Giving Voice to Traditional Songs

Jean Redpath's Autobiography, 1937-2014

Jean Redpath, Mark Brownrigg

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781611178937
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

The singer tells her story from Scottish childhood to success on the Greenwich Village folk scene and beyond, and shares her passion for traditional music. Jean Redpath is best remembered for her impressive repertoire of ancient ballads, Robert Burns songs, and contemporary folk music, recorded and performed over a career spanning some fifty years. In this book, Mark Brownrigg captures Redpath's idiosyncratic and often humorous voice through his interviews with her during the last eighteen months of her life. Here Redpath reflects on her humble beginnings, her Scottish heritage, her life's journey, and her mission of preserving, performing, and teaching traditional song. A native of Edinburgh, Redpath was raised in a family of singers of traditional Scots songs. She broadened her knowledge through work with the Edinburgh Folk Society and Scottish studies at Edinburgh University, but prior to graduation, she abandoned academia to follow her passion of singing. Her independent spirit took her to the United States, where she found commercial success amid the Greenwich Village folk-music revival in New York in the 1960s—and shared a house and concert stages with Bob Dylan and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Soon a rave review in the New York Times launched her career and led to wide recognition as a true voice of traditional Scottish songs. As a regular on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion and a guest on Late Show with David Letterman, Redpath endeared herself to millions with her soft melodies and amusing tales—and her extraordinary career and extensive knowledge of traditional Scottish music history earned her prestigious university appointments, a performance for Queen Elizabeth II, and induction into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame. This is her remarkable story.

CHAPTER 1

Family and Childhood Years

I am often asked, why I was born in Edinburgh when my family lived in Leven in Fife.

It is almost as if by being born elsewhere, I was letting down the side. Brief pause for commercial: Fife is the only county in Scotland that was once an independent kingdom and we are never likely to let you forget that.

I discovered recently from my sister-in-law that because of high blood pressure my mother was taken into Laurieston Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh for six weeks before I was born on April 28, 1937. It would be nice to think it was the excitement and anticipation which was flooring her, but it could as easily have been a premonition of the challenges which were to come.

How quickly we got home, I never thought to ask anybody, but there is a lovely family story concerning my dad. He was working in Leven and couldn’t get through to Edinburgh in time for the birth—in those days, husbands weren’t expected to be there to hold hands and dance attendance. Anyway, when my aunt Elsie got back to Leven after a visit, he asked her, “How’s Bluebell*—and what’s the bairn like?” “Bluebell’s fine,” she replied. “But the bairn has a face like a skelpit erse.”^†

So it was compliments from the word go. Apart from being less than flattering, this kind of talk is typical of the Scottish psyche, which sees it as a sign of weakness to gush or praise, so that comment is generally brusque and inevitably critical. The love and pride may be there, but you have to look hard for them under the stiff upper (and lower) lip.

We went home to live on the ground floor of a council tenement* in Leven, right at its gable end, where, growing up, we played in the close.^† The first memory I have is not my own but came from my neighbor. The neighbors had recently moved in and I had just been turned out for the day to play, in what I am sure was white socks and black shoes, navy skirt, and white blouse. Neat and tidy as my mother would describe, with “a shilling’s worth o’ ribbon and a ha’pennyworth o’ hair”—meaning a big white bow at the side of short straight hair.

Our new next door neighbor said to her husband, “Oh, Chick, come and see this bonny wee lassie”; then she came across to smile: “Hello, hen.” To which I replied by sticking out my tongue at her, my latest and probably only trick. “You cheeky little bitch,” she said. However, despite this unpromising start, we became good friends for many years.

My mother was one of twelve children and my father one of three. The paternal grandparents lived within walking distance, but I grew closer to my mother’s family, possibly because she was always dropping in on them and vice versa, whereas my father had to be encouraged to go and visit his parents. My father’s father was the last of the old patriarchs, sitting in a wing-backed chair, smoking a pipe and spitting into the fire, never missing. The pop of his lips when he spat was always followed by the sizzle as the spittle hit the flames. He used to snap his fingers when he wanted anything and my grandmother, who was a little slip of a thing, would rush and get it for him.

One night when we were visiting, my mother—quite uncharacteristically—said to me: “Away and kiss your grandfather good night.” To which I replied, “I’m no’ goin’ tae kiss that. It has ower hairy a mooth.”^‡ He had one of these big drooping moustaches, and I wanted nothing to do with him. She didn’t insist—I suspect she had her own views on that moustache and its owner.

HINDSIGHT* 1.1

Some figures loom larger than life in our childhood memories. The one which jumps out at me here is my mother’s mother:

I never could remember the details of her face, it was far too early for that, but Granny Dall was a huge woman, always dressed in black. One of my earliest memories is of her looming over the foot of my cot or bed. A huge figure, and I am sure she was smiling, but she was holding a teddy out in front of me and when I reached for it, she drew it away. It was all done in fun, she was only playing with me. But I am sure that if she hadn’t stopped me from clutching that teddy, I would have remembered her with more affection than I do.

I don’t believe I ever really made the connection between that large daunting figure and the young girl sitting in the right front pew of John Henry Lorimer’s classic painting from 1891, Ordination of the Elders in a Scottish Kirk, a copy of which hung in most of the family homes.

“That’s your granny as a lassie,” I was often told.

The girl in the painting was indeed the young Jane Kinnear who lived locally and was allowed to miss school in order to pose for the artist in Kellie Castle on condition that he teach her Latin and French, which he faithfully did. The elder closest to her, Robert Grant, was her grandfather.

I have other and more detailed memories of these early days. One of them has to do with Christmas. As an adult, I have always disliked Christmas, to the point of wishing I could go from December 23 to January 4 with no intermediate stop. I have listened to many explanations of this, but the one which fits best is etched vividly in my mind. I was a child of five or six and I was sitting on a pot with a basin under my chin, absolutely uncontrollable at both ends. The excitement of the approaching Christmas Day had got to me, and I can remember my mother saying, “Well, if this is the kind of nonsense we’re having, there will be no more Christmases.” That was enough to put anybody off.

Another, in a similar vein, was when I was sent off to school for the first time with all sorts of warnings swirling round my head about how I had to shut up, sit down, not make a nuisance of myself, and always to do what I was told—the standard Scottish start-up pack for anything. After that first morning, I went home for lunch and my mother offered to take me back to school. I replied, “I dinnae need tae be ta’en back, I ken whaur I’m gaun’.”* Thus began my independent lifestyle; I couldn’t understand why one of the other kids went running round the classroom howling, when his mother left him—what was all that fuss about? However it was an independence which went barely skin-deep. Two days later, as I sat at the back of the schoolroom, I realized that my teeth were floating. I was bursting for a pee but, remembering that I had to sit still and not make a nuisance of myself, I tried to tough it out, only to have the same result as King Canute on his summer holidays.^† I looked down at the puddle on the floor. In those far-off days of education, each child had a slate and a sponge to wipe it clean. I collected all the sponges I could reach from the kids around me and was mopping up when the teacher discovered what was going on. My mother had a summons to the school, and I was told that it was all right to ask to go to the toilet. But I often wondered what the poor teacher did with all those sponges.

There was very little by way of organized activity for youngsters. We were expected to entertain ourselves and did so in a much more relaxed and safe setting than even small towns can offer now. The only formal activity I can recall was a single evening when I attended the Rosebuds at the wee school.^‡ Who knows what inspired any teacher to do overtime or what was the ultimate point of this exclusive little club, but there must have been about a dozen small girls sitting on the floor. I remember going there, clutching my two pennies in my sticky fist; the high point of the evening was when we got to crawl out to place our coins at the end of a straight line. I was appalled when it became obvious that I was expected to go home and leave them there. I didn’t go back.

When we were children, I didn’t really see a great deal of my brother. Sandy was five years older, and at that age this is a huge gap. He was leaving secondary school just as I was starting it. There are echelons in childhood: he had his own friends and younger kids were just hangers-on, a bit of a pain. If you’re still playing skipping rope and ball games against the gable end of the house and he’s whacking a golf ball around the communal green which was behind the back of these houses, then you’re not much use to him—although I did act as a retriever for him for a while. Mind you, I passed on the one which went through two panes of a neighbor’s window and landed in a sink full of dishes. He didn’t object too much to being instructed to clear up the mess, but he was seriously indignant at not getting his ball back.

That communal green stretched the entire length of the street and was the base for endless childhood games, the safe space for cowboys and Indians, tig,* hide-and-seek, and golf practice (see above!). Other communal games were played in the street itself: the pavements were permanently chalked out for paldies—or hopscotch—where old shoe-polish tins filled with earth were used to slide into the squares and mark our progress. The gable ends of the tenements were ideal for ball games, particularly “doublers,” in which two balls at once were bounced off both the ground and the stone wall and demanded a good deal of juggling skill. So many of the chants used in those games are now forgotten, lost because kids no longer play them, and we would never have thought of writing down the words at that time.

One, two, three a-leary

I saw Wallace Beery

Sittin’ on his bumbaleerie

Kissin’ Shirley Temple.^†

There was also the saga of Leven’s May Queen summer festival, a parade and celebration toward the end of the school year which reached its climax with the crowning of the May Queen—probably one of the many remnants of tree worship found in northern Europe. While every other girl in the town wanted to be chosen as the May Queen—although these days she seems to be called the Rose Queen—I had my sights set lower, but with equally passionate determination.

HINDSIGHT 1.2: Written about 1970

I still remember the crushing disappointment at NOT being chosen to be a fairy—doesn’t every small girl see herself as a fairy, a ballerina, a sparkling princess, even if she is big-boned and built for stamina rather than speed?

Somehow the other band of handmaidens, the flower girls, held much less appeal. Landing in that brigade smacked more of a consolation prize than of an honor to me. My mother, bless her talented hands, produced a pale lilac dress for the occasion, detailed throughout with pale yellow French knots which must have taken hours of time and patience. I was not to be won over by handwork; I knew that the ultimate was to be swathed in white net and given wings and a wand! I really don’t remember much about the actual parade, although I am told I disappeared after the official function and was eventually found “down behind Cumming’s shop, playing in tarry chips in that brand new frock!” Clearly, if I wasn’t to be a fairy, then my interest in events was minimal.

Many years later, having achieved some eminence in my chosen profession, I was invited by the Leven committee to open the Rose Queen ceremony officially. The first year it was not possible because I was on the wrong side of the Atlantic; the second invitation coincided with a concert in Scotland, but still got a second decline-with-regrets response from me. This sparked the outraged question from my mother:

“Why are ye no gaun tae open the Rose Queen Parade?”*

“Because they wouldnae let me be a fairy, that’s why!”

The mistake that the original Leven committee had made in their selection, had clearly never been forgotten or forgiven.

We were never poor but neither was there ever much money around. For family holidays, if we got away at all, we went to my mother’s family home in Largoward, halfway between Leven and St Andrews, up on the hill. That’s where we met up with six of my mother’s siblings who were still in Fife. Auntie Elsie was very close—I think there were only two years between her and Bluebell—and when they were young they looked very much alike. This physical resemblance stayed with them, so much so that when they were running a boardinghouse in St Andrews, it was only at the end of the week when they were seeing people off that guests realized there were two of them.

My mother had gone to help an older sister, Nell, in the boardinghouse at one point and, when Nell left to get married, Elsie came to help. I can’t remember how many years they ran that boardinghouse together, but they had a lot of fun with visitors. The only name I remember them talking about was that of an Indian professor called Promothenath Dasgupta (that’s from oral memory!). He was a very cultured gentleman who, one night, nearly found himself getting a cold shower. My mother and Elsie were setting a trap for one of the students and waiting for him with a bucket of water when the professor walked by. He realized what was happening, of course, but just smiled and tipped his hat before saying “Good evening, ladies” and leaving them to their hijinks.

Food and lodging ruled my mother’s adult life, because she was always either housing or feeding people. When I was about eleven, we moved from our two bedroom tenement to a cottage in the middle of Leven. It’s not there anymore, because they razed it and put a public toilet in its space. Now I enjoy telling people: “Do you see that public toilet? I used to live there.” The new cottage was a two-down, two-up sort of house which had lain derelict for years, and my mother was the one who had the vision—while my father looked ill at the prospect—of how it could be rescued and rebuilt. It belonged to the garage where he worked for many years, and became available at a time when we all needed separate rooms and a little more space.

We moved in after six months of the kind of work that you would normally experience only if you were on a chain gang or sent to prison for hard labor. There were earth floors in the basement, so we broke bricks and poured concrete. And before it was sold to us, there had been squatters in the cottage, so we had to clean and fumigate the place, sealing it up and burning sulphur in it—this was in the days when you fumigated a house yourself, rather than getting the council or an industrial cleaner to come and do it for you. Then we brought in ten-pound hammers (shades of John Henry!) to start the reconstruction work upstairs. We shoveled the debris out through the end window. After months of back-breaking work, the cottage was ready. One summer we had fourteen guests in it, mainly bed-and-breakfast holiday makers. We lived in the basement, and mother let out the habitable rooms to guests, some of whom came back year after year. No wonder, because w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Family and Childhood Years
• Chapter 2: Flying the Family Flag at University
• Chapter 3: Flowers and First Steps
• Chapter 4: A Fun Way of Living
• Chapter 5: Living on the Road
• Chapter 6: Moving into New Ventures
• Chapter 7: My Trusty Friels
• Chapter 8: Wherever I May Roam
• Chapter 9: Honors? Have They Got the Right Person?
• Chapter 10: What Do You Mean “We Have a Problem”?
• Chapter 11: So Where Did My Journey Take Me?
• Postscript
• Glossary
• Discography