Category Archives: folklore and ethnography

The Monday Book – The People’s Past

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Monday book review by Jack Beck – –

The People’s Past (Edward J. Cowan 1980)

I recently reviewed ‘The Folk River’ by Fraser Bruce which describes the Scottish folksong club scene of the 1950s and 60s very accurately. So I thought it would be useful for me to re-visit a book I was given as a present by a friend when it was first published in 1980. Cowan’s book is actually a collection of papers presented at a series of lunch time seminars during the then recent Edinburgh Folk Festival. The idea was to completely turn the usual ‘fringe’ on its head and have a fairly academic event to the side of the much more populist and folk entertainment style main festival.

What’s really interesting is that most of the contributors are specialists in fields not associated with folk arts but have a personal interest in them. There are experts in art history, Scottish history, bagpipe history, and literature. In addition there are a few actual folklore scholars such as Norman Buchan and Hamish Henderson.

If you think it might be a bit dry you’d be wrong. It’s actually very readable and I suspect the various chapters may have been adapted from the original papers by the authors for that very reason.

Hamish Henderson described the vehicle by which folksongs and ballads were carried down the centuries and between different cultures as ‘the carrying stream’ with eddies, boulders and banks, and he appropriately has three different chapters in the book to expand on that.

For anyone interested in how Scottish folk culture unusually intertwined with the more ‘upper class’ or even ‘dumbed down’ strands of the nation’s arts, compared to other European nations, I can thoroughly recommend this book.

A House or a Home – –

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Jack fails again to get his Wednesday post up in time –

Wendy and I have moved house six times so far and it’s always taken us a while to get each one organized to our liking.

Our current abode/house/home

We started out in a small ground floor apartment in Rosyth in Fife and there wasn’t much choice there, with just a sitting room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and guest room. Then we moved to the wee village of New Gilston at the other end of the county and into what had been the schoolhouse. We were there for five years and it took almost all of that time before we finally decided which rooms suited which purpose!

After that to Padiham in Lancashire, England and a gatehouse built in 1790. It had been extended over the years and with lots of nooks and crannies. Once again we had two small spare rooms and once again it took almost until we left before we finalized which room was a home office and which was the guest room.

From there to White Springs in Florida and although the house had an obvious sitting room/dining room/kitchen, there were two bedrooms and again it took us a long time to decide which was which and which could also be a home office.

Continuing to Big Stone Gap Virginia and our bookstore, where we lived for fourteen years. The house was enormous and we started out living in the top story but over time that became part of the bookstore and our sitting room there became the ‘2nd Story Café’. I eventually converted our very dark and dingy basement into our bright and cozy apartment.

Finally here we are in Wytheville Virginia and in a lovely, well cared for, old house again. The lady we bought it from left a great bed and dresser in the main bedroom upstairs (mainly because probably she couldn’t get them out). So for the first couple of years we left things pretty much ‘as is’, including the well cared for back yard. In other words we continued to live in someone else’s house!

But now we’re beginning to make it our home and doing all kinds of changes that the poor previous owner would probably not approve of, although she might like the extended vegetable garden.

I suppose the message for today is that a house can become a home, but it can sometimes take quite a while!