2025 Hamish Henderson Memorial Lecture
Edinburgh, 15 November, 2025
The Edinburgh Music Review is pleased to publish David Francis’s 2025 Hamish Henderson Memorial Lecture in full.
I only met Hamish Henderson a few times, the first time when he came and gave his blessing to Aberdeen Folksong Club’s 21st anniversary celebrations back in 1983, and subsequently when I helped organise his 80th birthday celebrations in 1999. He was, of course, a kenspeckle figure at festivals and events throughout the land, where he would often be obliging the company with a song, fist inevitably wrapped round a dram.
Hamish was a lucid, even mellifluous writer who has shaped our understanding of that ‘lively and creative popular culture’, an underground song culture that persisted into the present, full of energy and fresh vigour if you knew where to look for it. Flicking through his writing and his letters there’s a text for exegesis, an idea for further contemplation on practically every page.
At that folk club celebration in Aberdeen Hamish reminisced naturally about his first encounter with Jeannie Robertson at her ‘wee hoose in Causewayend’, and indeed, having become immersed in the folk scene in that city – folk clubs, sessions, ad hoc bands and all the rest of it – a few years after Jeannie’s death, I was to hear her name frequently invoked, as she remained a kind of spirit presence. The other person with a similar esteem, who likewise had passed on before my own involvement, was Jimmy MacBeath, the subject of one of Hamish’s brilliant pen portraits in the School of Scottish Studies Tocher magazine[i].
Jimmy MacBeath was a singer who was born in Portsoy on the Banffshire coast. He learned songs from his mother and from his contemporaries as a young farm hand and a soldier in the first world war. You can get a sense of the hardship of the former work when it almost seemed that life in the trenches was preferable. When he came out of the Army he never settled in any one place but went on the road as a street singer and itinerant labourer, maybe working in kitchens at times, or at the berries in season. He would sing around the back courts of tenements, at feein marts, in pubs and for cinema queues. Some days he made a good sum of money; on other days when pickings were slimmer he would either sleep rough or in one of the ‘model lodging houses’, such as the notorious ‘Lodger’ in East North Street in Aberdeen, where he spent the latter part of his life. At one time in some of the lodging houses, if you turned up and all the beds were taken, for a penny you would be offered a place at a rope over which you could drape your arms and sleep upright. It wasn’t an easy life.
His work as a performer was largely unmediated. – by that I mean that it did not rely on any means of distribution other than his personal presence. He’d been a part of everyday life in the North East of Scotland, singing both for an income and sometimes just for the entertainment of his companions. His repertoire and his familiar and welcome appearance were part of local cultural life, understood, liked, and probably a little taken for granted, as part of the lifeworld of the people he lived among. His work as a performer was based on a very simple economic model. He sang. People gave him a modest contribution or they didn’t. His performance belonged to a world where reproduction of a song repertoire was more likely to be through oral transmission than the printed page. A performance was, to quote Walter Benjamin, ‘its unique existence at the place it happens to be.’[ii] Indeed Hamish Henderson recalls seeing Jimmy in a hotel bar in Old Deer in Aberdeenshire in the very act of passing on a song verse by verse to a young farm labourer who had taken an interest.
That straightforward economic and performative model changed in 1951 when he was recorded by Hamish and Alan Lomax. The recordings were used for several different purposes: for the new School of Scottish Studies collection, for the BBC, for Columbia Records’ World Library of Primitive and Folk Music, and for lodging in a museum in the US. The recording led to appearances on TV and radio, and record releases. Jimmy’s repertoire didn’t change much, or his performance style, but something had changed in terms of his relationship to the world. The men who recorded him were not cigar-chomping record executives who rolled up offering to make Jimmy a star, but they came from an equally unfamiliar context, the mediating and mediated world of the intellect, of publishers, radio, the academy. Hamish recognised it himself as he wrote, ‘Those early recording sessions in the Commercial Hotel in Turriff marked the intersection in space and time of the old world of Aikey Fair and the new world of the as yet undreamed of Keele Festival of the future.’
So what was the nature of that change? How could it best be described?
In terms of the usage of the MacBeath recordings, the presence in the mix of record companies and radio and TV appearances prompts the suggestion that what had been an unmediated factor of everyday life in the North East of Scotland was now a commodity, that not only the songs but the performances and the performer himself had become commoditised, a product which produced exchange value for record companies, and an item of consumption for media organisations. Jimmy MacBeath had become ‘Jimmy MacBeath’. Could you argue that his repertoire was already commoditised as his stock in trade, his means of making a living? When he came out the Army the potential of his voice of his voice was recognised by others who urged him to exploit it, Lucy Stewart’s brother, Geordie, even going so far as to advise him that it was the road to fame and fortune. But the difference is in the unmediated nature of his life and performance pre-recording. Having said all that, it’s certainly the case that Jimmy himself was not averse to the attentions of Columbia Records at whose expense he wined and dined at the best hotel in Turriff when the recordings were made!
I don’t think it’s unfair to say that MacBeath and his contemporaries were co-opted into a particular cultural project. Hamish had long been aware of the mis-representation of folk song from the sanitised Victorian songbooks to the BBC’s polished and de-contextualised accounts – what he referred to as ‘muckin the byre in white tie and tails’, and on to its being completely ignored by the likes of the Edinburgh International Festival. For voices like Jimmy MacBeath’s to be heard was a matter of ‘cultural equity’, in the phrase later coined by Lomax, but more than that, Hamish was keen, in the words of Alec Finlay, to yolk what he saw as the ‘positive and progressive aspects of folk culture to a project of cultural and social renewal’[iii].
Various of the singers that Hamish and Lomax had encountered on their collecting trips were brought together in an event, the People’s Ceilidhs, that took place during the nascent Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Funded as they were by the labour movement, these events were an overt challenge to the dominant aesthetic and the cultural gate-keepers of the time. Furthermore Hamish recognised that in bringing these performers from the various airts of rural Scotland, people might be sensitised to the traces of a folk tradition still to be found in the cities and that it might still be possible, as he put it, ‘to graft these flowering branches from the North and West upon a living tree’[iv]. He wanted, again in his own words, to place ‘examples of authentic singing styles, and – wherever possible – actual performances of good traditional artists’ within the reach of urban audiences. Jimmy MacBeath and company were important for what they were, of course, but also important for what they represented.
And here, I think, Hamish and his allies had a careful line to walk, and it’s a line those of concerned with the value of traditional culture continue to walk. If, as the French thinker, Guy Debord asserts, ‘all that was once directly lived has become mere representation’[v], the maintenance of authentic performance in a new context becomes a new challenge.
Debord was one of the leading lights in a movement called the Situationist International, a movement which critiqued the damage that advanced capitalism was doing to society through its creation of what the Situationists called ‘The Spectacle’, the mediation of and alienation from direct experience, where everything directly lived recedes into a representation. Their ideas were particularly prevalent during the Paris ‘évennements’ of 1968. One of their most famous slogans was ‘sous les pavés la plage’, that you’ll all be familiar with. One of Debord’s practical as well as theoretical concerns was the seeming inevitability with which radical projects were in his phrase ‘recuperated’, recuperation defined as ‘the activity of society as it attempts to obtain possession of that which negates it.’[vi]
There is a space in social life that sits behind the spectacle, occupied by neither the state or the market. Characterised as the ‘third place’, the commons, or civil society it is a space where people can relate directly, and not through the institutions of civic society, markets, and hierarchies. The veteran community activist, Laurence Demarco wrote that it is where ‘citizens not under the direction of any authority wielding the power of the state. It is the everyday world of social life, the voluntary association of people coming together to pursue a common interest’[vii] I want to suggest that in terms of folk culture it is where song, speech, music operate as forms of communication before or beyond technological or bureaucratic filters, where value emerges through use and participation, not consumption.
The idea of the commons, has come to mean a broad set of resources, natural and cultural, that are accessible to all members of a society. It derives from the historical actuality of common land, to which members of a community had rights of cultivation, grazing, coppicing and so on. It was something with which the poet John Clare was familiar:
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between.
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky.[viii]
Clare lived through, and was profoundly affected by the enclosure of this common ground, the process by which, as Karl Marx put it, ‘the landowners grant themselves the people’s land as private property.’[ix]
These paths are stopt – the rude philistine’s thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
Thus, with the poor, sacred freedom bade goodbye
And much they feel it in the smothered sigh
And birds, and trees, and flowers without a name
All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came
Folk traditions, community music, oral storytelling, local rituals – what we these days refer to as ‘the traditional arts’ - are all part of an embodied commons, a convivial, minimally mediated space, separate from civic society, the world of schools, health boards, community councils, planning partnerships, and all the other mechanisms ultimately under the direction of the state. It is a space where citizens can participate but not necessarily on their own terms. Democracy, which theoretically distributes power, is dependent on citizen participation, but it is a participation that implies that authority still rests with those who hold power in civic society. Citizens in societies where power is concentrated in few hands, despite the appearance of democracy, often have the right to participate in elections, but have little influence on the inherent power structures. As Laurence Demarco puts it ‘Structures of power militate against community empowerment, discourage it. Civic society has a tendency to move into civil society’s space.’[x]
The commons are always in danger of enclosure, and one of the dangers in terms of folk culture as that we see enclosure as a form of validation. One of the drivers behind the Traditional Arts Working Group commissioned by the then Culture Secretary, Linda Fabiani, was a desire to bring about ‘parity of esteem’ for the traditional arts in the cultural mix. The Working Group’s report stated:
The argument is that, although the traditional arts hold meaning for many, the general level of esteem in which they are held remains low. The traditional arts are marginalised in the school curriculum, and lack consistent attention in the media. Local authorities’ engagement with them is uneven, and they suffer in comparison with other art forms which find their expression in directly supported national companies.[xi]
The musician and scholar Simon McKerrell who has written extensively on traditional music, sees devolution in 1999 as a watershed. He writes that ‘Scottish traditional music up until devolution had been largely a non-state supported art form with performance, tuition and development taking place within a dedicated community of practice’[xii] – civil society, a commons in other words. With devolution Scottish traditional music became more emblematic of the nation and with it a desire for the parity of esteem that entry to the mainstream would allow.
It’s not that straightforward though. In 2012 the Traditional Music Forum asked Karine Polwart to speak on that very issue, and with her customary care and thoughtfulness she said this.
I’d like us to find the right models within our cultural mainstream to aspire to, and stop chasing the ones that do us no service at all. I just think we need to be very careful of what it is that we’re chasing when we talk about bringing ourselves into the cultural mainstream. To a large extent we’re in it enough. We don’t need to go any further. Maybe we should hang on to a little bit of our independence, and just think always about meaning, and never lose the meaning of what it is we do.
You don’t get much more mainstream than UNESCO. In 2003 it established the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, a treaty eventually signed by the United Kingdom as recently as the very tail end of 2023. Intangible Cultural Heritage is defined as ‘oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practice concerning nature and the universe, and the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts.’
Great. That’s surely just what we’ve been talking about, and indeed it was in that same Traditional Arts Working Group report that the suggestion arose that the traditional arts community should hitch its wagon to that particular star. But for me there’s something about that term ‘heritage’ which doesn’t quite sit right.
It’s easy to forget that it’s a metaphor[xiii]. The metaphor suggests that culture, defined as a whole way of life, is figuratively characterised as an ‘inheritance’, a bequest, a legacy. In other words it’s not so much a living, shifting, dynamic flow which I directly experience as a bundle of things. What do I inherit? A package framed and delimited as ‘cultural heritage’. It’s a metaphor that perhaps has its origins in the world-view of that class of people whose way of life centred on property and its ownership. To turn to Guy Debord again, the metaphor emphasises his point that being declines into having, and ‘having into merely appearing’[xiv]. Heritage arguably represents the moment when tradition becomes objectified, turned from living practice into display, mediated institutionally by museums, tourism, tradition as spectacle, a cultural commons enclosed. As the Swedish ethnologist, Uwe Ronstrom puts it ‘heritage tends to empty objects and spaces, which makes them possible to refill with all kinds of owners and inhabitants…It is everybody’s and therefore nobody’s…Local styles are uncoupled from their former musical mindscapes, their specific places and pasts, and made available as ‘local musics but not from here’’[xv]
But maybe that’s too harsh, too pessimistic. We have in heritage the conditions for reactivation, as Hamish Henderson knew well. The enclosure of the commons wasn’t entirely disastrous as it ultimately led to greater agricultural efficiency, meaning more people got fed.
I think it’s fair to say that Hamish Henderson was not unaware of the contradictions exposed by the introduction of Jimmy MacBeath and others into a new milieu. He was mindful of the need for people to be paid properly for performances through royalties, for example, while at the same time deprecating the ‘cash nexus which had begun to take the modern folk-song revival by the throat’, as he wrote in his essay on ‘Folk Singing in Auld Reekie’[xvi]. It seems to me that Hamish always knew the way back to the thing in itself, while being mindful of the emblematic importance of the representation of the thing. Here’s Ewan MacColl: ‘Hamish’s extempore performances were as far as I am concerned one of the most memorable aspects of the early People’s Festivals…At night he would be found presiding over the ceilidh which began at 11pm and finished at two or three in the morning.’
I’ll leave the final word with Hamish. ‘Folk Song, he wrote, is ‘a permanent aspect of human culture, which will go on persisting whatever social and technological changes take place, and will certainly adapt itself, as it has always done, to changing circumstances.’
[i] Hamish Henderson, ‘Jimmy Macbeath’, Alias Macalias: Writings on Songs, Folk and Literature (Edinburgh, Polygon, 1992)
[ii] Walter Benjamin, tr. Harry Zohn, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969 [1935]), p.2
[iii] Alec Finlay, ‘Afterword’, Alec Finlay (ed.), The Armstrong Nose: Selected Letters of Hamish Henderson (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), p.314
[iv] Quoted in Finlay, p.319
[v] Guy Debord, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994 [1967]), Thesis 1
[vi] ‘Faces of Recuperation’, Situationist International, (1), 1969.
[vii] Laurence Demarco, ‘The difference between civil and civic’, Development Trust Association Conference, 16 June, 2008, http://www.senscot.net/view_art.php?viewid=7318
[viii] John Clare, ‘The Mores’, Merryn Williams, Raymond Williams (eds), John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose (London: Methuen, 1986)
[ix] Marx, Capital, Vol 1, p.885
[x] Demarco
[xi] Traditional Arts Working Group, Final Report of the Traditional Arts Working Group, 2010, p.8 http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2010/01/28100441/0
[xii] Simon McKerrell, ‘Traditional Arts and the State: The Scottish Case’, Cultural Trends, 23(3), 2014, p.165
[xiii] Ryan Trimm, ‘Heritage as Trope: Conceptual Etymologies and Alternative Trajectories’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2017
[xiv] Debord, Thesis 17
[xv] Uwe Ronström, ‘Fiddling with Pasts: From Tradition to Heritage’, Ian Russell and Anna Kearney Guigné (eds), Crossing Over: Fiddle and Dance Studies from Around the North Atlantic 3 (Aberdeen: Elphinstone Institute, 2010), p.265
[xvi] Alias MacAlias, p.11