We have an eight-volume collection of Scottish folk songs that our Traditional Music students will know well – the Greig-Duncan Collection. Gavin Greig was an Aberdeenshire school-master at Whitehill, New Deer. Together with his minister friend, Rev. James Bruce Duncan, they amassed a huge collection of folk songs collected in the North East of Scotland, but the collection was only published comparatively recently – between 1981 and 2002. If that seems like a long time to publish eight volumes of songs, then you need to know that the Greig-Duncan collection consists of some 3,500 texts and 3,300 tunes. Gavin Greig was a man with a mission to demonstrate that the Scottish songs in book collections (‘book songs’) were often far removed from the ‘folk songs’ in circulation amongst people in a particular locality.
Two editorial names were associated with the preparation of these massive tomes for publication: Patrick Shuldham-Shaw (1917-1977) died before the first volume was even published, but Dr Emily Lyle has been General Editor for the entire collection, with the help of Peter A. Hall for Volume 3, Adam McNaughtan for Volume 5 and Katherine Campbell – formerly on the RCS teaching staff here – for Volume 8. This was a project of truly epic proportions!
Dr Lyle is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Celtic and Scottish Studies Department. As well as her work on Scottish folk song, she has also researched oral culture, folk customs and ancient mythology.
- Robert Burns and the discovery and re-creation of Scottish song – edited with Katherine Campbell (Musica Scotica Trust, 2020)
- An article about Robert Burns, in Musica Scotica : 800 years of Scottish music. Proceedings from the 2005 and 2006 conferences (2008)
- Fairies and folk : approaches to the Scottish ballad tradition (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2007)
- The song repertoire of Amelia and Jane Harris– with Kaye McAlpine and Anne Dhu McLucas (Scottish Text Society, 2002)
- Scottish ballads (Canongate, 1994)
- not to mention contributions to the journal, Scottish studies : the journal of the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh
This is a phenomenal output, and Dr Lyle’s careful, detailed work is on reading lists for our own Traditional Music students. Sometimes it’s easy to focus on composers and performers, platforms and performances, but we should never forget that quiet, dedicated scholarship enables the more obviously ‘creative’ folk to build their own work on solid foundations.
Whittaker Live 