hard, derisive guttural g’s worthy of a Dunbar or Henryson which he applies with even greater efficacy in excoriating the ‘braggarts’ (Verse II) â with its concert of harshly interwoven c’s, b’s, k’s and t’s â ‘callants… crousely… craw… clachan… curse’/’bonnie… braggarts… Broomie… Broken… Brave… Black… barracks… bare’. A bit like spitting venom by a man who fully appreciates his medieval flytings. In a more triumphant vein, sound = sense in those Verse III rhymes that conjure up the ringing of a liberty bell: ‘doom… room… bloom… doon’ â as do the interlocked alliterative d’s: ‘Free-dom… A-dam’.
Syntax too plays an integral role in so subtly, deceptively elevating the monumental expression of the work and, as with Burns’s ‘gies a haun o thine’, easily tripping-off the tongue as if the words were everyday colloquial speech that we all just sing so naturally. Yet another example of the artistic glamourie of the poet. Consider for a moment all those Germanic-like turns of phrase throughout The Freedom Come All Ye. At times, it is as if Hamish were writing in German or Dutch, as with all those verbs at the end of sentences:
For their il-ploys tae sport an play…
Black and white ane til ither marriet…
Both a means of keeping the music of his language fresh, new and, equally, of setting his words into memorable relief. Hamish, so like Burns, was having a field day with syntax for the song. For instance, it is not the straight syntax â the ‘win is roch i’ the clear day’s dawin… An the cloods blaw heilster-gowdie owre the bay…’ â but:
Roch the wind i’ the clear day’s dawin
Blaws the cloods heelster gowdie owre the bay…
Not ‘Dings doun the burghers’ fell gallows’, but ‘Dings the fellow gallows o the burghers doon’. Structurally, as with Auld Lang Syne, the song encompasses the same interesting duality and time frames that exercised Burns: above all, the compulsion to make an artistic statement that was both national and international, intimate and philosophical.
The present vision of the ‘roch win’ of change in Verse I apparently inspired Bob Dylan. The sadder and wiser future in Verse II of a Scotland finally at peace with itself and its not so heroic past: where ‘wee weans’ no longer ‘Mourn the ships sailin doon the Broomielaw’; where ‘Broken faimlies’ no longer curse Scotland the Brave for committing atrocities in the name of the British Empire, or blatant acts of white racism in the former British colonies.
The final call in Verse III is to rally now for ‘freedom’ (right where we stand) â with ‘MacLean’ and against apartheid. Thus his images link the local and the international â ‘the great glen’ and ‘the warl’; ‘Springburn’ and ‘Nyanga’; ‘MacLean’ and ‘a’ the bairns o Adam’ (all folk wherever they be). A unifying message for the planet. As Hamish so often reminded us:
I called myself and call myself a Scottish nationalist but I have tried to make it clear that a good nationalist must first be a good internationalistâ¦
Fred Freeman is Professor of Scots Language and Scots Song at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
For Part 1 of ‘Burns, Hamish and song’, Click here