The Ceilidh

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The word's history is well documented in dictionaries and in Carmichael's account. Rural dancing is documented through Kirk session records, visitors' journals and memoirs, gathered by the dance historian George S. Emmerson in A Social History of Scottish Dance (1972); those records are treated as established, his interpretations as his. The weak points are the origins of individual dances, which often rest on the accounts of dance societies and later collectors. The idea that today's ceilidh dances are ancient Highland tradition is the main myth: many were composed, adapted or standardised in the 19th and 20th centuries.

A word for a visit

established "Ceilidh" comes from Gaelic words meaning a visit, ultimately from Old Irish céile, "companion". Scottish Gaelic cèilidh and Irish céilí come from the same source, because Scottish Gaelic itself descends from the Gaelic brought from Ireland. The ceilidh is therefore a shared Gaelic inheritance, not a Scottish invention. The word also passed into Scots as kailie or kaley, which the Scottish National Dictionary defines as a social evening among neighbours with singing and storytelling, or simply a friendly visit.

The old ceilidh

established The original ceilidh was not a dance. It was an evening when neighbours gathered in a house, often one particular house in a township, to talk, share news, tell stories, recite poetry and sing. Alexander Carmichael, the collector of Gaelic oral tradition, described it in Carmina Gadelica in 1900 as a "literary entertainment where stories and tales, poems and ballads, are rehearsed and recited". These evenings carried the oral culture of the Gaelic world: genealogies, songs and long hero tales passed on by heart.

established One of the fullest pictures comes from Dr Norman Macleod, minister of Campsie, writing in Gaelic around 1830, later translated by his son Norman Macleod in Reminiscences of a Highland Parish (1867). Round the peat fire of a black-house, girls knit, one man busks fishing hooks and another makes baskets, while herd boys listen from the floor. A shepherd opens the evening on two Jew's harps, the famous "Lochaber trumps", playing reels, strathspeys and jigs; then come songs, stories, improvised verses, riddles and more tunes. Emmerson called the ceilidh the public forum of the Gaelic township, where news was discussed and culture handed from one generation to the next.

established A Jew's harp, not a clàrsach. The "harp" of the ceilidh house was the small mouth-played Jew's harp, not the Gaelic harp. Keith Sanger and Alison Kinnaird, in Tree of Strings (1992), their archival history of the harp in Scotland, stress that the clàrsach was never a folk instrument. It was played by trained professionals and by the gentry, in chiefs' halls and lairds' houses, and would not have been found in a croft, where the whistle, the Jew's harp and the fiddle were the instruments to hand. By the time of the township ceilidhs described above, the professional Highland harper had already died out: Murdoch MacDonald, harper to MacLean of Coll and called the last of the Hebridean harpers, died about 1739. The tales and ballads told at the ceilidh did keep the harp alive in story, from harpers who lull whole households to sleep to the mermaid in a South Uist tale who gives back a swallowed husband in return for harp music.

shared An older pattern. Sanger and Kinnaird quote a letter of 1693 from a student from Strathspey to his professor at King's College, Aberdeen, describing bands of nine to twelve women who went from house to house singing the poets' songs, "ordinarlie" with a fiddler, and then dancing. They read it as the fiddle taking over a role once held by the harp. It also shows song, verse and dance travelling from house to house more than a century before the ceilidh accounts quoted here.

Dancing at the old ceilidh

shared Dancing was part of this world, but not usually indoors. Emmerson points out that a typical Highland house of the 18th and 19th centuries had scarcely room for a threesome reel. When the moon and the weather were fair, the young people would go out to dance on the green or the road, to a piper or fiddler if one was there, otherwise to mouth music (puirt-a-beul), "deedling", a Jew's harp or, later, the melodeon. Emmerson noted that the practice could still be met in the Hebrides in his own day. Hogmanay in the West Highlands brought songs and then dramatic dances: a woman with a bunch of keys capering as "the old wife of the mill-dust" (Cailleach an Dudain), the Black Sluggard, the goat dance, "Weave the Gown" and "The Thorny Croft". In South Uist the St Michael's Day balls ran all night in the largest house with the evenest floor, with many curious scenes acted and dances performed, until the festival's races ended in 1866.

established In the Lowlands the nearest equivalent was the Ayrshire "rocking", named after the rock or distaff the women brought to spin together. By the 18th century, John Mitchell recalled of Ayrshire about 1780, rockings had become gatherings of young people who played games and danced in a neighbour's house.

Weddings, kirns and fairs

established The great dancing occasions of rural Scotland were the wedding, the harvest home and the fair. The "penny wedding", at which each guest paid towards the feast, could draw two hundred people or more. The Kirk objected less to dancing as such than to "superfluous banqueting", pipers and promiscuous (mixed) dancing. In 1645 the General Assembly told presbyteries to restrict penny bridals; in 1647 Haddington and Dunbar limited them to twenty guests and banned piping and dancing; Parliament legislated on numbers in 1681. Weddings went on regardless. In 1805 the Rev. James Hall came on a country wedding near Montrose with about four hundred guests, cauldrons of broth, a tent, and dancing on the green: reels, country dances, minuets and Highland capers.

established Wedding dancing had its own customs. In the Strathspey of about 1820, the guests made a ring on the lawn by torchlight for the bridal party's "shemit reel". In the West Highlands the first dance was the Wedding Reel, for the couple, best man and bridesmaid; in the Catholic islands the Stealing Reel let first the bride and then the groom slip away to bed. Everywhere the last dance was the Kissing Reel, Babbity Bowster or the Cushion Dance, in which each dancer in turn chose a partner, knelt with them on a cushion or handkerchief and kissed, until the ring had danced itself out. In South Uist it was danced to "The White Cockade" and couples left the dance, and the hall, two by two. Kissing one's partner before and after a reel survived in parts of the countryside into the 20th century.

established The kirn, or harvest home, was held in the empty granary after the last sheaf, the "maiden", had been cut and carried home in triumph; there was a feast, dancing, songs and sometimes a dramatic jig, and the old and young danced together. At fairs, William Aiton described Ayrshire lads and lassies in 1811 struggling for room to dance reels in crowded ale-house long rooms and barns. Enterprising fiddlers and dancing masters began to hire halls for the day of a fair and charge a penny a dance, "penny reels", which Emmerson saw as the beginning of the 20th-century public dance hall.

Kitchen dances and lairds' balls

established Where there was room, the dancing came indoors. In 1773 Boswell and Johnson found the MacLeods of Raasay dancing every night of the year to a fiddler, and Johnson, as quoted by Emmerson, said "I know not how we shall get away". In Skye in 1860 the poet Alexander Smith watched a farm kitchen cleared after dark: candles in tin sconces, the dogs put out, girls in white stockings and shepherds in their best, and a fiddler by the fire, the dancing ending in a whirl of the Reel of Tulloch. In the Strathspey of about 1813 Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus described the harvest-home and foresters' balls, with servants, labourers and family dancing together in the hay loft and threshing-mill floor. By the late 18th century the laird's ball for his tenants and neighbours had become a custom, and by the late 19th century the dances there were reels, strathspeys and the Reel of Tulloch, with country dances such as Petronella, Haymakers and Strip the Willow, the polka and the Highland schottische.

established These dances were spread and refreshed by itinerant dancing masters, known as the "dancie" or "professor", who followed a circuit and held classes for several weeks in a barn or village hall, ending with a ball. Robert Burns's Ayrshire learned its reels, strathspeys, country dances and hornpipes from such teachers, in barns lit by candles stuck in cloven sticks. Country dances reached the West Highlands and Hebrides only in the 1850s; before that the islands danced reels, including circular foursome reels, and simple game-like dances such as the Pin Reel and Coille Bharrach.

Hard times and silence

established In the 19th century the Clearances, poverty and an intense evangelical revival bore hard on the music and dancing of parts of the Highlands and Islands. Carmichael recorded an old woman in Lewis who described how the new ministers and elders did away with songs, stories, music and dancing, and broke and burnt the people's instruments. Emmerson thought the effect easy to exaggerate but real, and noted that the Catholic islands, such as South Uist and Barra, kept most for the collectors.

From visit to dance

established In the 20th century the word narrowed to mean an organised evening of social dancing. A modern ceilidh band usually has between two and six players, typically on fiddle, accordion, keyboard, drums and bass or guitar. A caller teaches each dance before it starts, so that anyone can join in. Ceilidhs are now held for weddings, birthdays and fundraisers, and the format has spread to England, where callers are in demand and the melodeon is a central instrument.

established Ireland developed its own dance tradition under the same name. The Gaelic League, founded in 1893, promoted dance and music classes, and the first Irish céilí band was formed for radio in 1926.

How old are the dances?

shared Many of the dances done at ceilidhs are not ancient. The tune of the Dashing White Sergeant was set by the English composer Sir Henry Bishop in 1826, to words traditionally attributed to General John Burgoyne. The dance itself, done in trios facing trios round the room, is usually said to take its steps from Swedish circle dancing. Emmerson placed it among the "Swedish Dances" invented by the London dancing master G. M. S. Chivers in the 1820s, in which each man dances with a partner on either side; he saw it as a round-the-room development of the threesome reel, which appeared in English ballrooms around the middle of the 19th century. Either way, it is a ballroom creation, not a Highland folk dance.

shared The Eightsome Reel is said to have been devised in the early 1870s by the Earl of Dunmore and his friends at the time of the Atholl Gathering Ball, then danced at Portree and Perth, according to a note in the RSCDS books. Emmerson showed it was built on older material: reels for eight appear in manuscripts of 1805 and 1818, and a version with the square formation and double wheel was printed in 1830. It merged the reel, the round reel and the country dance, and by the early 20th century it was the one reel almost every Scot knew. It reached some districts late: one of Emmerson's friends brought it to Knapdale in Argyll in the late 19th century, having learned it at a dance in Lochgilphead.

established Strip the Willow belongs to an older family of weaving dances, danced with accented running steps in 9/8 time; in England it was known as Drops of Brandy, after its tune. By the 20th century it was usually danced to reels or marches. Emmerson counted it and the Eightsome as the two survivors of Scottish traditional social dance still known to the general public, outside the dance clubs, in 1972. The Highland Schottische, a Scottish version of a Nordic polka to strathspey-like tunes, was popular at Victorian balls; Queen Victoria noted how well it was liked at a ball at Inveraray in 1875. The Gay Gordons is a couple dance of the "old-time" ballroom type of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Standardising the steps

established By the early 20th century the old social dances were fading. In the towns the quadrille, lancers, waltz and polka had taken over; after the First World War jazz and modern ballroom dancing pushed out most of the rest, and Emmerson found that by 1923 even the Northern Meeting ball in Inverness was played by a jazz band. On 26 November 1923 a public meeting at the Athenaeum in Glasgow founded the Scottish Country Dance Society, led by Ysobel Stewart and Jean Milligan. Its aim was to preserve the dances, music and traditions of Scottish country dancing. It grew out of the publication of a book of dances and went on to publish many more, fixing versions of dances that had varied from place to place. Princess Elizabeth became patron in 1947, and King George VI granted the title "Royal" in 1951. The country dancing taught by the RSCDS and the looser, called dancing of a ceilidh are related but distinct traditions.

• "Ceilidh" originally meant a visit, not a dance.
• The word comes from an Old Irish word for a companion.
• In Scots, a friendly evening visit was a kailie.
• Alexander Carmichael called the old ceilidh a "literary entertainment".
• The old ceilidh's favourite instrument in many houses was the Jew's harp, or "trump".
• In Ayrshire, spinning evenings called "rockings" turned into young people's dances.
• In 1647 two East Lothian presbyteries tried to limit weddings to twenty guests and ban dancing at them.
• The last dance at an old Scottish wedding was usually a kissing dance, Babbity Bowster.
• At Raasay in 1773 the laird's household danced every night of the year.
• "Penny reels" at fairs, a penny a dance, were an ancestor of the public dance hall.
• Country dances reached the Hebrides only in the 1850s.
• The tune of the Dashing White Sergeant was written by an English composer in 1826.
• The Eightsome Reel built on reels for eight dancers recorded as early as 1805.
• The Scottish Country Dance Society was founded in Glasgow in 1923.
• The first Irish céilí band was formed for radio in 1926.

• Do not say the ceilidh was always a dance; it began as a visit and gathering for stories and song.
• Do not say there was no dancing in the old Gaelic world; it happened outdoors, at weddings, kirns and in larger kitchens and barns.
• Do not say the Kirk banned dancing outright; it restricted it, mostly at weddings and in service time.
• Do not present the ceilidh as a purely Scottish invention; it is shared with Ireland.
• Do not call the Dashing White Sergeant or the Eightsome Reel ancient Highland dances.
• Do not treat RSCDS country dancing and ceilidh dancing as identical.
• Do not picture the clàrsach (Gaelic harp) at a township ceilidh; the "harp" there was the Jew's harp.