Scots Ballads & Bothy Songs: The Muckle Sangs and the Ploughman's Lilt

• Ord defined bothy song simply. "Bothy-song is just another name for folk-song," he wrote: songs that circulate "among the common people of a country, and [have] originated among them... a communal product and not, as a rule, the result of individual effort".
• The songs were social documents. They named farms and farmers, such as "the great Drumdelgie, upon sweet Deveronside" and "the Barnyards o' Delgaty". They complained about food, horses and wages, and warned other servants away from bad masters.
• The feeing market was the heart of the system. Farm servants were hired at markets for six months or a year at a time. Many songs describe a farmer's "fine story" at the fair and the disappointment that followed.
• Many genres died with the jobs. Ord noted that shearing and harvest songs disappeared with the reaping machine, and herding songs with the fencing of fields after the Education Act of 1872. Begging songs faded with the Poor Law and the Vagrancy Acts.
• The north-east kept its own ballads and Jacobite songs. Ord heard songs such as "The Muir of Culloden" and a ballad of the 1745 Battle of Inverurie only in the farm kitchens of Aberdeen, Banff and Moray.
• Women were among the greatest ballad sources. Anna Gordon of Aberdeen, later Mrs Brown of Falkland, supplied ballads used by Walter Scott and Robert Jamieson.
• The great collections followed. They include Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–03), Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), Gavin Greig's work in Buchan (with James Bruce Duncan), and the twentieth-century folk revival led by Hamish Henderson.

John Ord was an unlikely folklorist. He was a senior officer of the Glasgow Police, a superintendent decorated for his service, and the author of a history of the Glasgow police force and a history of the Barony of Gorbals. He was also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. He had grown up in the north-east, and throughout his career he collected the songs of his native countryside, noting them down "in the bothies and farm-kitchens" rather than copying them from printed books. He had earlier published Ballads and Folk-Songs of the Clyde Valley.

He did not live to see his great collection in print. The Principal of Glasgow University, Robert Rait, himself a north-easterner, wrote the foreword in April 1930. He called it "the classical work on a subject the importance of which is receiving wide recognition... We have here the real thing — the songs as actually sung in the bothies of the farms in the north." In its pages, Rait wrote, "food and drink, work and play, lovers' happiness and their tragedies... echoes of fairy tales and of civil war... are here preserved with pious care in this Book of Remembrance."

Ord drew a clear line between the two forms. A ballad, he wrote, "is a species of minor epic, that is, it narrates a story, real or fictitious, representing some heroic action, or event of lasting importance in the history of a nation or race, or it may be some long forgotten love tragedy, or dark deed of revenge." Scottish love songs, he added, "generally tell a story, while their English analogues are simply sentiments in rhyme." And he insisted on one point above all: "To hear folk-songs to the best advantage, they should be sung and not read."

He was frank about the words: "the rhythm halts, and the rhyme does not run smoothly, and in many cases they are pure doggerel". The tunes, though, were "in many cases exceptionally fine, and often superior to all except the very best of our standard Scottish songs". He compared the songs of the concert hall to hothouse flowers and the songs of the bothy to the wild flowers of the fields and glens.

The great narrative ballads, known to traditional singers as the muckle sangs ("big songs"), are among Scotland's finest literary inheritances. They tell of the fairy abduction in "Tam Lin", the drowned nobles of "Sir Patrick Spens", the carrion birds of "The Twa Corbies", and the battles and feuds of the Borders and the north-east.

The north-east kept a rich store of them. Ord prints "The Battle of Harlaw", about the bloody fight near Inverurie in 1411 between the Lord of the Isles and the north-east lairds:

As I cam' in by Garioch land, And down by Neitherha', There were fifty thousand Highlandmen A' marching to Harlaw.

He also describes an Aberdeenshire ballad of the supernatural in which Sir John Gordon falls asleep under the elfin tree, mistakes the Fairy Queen for the Virgin Mary, kisses her, and is carried off through a landscape of "dead men's banes" to Fairyland. The belief in the supernatural, Ord wrote, "still lingers in the straths and glens of the north-east of Scotland", where old folk would tell "in confidence that they have heard the fairy music at the dead of night".

Aberdeenshire, he noted, "has been a fruitful field for the ballad hunter". The first great source was Anna Gordon, daughter of Professor Thomas Gordon of King's College, Aberdeen. As Mrs Brown of Falkland she wrote down ballads learned in childhood, and Walter Scott used them in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–03), as did Robert Jamieson in his collection. Peter Buchan, Dean William Christie and Gavin Greig followed. Ord's friend Greig, a schoolmaster at New Deer, collected "hundreds of ballads, folk-songs, and folk-melodies" in Buchan, many never printed before. Across the Atlantic, the Harvard scholar Francis James Child gathered 305 ballad types, with all their variants, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98). Many of the finest versions are Scottish, and "Tam Lin" is Child 39.

established An enchanted instrument. The harp appears again and again in the muckle sangs, nearly always with magic in it. Keith Sanger and Alison Kinnaird, in Tree of Strings (1992), the standard history of the harp in Scotland, gather the examples in their opening chapter. In some versions of "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" (Child 4) the elf knight "harped them all asleep" except the king's daughter. In "Thomas the Rhymer" (Child 37) the Queen of Fairy invites True Thomas to "harp and carp" with her. "Glenkindie" (Child 67) is a harper who could harp "a fish out o saut water, / Or water out o a stane", until his own serving man harps him asleep. In "The Harper of Lochmaben" (Child 192), and an Aberdeenshire version known as "The Harping Mannie", a harper lulls King Henry's court to sleep and steals the king's horse. In "The Twa Brothers" (Child 49) Lady Margaret harps her dead love out of the grave.

established Binnorie. The most famous harp ballad is "The Twa Sisters" (Child 10), often sung with the refrain "Binnorie, O Binnorie". A jealous elder sister drowns the younger. A harper finds the body and makes a harp from her bones, or strings it with her golden hair or uses her finger-bones as pins. At the feast the harp plays by itself and names the murderess. One Scottish version, as quoted by Sanger and Kinnaird, ends: "And the lasten tune that the harp did play / Was 'Wae tae my sister, wha drooned me'." They explain the power of the image through the old belief that the soul lived in the bones and hair.

established Orfeo. A Scottish manuscript of about 1585 preserves "King Orphius", a version of the medieval romance of Orpheus in which the king plays a harp, not a lyre, and wins back his queen from the King of Fairy. A ballad form of the story, "King Orfeo" (Child 19), was still sung in Shetland into the 20th century.

shared Real harpers behind the songs? Sanger and Kinnaird think the harp was the likely accompaniment for narrative Scots ballads in the Middle Ages, but they find little record of it. Women harp often in the ballads, yet the records name almost no Scottish women harpers: "Meg of Abernethy, harper" in Aberdeen's burgh records of 1398–1407, and an unnamed "woman clairsocher" paid 12 shillings by the Dowager Countess of Mar in 1642. Because the ballads were mostly written down only from the 18th century, they suggest the heroines' harps may in some cases be later additions. They also note that in still later versions of "King Orfeo" and "Binnorie" the fiddle has taken the harp's place, just as it did in real life.

The bothy song grew out of a particular way of farming. On the big farms of the north-east, unmarried men were hired for a term of six months or a year. They lived in a bothy, an outbuilding where they cooked for themselves, or in a chaumer, a room above the stable, and ate in the farm kitchen. The pecking order was strict: the foreman, then the horsemen with their pairs, then the orra man (odd-jobs man) and the halflins and loons (boys). Their songs, Ord wrote, "deal with the every day affairs of the country people, depicting their life with its lights and its shadows".

The working day began early. "Drumdelgie", one of the best-known bothy ballads, sets the scene on a big farm near Cairnie:

There's a fairmer up in Cairnie, Wha's kent baith far and wide To be the great Drumdelgie, Upon sweet Deveronside. The fairmer o' yon muckle toon He is baith hard and sair, And the cauldest day that ever blaws His servants get their share.

The men rise at five, feed and groom the horses, eat their brose, thresh in the dark, and go out to plough or cart in frost and snow.

The ploughman's pride shines through. In "The Bonnie Lad that Handles the Plough", every other trade, from mason to tailor, is found wanting next to the ploughman, and one song calls on Samson, Solomon, Alexander and King David to prove the point:

But none of those bold heroes Could live without the plough.

Food is a running complaint. Ord explains that in the bothies the men were often simply given six and a half bolls of oatmeal a year and a Scots pint of milk a day, "and they had to make their own food in the bothies. In such cases it was brose for breakfast, dinner, and supper." The songs make the point with feeling:

The breid was thick, the brose was thin, The broth they were like bree; I chased the barley roun' the plate, And a' I got were three.

The horses fare no better. "The Barnyards o' Delgaty", sung to the chorus "Linten adie toorin adie", tells of a young man fee'd at Turriff market by a farmer who promised him "the ae best pair I ever set my e'en upon":

When I gaed hame to Barnyards There was naething there but skin and bone. The auld black horse sat on his rump, The auld white meer lay on her wime.

These songs served a purpose. A hard or mean farmer soon found, Ord notes, that servants "did not renew their engagements" with him. He then had to go to distant markets where he was not known, "and with smiling faces and false promises which they never meant to keep... engage strangers". The songs carried warnings from fair to fair:

Come lads, a' ye jolly ploughmen That whistle through the fair, Beware o' gaun to Swaggers, He'll be in Porter Fair.

"The Weary Farmers" is blunter still, about masters who buy the lads small beer at the hiring, "and grunt and say that siller's scarce — the set o' leein' villains", and who feed their men "cauld kail and tatties... while they sit at their tea and toast".

Ord also notes the landlord's side. Crofters and small farmers sang of eviction by "the laird and his factor", and of a justice system in which, as he put it, the poacher always seemed to come off worse than the hen thief.

The feeing market was the great event of the ploughman's year. There servants and farmers struck their bargains, often sealed with a drink and an "arles" payment. The foreman of a big farm cut a dash, as in a song Ord quotes:

I had a hat upon my heid, It cost me mair than half a guinea.

The ploughing match was the other great day, and the songs relish the excuses of the losers:

Some said their rigs were fearfu' teuch, Some said that theirs were stony, The furs wad neither cut nor grip, Nor yet look square nor bonnie.

"The Guise o' Tough" is a cheerful account of a new orra man's term. Fee'd at Alford "in the year o' ninety-one", he meets a pair of horses that "gart me rue", a plough that "wadna throw the fur", and a farmer who threatens to put him off the farm after he breaks the potato masher.

Gavin Greig thought the north-east "folk-songist" was "not a fervid lover". Ord disagreed, and quoted lines such as:

The ox may hang in the plough, love, The cow may drown in the mire, But the laddie will never want his riches That marries his heart's desire.

He notes that a verse of this kind, "Love for love is the bargain for me", was "touched up by Burns" for his "Collier Laddie".

The jilted lovers of the songs range from the brisk heroine of "Mormond Braes", who decides "there's as good fish into the sea as ever yet was taken", to a forsaken woman whose curse on her lover's wedding is so savage that, Ord wrote, it would "almost make a person shiver". There is comedy too. In "The Bonnie Wee Window" a lover gets his head stuck through a broken pane while stealing a kiss. In "Kissing in the Dark" a lad hugs and kisses his sweetheart's mother by mistake.

Harvest songs were a class of their own. "The Band o' Shearers", from the days of the hand sickle, was known in every county. Ord describes the old harvest customs: a woman's day's work was reckoned in "thraives" (two stooks of twelve sheaves), and a bandster could claim a kiss from the gatherer whenever one of her bands slipped. He also tells the story of the "Lothian Hairst": bands of north-east harvesters sailed from Aberdeen to work the earlier harvest in the Lothians under a contractor, and their foreman, Logan in the song, cleared the women's bothy every night. He records the death in 1923, at ninety-nine, of a Banffshire man believed to be the last of the Lothian harvesters.

Machines ended that world. The scythe replaced the hook, then in the late 1860s and early 1870s came the reaping machine, and by the 1890s the self-binder. "There is little fun now on the harvest rig," Ord wrote. "Clyacks, kirns, and harvest home festivals have passed into the limbo of forgotten things." The herd laddie, with his notched stick and his songs, disappeared once fields were fenced and children had to attend school after 1872.

Ord found that the north-east kept songs that were "never heard except in the bothies and the farm-kitchens". "In no other part of the country," he wrote, "was the Jacobite spirit so strong." He links this to the raising of the Earl of Mar's standard on Deeside in 1715 and to the Aberdeenshire regiments who fought at Culloden. He prints verses of "The Muir of Culloden" and a ballad of the Battle of Inverurie (December 1745), in which Lord Lewis Gordon's north-east Jacobites routed a government force under MacLeod.

The wars of empire left their mark too. Songs of the Napoleonic Wars, such as "The Banks o' the Nile", "Young Jamie Foyers" (about the siege of Burgos) and a ballad of Barossa (1811), were, Ord says, "genuine bothy-songs, and have never been sung in the drawing-room or the concert hall."

Begging songs reflected an older social order, when the licensed beggar, the "blue-gown" or King's Bedesman with his pewter badge, was a welcome carrier of news. They faded as poor relief and the police changed rural life.

Ord ended his introduction with a question: would the songs, "transplanted from their native soil", live on, or "pine and die"? He hoped they would "live to gladden the hearts of generations yet unborn, and teach them something of the lives and customs of their countrymen of past generations, that cannot be learned from histories and school books."

The answer came after the Second World War. The School of Scottish Studies was founded at the University of Edinburgh in 1951, and collectors led by Hamish Henderson recorded farm servants and Scottish Travellers, among whom the muckle sangs had survived. The Aberdeen Traveller singer Jeannie Robertson, recorded by Henderson in 1953, became internationally famous. The Greig–Duncan manuscripts were eventually published in full. Bothy ballad competitions and festivals in the north-east still keep the songs in the mouths of singers, as Ord insisted they should be.

• Farm servants in some bothies were given oatmeal and milk as wages in kind and lived on brose three times a day.
• A Scottish herd boy's club was carved with a knot called the "meltie-bow", believed to stop a blow from seriously injuring an animal.
• A bandster at harvest could claim a kiss whenever a girl's sheaf band slipped. Ord was told such slips happened "with amazing rapidity".
• One of Scotland's finest records of rural song was compiled by a Glasgow police superintendent.
• In "The Twa Sisters" a harp made from a drowned girl's body plays by itself and names her murderer.
• A ballad of King Orfeo, the Orpheus story with a harp, was still sung in Shetland in the 20th century.

• Edited texts. Even "as sung" collections show editorial tidying and English spelling of Scots words.
• Ord's history. Ord's asides on history (battle numbers, the first scythe, King James V's authorship) are those of an enthusiast and need checking.
• Many versions. Most songs exist in several versions. The quotations here follow Ord's texts.
• Revival details. The post-war revival and later publications are summarised from general sources, not from Ord.
• Harps in ballads. Do not take a harper in a ballad as evidence that real harpers played that song. The harp is often a magical motif, and in some versions it may have replaced singing.

• Tam Lin
• Thomas the Rhymer
• Gaelic Song Traditions
• Crofting Life
• Walter Scott & the Historical Novel