A Wheen o’ Wimmin
Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, 18/11/2025
Chris Miles, Amy Lord, Barbara Dymock, Aileen Carr, Elspeth Cowie
‘A Wheen of Wimmin’, A magical evening of folk song and harmony
This was one of the best folk concerts I’ve been to recently. It did what in my view folk music should do. It told stories, it had great individual singing, but also great harmonies, and it got us in the audience singing with them. It was truly an uplifting evening on a cold November night.
Of course it helped that we had five of the finest traditional singers in Scotland who make up ‘A Wheen o’ Wimmin’, with us. Amy Lord, the youngest of the singers, trained at the Conservatoire with some of Scotland’s finest teachers and for the last 20 years has been singing and teaching. She has a lovely clear soprano voice. Aileen Carr has been a great figure in Scottish folk music since the 1970s, both as a solo singer and with different groups; she still has a fine voice for long ballads. Barbara Dymock sang in her youth with groups Coalbeg and Fair Game but had a long break to train as a doctor and be a GP. Since returning to singing she has sung in a duo with Chris Marra and in other groups which I have enjoyed in Edinburgh folk clubs. Barbara told us she was a late substitute for Sheena Wellington; she proved a very good substitute as she has a lovely strong expressive voice. Elspeth Cowie now lives in Nerja in Spain, where she organises regular folk sessions, but returns to Scotland regularly. She has a long background in traditional music both as a singer and an organiser and still has an excellent voice. Chris Miles I remember well from her partnership with the late great Gordeanna Mcculloch and in the group Palaver. Chris has a lovely melodic voice.
The audience were clearly lovers of traditional music and joined in heartily in the choruses and sometimes in the songs themselves. There was a good crowd, though it wasn’t sold out, possibly owing to an alternative distraction, the Scotland v Denmark World Cup game, which certainly made for an exciting journey home to Newtongrange on the train! The ‘Wimmin’ opened the concert with a song by Sandra Kerr, ‘We were there’, an anthem to women’s struggles through time. It’s a great song which deserves to be much better known. They continued with another great song, this time by Davie Robertson, ‘The Star of the Bar’. I was very pleased about this as Davie Robertson was the star of the folk club I used to run in North Berwick. He was a great singer, songwriter and piper and his record ‘The Star of the Bar’ is still available on Apple Music as are many of the records of the Wimmin tonight. The Wimmin alternated between solo songs like ‘An old maid in a garret’ and ‘Rosie Rosie’ by Elspeth Cowie, but always with great harmonies in the chorus, and group songs like ‘The Women of Dundee’ or Michael Marra’s great song ‘Muggie Sha’ where the chorus is more important than the verses.
It was a great evening of folk song by the singers but also for us the audience. It told the story of women’s struggles through in life and history and demonstrated their importance in the folk tradition. Sadly, this little tour of five dates by the ‘Wheen of Wimmin’ comes to an end in Stonehaven this Friday. The good news is they will be appearing next year at the Girvan and Portsoy Folk Festivals, so try and catch them there.
