Jock Duncan: The Man and His Songs

Jock Duncan (1925–2021) was one of the last traditional singers in Scotland to craft their repertoire largely from oral tradition, before digital recording, post-revival professionalization, and more formalized learning and teaching established a strong presence in the late twentieth century. As such, his songs and experiences provide unique insights into traditional singing and rural ways of life in twentieth-century Northeast Scotland. This volume, edited by Peter Shepheard, collects Jock Duncan's recollections of farm life and singers as well as 60 songs from Duncan's repertoire.Peter Shepheard has lived in Scotland since the 1960s. He founded and worked with St. Andrew's Folk Club and later the Traditional Music and Song Association (TMSA), and he regularly performs as a singer and melodeon player. Through Springthyme Records, established in 1973, Shepheard has foregrounded traditional song and music, producing albums, books, and music transcriptions. Shepheard first heard Jock Duncan sing in a competition context in 1980 and brought about Duncan's first album Ye Shine Whar Ye Stan! (with Brian McNeill; Springthyme Records, 1996), as well as field and home recordings over the years.This book is both a timely document of song traditions and life in twentieth-century Aberdeenshire and a celebration of an influential and highly respected bearer of Scots song tradition. It also provides historical context regarding an influential and prolifically musical family—including Jock and Frances Duncan's sons, Ian Duncan and the late Gordon Duncan, both pipers, teachers, and composers.Following an introduction to Jock Duncan are 24 reminiscences written by Duncan and edited by Shepheard on topics including life at his family farms Gellibrae and Faddenhill, harvest time, foods, local places and weel-kent (well-known) folk, such as the dancing master and the kitchie deem (kitchen maid). The anecdotes richly describe places, events, things, and people, as well as colorful Aberdeenshire Scots dialect words. While many bothy songs convey the hardships of working conditions with warnings about specific farmers, we gain a rare sense of the personal impact of the 6-month feeing (hiring) system through the abrupt departure of kitchie deem Mary Taggart, who within 6 months felt like a sister to Duncan and his siblings. We also relate to the youthful Duncan's wonder at the wildlife thriving around the farm and mill, the older Duncan's reflection on the ingenuity of his forefathers in their agricultural systems, and the impact of industrialization as “the terrible age of the tractor” (p. 11). The reflections end with a round-up of traditional singers and some of their songs—among them Aileen Carr, Willie Kemp, Stanley Robertson, Jane Turriff, and Duncan's second cousin Charlie Duncan.Central to the book are 60 song transcriptions. Shepheard provides brief musical analyses commenting on pitch, scale, tempo, variation, consonance and unaccompanied singing, grace notes, modal distribution, and an explanation of the tune codes used for the featured songs. Some descriptions are less clear than others, and a few sections wander from Duncan's work to Shepheard's more generalized observations on traditional singing. The songs include nineteenth- and twentieth-century bothy songs, older folk songs, and traditional narrative ballads. There are well-known, well-traveled titles such as “McPherson's Rant” and a version of the “Twa Sisters” (“Bonnie Mill Dams o Binnorie”), and songs rich in local detail such as “Rhynie,” “Pirn Taed Jockie,” and Duncan's infamous version of “Tradesmen's Plooin Match at Hogmanay.”At the end of the book, contextual information for the songs includes description, historical notes, scale and structure, and references to established collections (Greig-Duncan, Folk Songs of the North-East, Ord, Ford, Last Leaves, Child, and the Roud Folk Song Index). Twenty-two of the songs feature comments from Jock Duncan about his sources or memorable aspects of the song, such as “John Strachan was never bettered at this song about the shearin days before the reaper made short work of it” (p. 187).Shepheard endeavors to provide information and links to locate recorded performances of the songs. Some transcriptions come from private recordings, and it is unclear whether they are currently accessible or will appear in the forthcoming compilation CD. As Shepheard indicates, the transcriptions required some generalized choices for readability based on recordings made over a 20-year span. Each transcription is based on one recorded performance; although not detailed descriptive transcriptions, they convey a sense of Duncan's singing that enhances both listening and interpretation.The book's layout is useful for singers moving between the songs and the song notes. The inclusion of song endnotes seems overly complex since they could have been woven in elsewhere. An index of songs with available recordings, as indicated in some endnotes, would have been a useful addition within the text. It is also unusual that known composers are not included alongside the lyrics and notation for the songs as sung by Duncan.The themes of connection and continuity are strong in this work, including the assertion that those still engaged in their local culture—singers such as Jock Duncan or Jeannie Robertson, who were platformed by scholars, activists, and revivalists—did not keenly feel the weight of the twentieth-century folk revival. However, Shepheard also demonstrates the importance of the revivalists to connect, reconnect, and provide future opportunities for connection between cultural practitioners, such as TMSA-run competitions, as well as opportunities for wider scholarship.Shepheard's approach enhances the web of connections for song scholarship by relating the contextualized repertoire to song variants, other singers, and song collections. Correlated scholarship includes The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection (Gavin Greig and James Bruce Duncan, Vols. 1–8, Aberdeen University Press, 1981–2002) and Peter Hall's 1985 master's thesis “Folk Songs of the North-East Farm Servants in the Nineteenth Century” (University of Aberdeen), an abridged version of which appears in Volume 3 of the Greig-Duncan collection, as well as articles such as Ian Olson's “Bothy Ballads and Songs” (Scottish Life and Society: Oral Literature and Performance Culture, edited by John Beech, Owen Hand, Fiona MacDonald, Mark A, Mulhern, and Jeremy Weston. A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology, Vol. 10, John Donald, 2007), and Ian Russell's “Competing with Ballads (and Whisky?)” (Folk Music Journal 9:170–91, 2007). Providing the holistic approach that folkloric and ethnological works often reach for, this book will be useful to music practitioners as well as scholars of folklore and ethnomusicology.As a welcome companion to Jock's Jocks (Jock Duncan and Gary West, eds., NMS Enterprises, 2019), which features Duncan's collected accounts from World War II soldiers, Shepheard presents this work with appropriate warmth and understanding for such an affectionately remembered stalwart of the Scottish music community. Shepheard and Duncan further demonstrate the power of oral history to reflect upon a singer's repertoire shown to be both unique and representative of time, place, and community.