A trawl through the local newspapers of 1824 might give more detail than this short excerpt. Drowning in a bog sounds like a very unpleasant way to go. I wonder what happened to the costume? Finding an elk's head sounds a bit grisly too - like a scene from The Godfather! Both very interesting artefacts though - and surely culturally significant that the elk head ended up in Glasgow Museum. Click to enlarge:
Working away on the next instalment of the McEwan story; meanwhile here's a local gem:
Introduction: The story below has been assembled from a variety of online sources - newspapers, censuses, marriage certificates and ships passenger lists. If any readers know of errors here I would be pleased to hear from you. This is one of a series of posts to coincide with the 100th anniversary of William McEwan's first recording session in London in November 1911.
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PART THREE: Conversion, Evangelism, America and the historic 1911 London recording sessions
Now back in Glasgow, alcohol was still playing a major role in William’s life, much to the concern of his father. It must have been a shock for the devout Covenanters James and Margaret McEwan (both now around 70 years old) to see what had become of their son during his time in America. Here is the only account I have found of William’s condition, and conversion, as reported by a writer with The Daily Republican newspaper of Rushville, Indiana, on 30 October 1912:
“…His father then lived in Scotland, and on one Saturday night he was to appear in a show there, and all his old friends were to turn out to give him a reception. After the show, he said, they all went out for a time. He said he was under the influence of drink when he got home that night and his father was very much put out about it. That night his father extracted a promise from him to attend church the next day.
He started, and met a crowd of his former friends singing on a street corner to attract people to the house of worship. He followed them to the church, but when the invitation was extended he didn’t have the nerve to go forward, he said, because he realized that he would have to break off with all his old life and associates. When the minister said the man who would not hold up his hand signifying that he wanted to be prayed for was a coward, he would not take that and held up his hand. He joined the church, and that night there was great rejoicing in his father’s house.
McEwan said he cancelled all engagements and became an evangelistic singer, and since that time offers had been coming to him and he did not have to seek them…”
The writer, or editor, seems to not understand the nuances of a conversion (conviction of sin > need of a Saviour > Christ as the only answer) and so the account above is a bit disjointed. However, after William’s conversion to Christ, he cancelled all of his musical engagements and took an ordinary job in a carpet factory, on what he later said was just “one tenth of his vaudeville salary”. The famous singer with a blue collar job among ordinary Glasgow folk? Yes. But (as all Christians will know full well) conversion does not mean perfection, and the ‘old nature’ wasn’t too far under the surface. Another newspaper reported that William’s workmates:
“… jollied ‘Mac’ about his religion in the factory and finally he soaked Fisher, one of the foremen, in the face and laid him out, and decided to go back to vaudeville… ”
However,
“…there he believes God intervened, when he was about to slip and instead of going back to vaudeville he drifted into evangelistic singing work and has been at it ever since… ”
A BBC Radio Scotland programme in 2007 said this of MacEwan’s early gospel career on the streets of Glasgow:
“…William MacEwan who used his high penetrating tenor voice to gather a crowd on noisy Glasgow city streets, without the aid of any microphone. They can’t sing like that these days… ”
Frank Wappat wrote that:
"...he worked on the premise that 'more people can be reached by singing the gospel than by preaching it'. It is said that his voice could still an angry crowd - and the shrill piercing tenor could certainly penetrate a crowd. To the Saturday night drunks, he would sing 'My mother's prayers have followed me' - often reducing them to tears. Penitents would be led back to his religious Meeting Hall and many there were who professed to having been saved. Indeed, crowds would gather just to hear him sing. His singing style was moulded by appearing in the streets singing to vast crowds before microphones were invented..." My friend Joe in Ayrshire has told me that his father used to cycle up to Glasgow to listen to William McEwan sing.
The Return to America
The first decade of the 20th century was a formative one for William McEwan. I can find no more details just now of these early post-conversion years in Glasgow, but on 21 November 1908 the ship SS Hesperian left Glasgow carrying a 36 year old evangelist called William McEwan, whose race was stated as ‘Scotch’. The ship docked at Moville in Donegal before arriving in Boston on 4th December 1908. Having spent Christmas in America, in January and February 1909 William McEwan was in Boston with two of the world’s most famous evangelists, John Wilbur Chapman (of Indiana) and Charles McCallon Alexander (of east Tennessee).
[Note: Chapman and Alexander organised revival missions in Britain from February - June 1903, including Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Belfast. See here for a full account. They may well have met William McEwan during this time. Certainly there must have been some connection for William to be whisked across the Atlantic to take part in their US campaigns of 1909]
During the Chapman-Alexander revival campaign William’s role was to lead the singing in ‘Group Five – Roxbury North’ and at Dudley Street Baptist Church. In April McEwan was in Florence, Alabama, and was greeted by The Florence Times report of April 16th with considerable enthusiasm:
“…William McEwan, the noted Gospel soloist who will lead the music in the series of union services to be commenced in the Presbyterian church in this city on the 27th, has had a remarkable career. He was distinguished as an opera singer, and sang in nearly all the large cities of this country and England. He became converted at a gospel meeting in his old home, Glasgow, Scotland, and since then has devoted his rare talents to the work of his Master. A Massachusetts paper in speaking of him says 'William McEwan sings like an opera singer, and this is what he was before he became an evangelist. It is fair to say, too, that no sweeter gospel singer ever lived than this man.' His coming to Florence will be an event indeed…”
November 1909 saw McEwan in the city of Sault Sainte Marie in Michigan, where he worked with New York evangelist Rev Henry Davidson "H.D." Sheldon, an associate of Chapman. A newspaper report of the time said:
“…Mr McEwan will lead the big choir, and will also tell the story of his conversion. This story has interested many in the past, and will doubtless be one of the features to cause the auditorium to be packed on Saturday night… ”
The Evening News of 13 November 1909 reported that:
"...Previous to his conversion Mr McEwan was for seven years an opera singer in the old country... Mr McEwan came to this country a year ago this month after singing the gospel for 12 years in all the principal cities of England, Scotland and Wales. He arrived in Boston in time to assist Dr Chapman in the great campaign in January when he created a wonderful sensation and at once sang his way into the hearts of the people of that city..."
As the Sheldon revival campaign continued, The Decatur Daily Review (Illinois) of 13th February 1910 said that:
“…Mr McEwan is known in many places as ‘The Scotch Sankey’. He has no superior in his line. His voice is a clear tenor, with an unusual range. He sings with a feeling that often brings tears to the eyes of those who hear him. His is listened to with rapt attention…”
Just a few days later, on 19th February, the same paper gave a review of the campaign:
“… the leader of the music, Mr McEwan, won his way with both choir and people. He has a delightful Scotch accent and a warm heart with plenty of the Scotch variety of wit. The people did not sing heartily enough to suit him at first so he admonished them with ‘I am just a common Scotchman; sing, don’t look at me.’ He pleaded that the singing should be full of worship. Mr McEwan has been called the Scotch Sankey. Mr Chapman says that his work is second to none in the field of the singing evangelist…”
In March 1910 he was still in Decatur, Illinois. The Daily Review of March 4 1910 reported that:
“…The service will be conducted by William McEwan who is directing the choir at that church. … by request Mr McEwan will repeat ‘My Ain Country’. As the closing feature of this service, and not the least interesting Mr McEwan will tell the story of his conversion, how he was persuaded to abandon his profession as a singer of light opera and take up religious work as a gospel singer…”
Alongside the article was the notation of McEwan’s self-written hymn “Keep On Praising”. While he was travelling, the family seems to have stayed in Brooklyn, New York City. The 1910 US Census for Brooklyn (dated April 15th) records a traveling evangelist called William McEwan, aged 38, who first came to USA in 1890; his wife Jeanie, aged 38, born Scotland, who first came to USA in 1890; a daughter Jeanie S, aged 17, born in Massachussetts; a son William Jr, aged 11, born in Scotland; and a daughter Mary M, aged 8, born in Scotland.
As the year went on, his popularity soared. On 24th October 1910 The Paducah Evening Sun of Kentucky headlined an article as “Greatest Crowd Attends Revival on Sunday Night - Mr William McEwan sang two songs”.
In December 1910 McEwan was with famous evangelist Dr Reuben Torrey (a colleague of DL Moody, and who had been in Britain with Chapman & Alexander back in 1903), assisting with the music in a revival campaign at Saint John in New Brunswick, Canada. Thousands attended the campaign. They then moved to a three week mission in January 1911 in Windsor, Nova Scotia – crowds as large as 1200 people flocked to the meetings. The Boston Daily Globe reported on 6 February 1911: "...he was assisted by William MacEwan , tenor soloist, who was in Boston with Chapman and Alexander two years ago, and is now associated with Rev Dr R A Torrey…”
So from December 1908 – February 1911, William McEwan made an astonishing impact upon the evangelical world in the United States, singing in at least 6 states, and also in Canada. He was now a musical phenomenon, and just the man whose voice should be captured by the latest in audio technology. William McEwan was bound for London to record his singing for the iPod of its day, the new wind-up 'talking machine' gramophone.
The first recording session
In November 1911, while Chapman and Alexander were conducting a revival mission in Bangor, County Down, William McEwan travelled to London.The Columbia Phonograph Company had opened an office in London in 1900, initially in a five storey building at 122 Oxford Street but later moved to larger premises at 89 Great Eastern Street. They built a disc factory at Bendon Valley, Wandsworth in 1906 to manufacture both records and record players.
Louis Sterling became manager of Columbia (London) in 1909; his strategy for the label was that "they got hold of some of the best voices and instrumentalists in the kingdom and their productions had a great vogue..." (from The Talking Machine Industry by Ogilvie Mitchell, 1924). It is said that by 1913 one third of British households owned a gramophone.
The inlay card for the 1994 Lismor CD sampler ‘William MacEwan – the Original Glasgow Street Singer-Evangelist’ tells the story like this:
“…In 1911 he traveled to London to persuade the Columbia-Rena Record Company to record him singing gospel songs for the working class people. Such were his powers of persuasion that the surprised, but convinced, record company signed him up to record 24 gospel songs at his first session shortly afterwards. With only harmonium for accompaniment, this amazing Scotsman made the world’s first set of gospel songs using the primitive recording apparatus of the day. Microphones had not been invented, so the recordings were made by MacEwan singing into a tin horn attached to which was a rubber tube leading to a cutting needle, etching his voice into a 3/4" thick warmed platter of wax. The harmonium was housed on a platform four feet above the ground and placed near the recording horn…”
The 24 songs were as follows:
Will the Circle Be Unbroken
(Habershon / Gabriel - written 1907) Issue No 1842
Memories of Mother
(Morris / Harkness - written 1910) Issue No 1843
He Lifted Me
(Gabriel - written 1905) Issue No 1844
He Died of A Broken Heart
(Dennis / McKinney - written early 1900s) Issue No 1841
God Will Take Care of You
(Martin / Martin - written 1905) Issue No 1852
My Father Knows
(Henry / Martin - written 1897) Issue No 1849
Some Day
(Staley / Gabriel - written 1911) Issue No 1848
My Ain Countrie
(Demarest - written 1861) Issue No 1850
Only A Sinner
(Gray / Towner - written 1905) Issue No 1842
We Shall Shine as Stars
(J.W. Van de Venter - written 1899) Issue No 1851
Somebody (Did a Golden Deed)
(John R Clements / W.S. Weeden - written 1901) Issue No 1843
His Eye is On the Sparrow
(Martin / Gabriel - written 1905) Issue No 1852
Sometime We’ll Understand
(Cornelius/McGranahan - written 1891) Issue No 1850
My Mother’s Prayer
(J.W. Van de Venter - written 1895) Issue No 1849
All Hail Emmanuel
(Van Sickle / Gabriel - written 1910) Issue No 1845
Gospel Bells
(Martin / Sankey - written 1895) Issue No 1841
Nothing Satisfies but Jesus
(Morris - written 1905) Issue No 1848
Thou Remainest
(Whittle / McGranahan - written 1884) Issue No 1845
Softly & Tenderly
(Will L Thompson - written 1880) Issue No 1844
Nor Silver Nor Gold
(Gray / Towner - written 1900) Issue No 1851
He Will Hold Me Fast
(Habershon / Harkness - written 1906) Issue No 1846
Shadows
(Harkness - written 1906) Issue No 1847
In Jesus
(Procter / Harkness - written 1903) Issue No 1846
Christ Returneth
(Turner / McGranahan - written 1906) Issue No 1847
Looking back on this track listing exactly 100 years later, to us these are all old, old songs which many readers here will have been familiar with from childhood - if not from McEwan’s original recordings then certainly from other versions recorded later in the 20th century by other gospel singers, or from popular hymnbooks. But in 1911, most of these were fresh, new pieces, written by people who were the Stuart Townends and Keith Gettys of that era. The oldest by quite some distance is the Scots language hymn ‘My Ain Countrie’, which had become something of a signature piece for William McEwan. It's also important to remember that 'popular hymns' were a relatively recent phenomenon, and not without controversy (as the life of hymnwriter Horatius Bonar demonstrates). It was the 1859 revivals in Scotland, Ulster and America that transformed the world of sacred song.
This set of recordings gave McEwan the title of “The World’s First Great Gospel Singer on Record”, and led Columbia to market him as “The World’s Sweetest Gospel Singer”. With the recording completed the 5' 2" McEwan went back to America, sailing on the SS Baltic from Liverpool on 20th December 1911 and arriving in New York on 7th January. He became a megastar.
“…William McEwan is held to be the first gospel tenor in America. In the advertisement of the Columbia Phonograph Co, who have the exclusive right to the records produced from his voice, he is called the world’s sweetest gospel singer… about four years ago he came to this country, where he has become loved as well as famed, for his quaint Scotch ways, his devout piety and pleasant face, as well as a lovely voice…”
- from The Hamilton Daily Republican (Ohio) 29 November 1912
America was now William McEwan's oyster. But war was coming...
Introduction: The story below has been assembled from a variety of online sources - newspapers, censuses, marriage certificates and ships passenger lists. If any readers know of errors here I would be pleased to hear from you. This is one of a series of posts to coincide with the 100th anniversary of William McEwan's first recording session in London in November 1911.
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PART TWO: His first trip to America, Fame and Marriage
In June 1889, a 17 year old millworker called William McEwan, travelling alone and carrying just one bag, boarded the SS Nestorian in Glasgow. The ship stopped at Moville in Donegal, and Galway, before heading across the Atlantic, arriving in Boston on 18 June. He headed to Lawrence, New Jersey, a town of 100,000 people, half of whom were described in 1890 as ‘foreign born’.
The ‘Keith - Proctor Circuit’ was a coming together of two great American entertainment promoters. Benjamin Franklin Keith and Frederick Freeman Proctor owned a chain of highly popular all-day theatres in the booming immigrant cities of Boston, Philadelphia, Newark and New York. McEwan signed up with them and sang in theatres all along the eastern coast states.
[The renowned Irish traditional fiddle player Michael Coleman (1891-1945) also played for the Keith circuit between 1914 and 1917. Coleman recorded around 80 78rpm records in the USA from 1921-1936, which were sent back home to Ireland and had a phenomenal effect in reviving Irish traditional music. Coleman is described on a memorial near his birthplace in Sligo as the ‘Saviour of Irish traditional music’ whose legacy is still revered today. Samples of his music are available here.]
William McEwan returned to Scotland and on 26 December 1890 was married at Chalmers Street Hall in Calton, Glasgow. His bride was Jeanie Robinson, a handkerchief hemmer; they were both aged 19. Jeanie’s parents were Joseph Robinson (deceased) and Jeanie Robinson (maiden name Scott). The wedding was conducted by Rev James Gage, Minister of Great Hamilton Street Free Church and the newlyweds settled into married life at 88 Brook Street, Glasgow.
The Scottish Census of 1891 gives the McEwans’ address as being 171 Wolseley Street, Govan, Glasgow, and state that William was a handmill warper. However, the draw of higher pay on the stages of America was strong and soon William and Jeanie sailed for America. The passenger list of another voyage of the SS Nestorian (sailing from Glasgow and arriving in Boston on 22 October 1891) includes a William McEwan, a millhand aged 20 who had been to the USA before. As time went by, the McEwans, now settled in America, had their first child - a daughter, who they named Jeanie after her mother and maternal grandmother, was born in Massachusetts around late 1892.
William certainly made more money in America, but the life of a professional entertainer brought him under other influences too:
“…(William McEwan) came to America when a young man, did a little concert work and returned to his native land where he found his sweetheart, as he put it. He was married and returned to America where he engaged in light opera and vaudeville work because it offered more lucrative wages.
McEwan said life ‘on the road’ was hardly conducive to Christianity. He declared people on the stage got together each Sunday and sang ‘Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight’ [which was written by Robert Lowry, who was born in Pennsylvania of Ulster parents] and thought they were right with God until next Sunday. That’s all the religion, he declared, that is to be found among stage folks.
While on the stage, the chorister said, he learned to drink. Although he was never a drunkard, he said, he had been under the influence of drink. His wife traveled with him continually and after their first child was born, Mrs McEwan had a desire to return home. McEwan said he took her to New York and put her on a steamship. His desire was so great to return that he could not overcome it, and the next day he left on a boat sailing from Boston, arriving home a day after his wife…”
So whether it was just homesickness, or perhaps a young wife and mother struggling to cope with her husband’s lifestyle, Jeanie headed back to Scotland, taking their only child with her. The passenger records for the SS Circassia, sailing from New York to Glasgow, include a Mrs J McEwan aged 22 and Jeanie McEwan aged 17 months. They set foot on Scottish soil on 26 April 1894.
William followed them the next day. Now a married man with responsibilities, and back home in Scotland, William McEwan took a job as an insurance agent. They had another child, this time a son who they named William, born around 1899. The 1901 Scotland Census records that William and Jeanie McEwan, both aged 29, were living at 59 Landressy St, Greenhead, Glasgow, with their daughter Jeanie, aged 8, and their son William Jr., aged 2. And around 1902 a second daughter, Mary, was born.
McEwan's teenage years as a 'wandering boy', sailing twice from Glasgow to America and back again, may have seemed like the last and only opportunity he would have to become a world famous singer. Yet music was never far away, and William carried on singing on the stages of Scotland...
...but the biggest change in William McEwan’s life was yet to come.
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Introduction: Back in the early 1990s during my student days at the Art College in Belfast, I did a fair bit of hoking in old second hand bookshops and junk shops around Smithfield and other places. This was before the prosperity bubble of the late 90s/early 2000s, and so it was still fairly easy to find remnants of bygone days. Digging through the piles of old 78rpm records, one name appeared over and over again - William McEwan. It seemed that every shop had some of his records, dumped by people who had forgotten him, a once-household name who had been left behind by the 'progress' of advances like the LP, the audio cassette and the CD. Around this time an audio cassette triple box-set of all 82 of McEwan's known recordings came out, on a limited-edition private release by Frank Wappat of BBC North in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. A few years later I learned that McEwan's recording of the Scots language piece 'My Ain Countrie' had been one of my late grandfather's favourite songs.
Yet, despite William McEwan's apparent popularity and commercial success, I have never been able to find a definitive biography of him and so I had no idea of the scale of his musical achievements. Over recent months I have gathered up as much information about him as I could find. These blog posts are my attempt to piece together something of his story and to give him his place back for our generation - coinciding with the 100th anniversary of his first recording session, for Columbia Records in London, in November 1911.
This is the story of how a poor Glasgow boy, of Ayrshire parents, became one of the biggest musical names in the world.
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PART ONE: Ayrshire Roots, Glasgow upbringing and early talent
William McEwan, the man who would be called ‘The World’s Sweetest Gospel Singer’, was born on 11th December 1871, in the Bridgeton area of Glasgow. William later described his upbringing as having been ‘of poor parentage’ and that his father was a hand loom weaver or pattern worker.
His parents were James and Margaret McEwen (maiden name McGhie); they had been married in the thriving fishing port of Girvan in Ayrshire on Hogmanay (31 December) 1858, aged 22 and 17 respectively and moved into a house in Wilson Street. James had been born in Girvan in 1837; James's father, also called James, had been born in Ireland (no precise location that I know of) in 1801. In an interview in the USA in 1912, William McEwan said that his family roots were in Ayrshire.
Some time between 1858 and 1871 (during the time of the society-transforming 1859 evangelical revivals in both Scotland and Ulster) the McEwen / McEwan family moved to Glasgow, where they attended First Reformed Presbyterian Church in Great Hamilton Street, a congregation which proudly traced its origins to the times of the Covenanters. William McEwan confirmed in later life that he had been raised in the ‘Reformed Presbyterian church’ and that “…he never knew what it was to sing a Gospel hymn in his boyhood days because the church to which he went always sang the Psalms…” (This is a distinction which is a factor in present-day growth of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Scotland over the past few months).
However, his parents recognised that young William had great singing talent:
“…In early life his parents discovered that he had a sweet voice and his father’s ambition for him to succeed was so great that he contrived to arrange for him to study under one of Scotland’s great music masters. He learned fast, became a concert singer and won instantaneous success… ”
“… he studied music at an early age under the famous Baillie (George) Taggart of Glasgow and later received a certificate from the Royal Academy of Music in London. He traveled for years on the Keith-Proctor Circuit and later in Scotland where he traveled in Vaudeville…”
George Taggart was a shrewd choice by William's father - Taggart was the conductor of the Glasgow Select Choir, and also of Glasgow Glee and Catch Club. His daughter, Jenny Taggart, went on to become a famous soprano; another daughter, Rena, was a violinist. George Taggart is known to have taken Glaswegian artists to tour in North America and he may well have recommended the poor but brilliantly talented young McEwan to some of his contacts on the other side of the Atlantic.
Sometime around the years 1887 - 1890 the teenage William McEwan, a hand-loom warper from Bridgeton, was bound for the stages and concert halls of America.
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This post is for Jenny in Alaska. Here are more examples of that Scotch-Irish symbol from the late 1800s. Here's a biography of Henry McCook, and here's a free online edition of the book.
Blond wood, upholstered seats and mood lighting have their place, but there's nothing to beat the beauty of plain and simple.
I'm currently doing some research into the life of the tenor gospel singer William MacEwan (also spelled McEwan) from Glasgow. He was referred to as 'the world's first great gospel singer on record', issuing over 40 old 78rpms during his career. His first recording session was for the Columbia record company in London in November 1911, so exactly 100 years ago next month - this was the session which included my grandfather's favourite hymn, 'My Ain Countrie'.
I have a lot of information about McEwan's musical career, and of hymn books he published, but very little about his personal life - for example I've got conflicting birth dates (1870, 1872 or 1877) and death dates (1943 or 1949) for him, and no conclusive information if he was born in Bridegton in Glasgow or just outside the city. He certainly lived in Bridgeton in later life, but I have also seen a 1922 document with his address given as 90 Mevia Street, Glasgow (but can't find any other record of a street of that name ever having existed at all). I also have a reference to him dying and being buried in Los Angeles (in 1949) So this post is just to see if anyone out there knows much about him and would be interested in helping.
I will post what musical information I have in November. Maybe someone out there knows of a fuller biography? A man of his calibre and influence deserves to be remembered in the year of his centenary.
When I was 14, this Iron Maiden song blew me away:
With me now on the brink of 40, Ryan Adams has somehow extracted this beautiful acoustic version from the bombast of the original. It's a masterful reworking, seemingly recorded for a Dutch radio programme called GI:EL. His new album, Ashes & Fire, is currently streaming free here; official release date is tomorrow. It sounds like a sparking return to the form he was in about a decade ago on his first two releases Heartbreaker (2000) and Gold (2001). A recent interview with him is available here.
Not a shiny glass and steel place which sells over-priced gadgets, but a real handmade wooden storage system to put actual apples in. This is the 4 drawer version, the 10 drawer one is even better. Both are available here at GardenTrading.co.uk
Computer screens just aren't big enough to show you the scale of this view. Ulster is a beautiful place... when the sun shines. (Click to enlarge.. and then put your nose against your screen.)
> Buy it here on Amazon.co.uk
> Review here
Thanks to Billy Kerr fae Irvine in Ayrshire for alerting me to this! Tickets are £27.50 which is far from cheap, but as all those shampoo adverts say, it's "because she's worth it". (Now if she changed her surname to 'Scotch-Irish' then we'd be getting somewhere!). The surname is similar to this great Ulster-Scots minister of Templepatrick. Just listen to this...
So says theology & culture website Mockingbird about the wonderful Jayhawks. Or what about "jangly God-haunted Midwestern country-folk with fuzz guitars and harmonies that redefine the words “sandpaper-and-honey.” Mockingbird Time is The Jayhawks' new album. I remember around 1993 driving a carload of friends to Dublin one night to see them play, and I think we drove straight back home again after the show was over, getting back to Belfast as the sun was rising around 5am. Back then it was a hairy enough trip... Not many men can get away with wearing a cardigan over a checked waistcoat, but Mark Olson does. The vocal harmonies of Olson and Gary Louris can be beautiful - imperfect perfection.
One new video below of Mark Olson and Gary Louris playing live and simple for RollingStone.com, posted there just yesterday with five other clips and a short interview. Enjoy.
So wrote Sir Thomas Smith in 1572, and it was a prophetic statement for our rain-drenched tour of the Upper Ards on Saturday morning! We had called the tour "A Forenoon Doon the Upper Ards", but with the weather forecast we joked about re-naming it "A Forenoon gettin' droont in the Upper Ards!". And by about 10am the forecast came true.
The tour included a visit to Newcastle to see the location where the Smith colony set up their first base-camp headquarters in their failed effort to establish an English community in the Ards which would oust the Clandeboye O'Neills. There were 31 people in total, drawn from four local historical societies (Ards, Loughries, Bangor and Comber), with various friends and other folk as well. We started at 9.00am in Newtownards and made numerous stops the whole way down the Strangford Lough shore to Portaferry and back up the other coast as far as Millisle, before heading back to Ards for 1pm. Plenty of crack and banter, a very welcome tea and scones stop, and great support from Ards Borough Council and the Northern Ireland Environment Agency.
I hope that the commentary was interesting for folk - we covered over 800 years of history, from the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in 1177 which brought the Savage family to Ulster, and of their tangles with the Clandeboye O'Neills, with the English Smith colonists and their later interconnections with the Scottish Hamiltons and Montgomeries, and also of 1798. The rendition of the poem 'Betty MacBlaine' went down well! We didn't bother making a few of the stops just because of the weather, but the stories were told and the places can be re-visited some day. Here's a pic of half of the group up in the lecture room building at Kirkistown Castle - the rest were in the castle tower! And Mr Balmoral was generous enough to foot the bill at Knott's Coffee Shop for a light lunch! So it was a wet day, but a good day - local folk visiting local places hearing local stories which can be shared with friends and family. And as usual, I learned as much from the group as they did from me. Great stuff!
Throughout the day quite a few people spoke to me of their frustration at shallow, narrow portrayals of Ulster-Scots heritage, as distinct from the deeply-rooted real stuff. This seems to be quite a widely held view among us plain folk.
Currently available at Chisholm Larsson Gallery in New York for $400 (£250), size 30" x 20". Click here for full details.
...the mighty Bill Monroe was born. He invented bluegrass music in the 1940s, which was (and still is) a high-octane fusion of a variety of styles including the Scotch-Irish ballads of his rural Kentucky upbringing, the (often dark and quaint) old hymns of the wee country Baptist churches he attended on Sundays, and of the 'brother duets' tradition which he and his brother Charlie had made famous as The Monroe Brothers, with Charlie on guitar and Bill on mandolin. NPR.org has posted this article and tribute online, along with an 8 minute audio clip. There's a brilliant 2.34 discussion about the Monroe Brothers, by Chris Thile and Michael Daves, further down the same page - click here to listen.
Bill Monroe often spoke of his Scotch-Irish cultural roots. I hope that this important musical centenary will be acknowledged on our side of the Atlantic in some way, by more than just this casual blog post.
It's that time of year again; the hedges have been loaded with blackberries for the past few weeks. However, Harvest Fair day (23 September) was the deadline that the older folk round here had for picking blackberries, none were ever picked after that date. And of course there's the old tradition that Ulster-Scots Presbyterians were/are nicknamed 'Blackmouths' because of the quantity of blackberries they had to eat (the juice stained their mouths - there's an interesting piece on the BBC Ulster-Scots website with a fuller study of the term - click here and scroll down). And here you see the term being used on official government census forms in 1911. The great Scottish Presbyterian minister, Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661), uses the term 'black mouth' in at least two of his renowned Letters, but these might just be poetic references rather than cultural. A great wee fruit and seriously under-rated. It definitely does 'tak langer tae clim the loanen whun the blackberry's on the bush'.
