Category Archives: folklore and ethnography

Teach your Children Well – – –

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Jack just makes it in time – –

I taught an on-line class yesterday morning and it brought back many memories.

To explain – –

I taught classes in a Scottish college for over twenty years starting with apprentice house painters and ending with management students. I had the opportunity to retire at either age 60 or 65 and might have gone on to 65 if only for the sheer pleasure of actually teaching. But the bureaucracy and paper work was so awful that I chose 60 and don’t regret it.

However, I never lost the pleasure of actually helping a group of people to navigate their learning experiences and I’ve been lucky to continue to be able do that.

Following retirement, I was contracted as a consultant and taught classes in lots of exotic places, then after moving to the US it was mostly more about Scottish culture, language and music.

Sometimes this was very informal just sitting down with friends and sometimes much more academic in lecture halls or classrooms.

In some ways performing as a singer for audiences gave me more confidence to do something similar in front of a group of students. Eventually, I think, it worked the other way too.

The two big role models in my teenage years were both teachers – George Simpson was the woodwork teacher at the high school I attended and Jim Yeats was the newly appointed young painting instructor when I moved on to the local college as part of my apprenticeship as a house painter. If I saw them walking in town and they said hello I felt like I was walking on air!

So if I managed to be a role model myself, then I’ll be well satisfied!

Mind me Harp, Mind me Harp – – –

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Jack barely scrapes over the line this week – –

The title of this post is a reference to a comedic recording of a mythical Irish ceili band featuring the great Peter Sellers and produced by George Martin (later famous as the ‘fifth Beatle’).

But this is about ‘something completely different’.

My good friend Tom Swadley who leads a rather better band playing Irish traditional music, and based in Virginia and Tennessee, sent me a link to a documentary a few days ago. It traces the history of the Bothy Band from their inception to their recent 50th anniversary reunion concert.

The Bothy Band emerged in the 1970s along with a few others such as ‘Planxty’ and ‘De Danaan’ playing not just very skillfully but with an obvious deep understanding and love of their inherited Irish music. One of their first recordings was of a concert in Paris and like everyone else I was blown away when I first heard it.

They play mainly instrumental sets of tunes with the occasional song thrown in to break things up, but it’s the sets of tunes that grabs you. There’s a tremendous energy and drive that comes from the combination of guitar, bouzouki and keyboard topped with the pipes, fiddles and flute. As others have said – this takes Irish music into the equivalent of ‘rock and roll’!

The documentary is really excellent and traces their career from the earliest days, using archive material, fly on the wall snippets of their rehearsals for the reunion concert, and then finishes with the actual concert. It reminded me of another great documentary about ‘The Weavers’ preparation for their farewell concert at Carnegie Hall (not the one in Dunfermline!). The treatment seemed very similar. In some ways the Bothy Band did for Irish music what the Weavers did for American music, so somewhat fitting!

Here’s a link –

https://www.tg4.ie/en/player/home/?pid=6349887690112&fbclid=IwAR3KSqj3T8rHCeBdTy7PcdTFrEe_UH_yLsvhtmaaXmrd7vY7KnxwswoglIE_aem_AaJbdgKoHkYjsBqJaKLYBlndsm4HXbOpoE2puYj6jeu-iJxfL6UCorf2maGeJgrGj5B2oSv-XDTKSeJk376x_ZEN