We regard the written word as sacrosanct, but where are the prizes for song? Essay

Zoltan Kodaly Folk Music of Hungary (Budapest, 1960)

In a sense Scotland too has yet to reveal her message. ''Literature'', for most of us, has, unfortunately, come to mean one thing: the written word. For example, we arbitrarily recognise the old Scots ballads as ''literature''. Scholars sit and analyse them, and collections of ballads are readily available, as they have been since the days of Bishop Percy.

Yet, in fact, as mere words on a printed page they constitute a false representation. The art of the ballad resides in the fluidity of live performance rather than in the fossilisation of cold text. What hope of just recognition then have the lyrical songs which are seen as mere trifles, unworthy of publication, and which are still, therefore, very much part of an oral tradition? Burns himself complained of their lowly status:

''The Mob of mankind, that 'many-headed beast', would laugh at so serious a speech about 'an old Song'; but, as Job says, 'O that mine adversary had written a book!' Those who think that composing a Scotch song is a trifling business - let them try.'' (To James Hoy, November 6, 1787)

Two hundred years on, we have still to appreciate Burns's outstanding achievement - perhaps the greatest songwriter of the eighteenth century - and to acknowledge the excellence of Scottish song right across the centuries.

We are all products of an educational system which regards the written word as sacrosanct. An author finds acceptance and social respect-ability through attainment in print: the Booker, the Whitbread, the Somerset Maughan. But what if the medium is not ''poetry'' but song? Where are the prizes then?

Eric Bogle, Adam McNaughton, Maginn, Hamish Henderson, Ian Walker, Ian Bruce, Dick Gaughan, Alan Reid, Brian McNeill, and so many others are names never uttered in Scottish ''cultural'' circles. Yet, these songwriters are regarded widely as the vanguard of a great living folk literary tradition. I would bet that, for example, Bogle's No Man's Land (sometimes called The Green Fields of France) is better known and regarded internationally than most of what passes for Scottish literature. On his last visit to Scotland Nelson Mandela embraced Hamish Henderson as an obvious gesture of deference for the songwriter's outstanding contribution to folk song and, equally, to the international struggle for justice; for the two go hand-in-hand throughout so much of the contemporary Scottish folk movement. Freedom Come All Ye, John Maclean's March, Rivonia - Free Mandela - these were clearly some of the

songs Mandela had in mind.

Scottish folk groups and solo artists deliver our words and music to all parts of the globe. The Battlefield Band, Capercaillie, Tannahill Weavers, Old Blind Dogs, Deaf Shepherd, the singer/songwriters mentioned above, and many others, are known and acclaimed worldwide.

Not a few have been decorated by foreign governments. Meantime, much of the national culture has long germinated underground in Scotland for reasons far too complex to dispatch with simple answers or platitudes.

None the less, a message - a constructive myth, if you like - has filtered through the centuries, reminding us of who we are and, more importantly, who we should be. Set against the primary aim of ''freedom, which no good man surrenders but with his life'', is an astounding assumption enshrined in the Declaration of Arbroath (1320): the recognition that the highest justice is:

''before Him to Whom there is

but a single weight, Who has one law for Jew and Greek and for Scots

and English . . .''

It was not a far cry from this ideal of absolute justice to what have rightly been described as fundamental principles of humanity and an international perspective within Scottish thought. In modern times the notion is manifest in the national internationalism of our writers and songwriters: like MacDiarmid with his ''Scotland in relation to the infinite'', or Henderson with his messianic John Maclean whose spirit speaks: ''In Glasgow oor city and the hail world besides'' (John MacLean's March). No doubt that is why Burns, whose simple humanitarian art has been translated into every conceivable language, remains our national poet; why the Scottish Enlightenment, with its emphasis on tolerance, rather than the seventeenth century - ''the killing times'' - is the period upon which we more happily dwell. Think about it. The foremost Burns songs - A man's a man, Auld lang syne - are for all the

world

the very measure of our humanity; the standards of behaviour we advocate, however far below them we so often fall.

I wish neither to whitewash nor to blackwash our humanitarian track record. But I do object to the whole notion of racism by design (''institutional racism'') in the country. Into the balance I would throw the songs which reflect and inform public

opinion. They remain for our civil society a strong, quickening undercurrent of the values and social critique implicit in the Declaration of Arbroath. It is instructive to remember Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun's quote to the effect that: ''If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation''.

To my mind that is why ''freedom'' and ''exile'' are two healthy, if sobering, preoccupations within the Scottish folk movement.

''Fredome'', in our literature, song, and balladry, has meant not only personal

liberty and national freedom from subjection - from Barbour's Brus to Henderson's Rivonia - Free Mandela - but, to quote The Dictionary of The Older Scottish Tongue, a ''free, open-hearted, or generous disposition'' towards others.

Freedom, in this sense, means responsibility . . . conscience. Hence, so many of our national songs leave us with little scope for complacency, or hand-on-the-heart chauvinism. Hamish Henderson's millennial vision of ''freedom'' is a case in point:

Broken faimlies in lands we've herriet

Will curse Scotland the Brave nae mair, nae mair

(The Freedom Come-All-Ye)

His song is indeed a celebration, but the painful, backward reflection does not let us off the hook all

that comfortably.

The most widely celebrated Scottish works are cast in this mould. They are songs of conscience: like Bogle's No Man's Land - probably the finest anti-war song ever written - which, with its subtle, biting refrain, ''Did the pipes play the 'Flooers o' The Forest'?'', reminds us poignantly that responsibility does not end with empty gestures or national rituals.

Did they beat the drum slowly,

Did they play the fife lowly,

Did the rifles fire o'er ye

As they lowered you down.

Did the bugles sing the 'last post' in chorus

Did the pipes play the ''Flooers o' the Forest''?

Anti-racist songs, like Ian Walker's Hawks and Eagles or Iain MacDonald's Sun City, have not just an international focus; they forcefully throw us back upon ourselves. Erin-Go-Bragh, for example, is a defiant anti-racist statement, written in response to the persecution of Irish (and, indeed, all other) immigrants in Scotland: as the protagonist of the song asserts in his parting shot: ''I don't give a damn to where you belong''. The Erin-go-bragh of the song is a Highlander, mistakenly identified as an Irishman, who, in essence, asserts that if there is to be persecution in the country he will proudly wear the Irish label. Peter Nardini's Larkhall pulls even fewer punches with the bigots.

Bigotry pours out the drains like blue blood runs through the veins of princes, and on Sundays,

Everybody goes tae church, it disnae cost them very much tae worship, when the pub's shut . . .

God wears a fitba' scarf and the sun sets like an orange sash in the distance, but they're a' good Christians.

And they tell me that once you're over the wall,

It really isnae a' that bad at all, as long as yer name's no' John Paul . . .

There have been many fine songs

written in this vein. John

John McCreadie's Doomsday in the Afternoon, for example, a mordant defence of travellers, makes our collective guilt part of a far more heinous crime than moving on tinkers' campsites.

The travellers were at Auschwitz

There were travellers at Belsen too.

The Nazi treated the traveller

The same as the Jew.

But history turns a blind eye

and remembers what it will.

For the travelling people

There is no Israel.

England may be the ''auld enemy'' in songs of medieval battles, but anti-English sentiments occupy no place, overall, within the folk movement. A strong nationalistic song like Lionel Cleland's Right to be Free is, at its most rabid, anti-Westminster, not anti-English. Even Flower of Scotland - so often misrepresented and misused - calls for a return to the high spirit of our ancestors, rather than to their militarism; Those days are gone now and in the past they must remain.

Gaughan's Both Sides of the Tweed states the general position eloquently:

Let friendship and honour unite

And flourish on both sides of the Tweed.

In point of fact, much of our critical tradition turns inwards. I am reminded of Bernard MacLaverty's comment that, on informing his mates of his prospective move from Northern Ireland to Scotland, one of them remarked:

''You'll like Scotland. The writers there scratch each other's backs . . . with dirks.''

Certainly, the folk movement is nothing if not critical and iconoclastic. Brian McNeill's No God's and Precious Few Heroes brilliantly compresses so much of our thinking into a series of explosive musical statements:

''the pride and the glory's just another bloody lie;'' ''So to hell with the heather and the glen;'' ''And tell me, will we never hear the end of poor bloody Charlie and Culloden yet again;'' and that biting refrain ''there's plenty on the dole in the land o' the leal.''

In a gentler vein Leave Us

Our Glens achieves the same

end with its send-up of the tartan

Scot - ''that mess called full Highland dress'' - and those who cherish Brigadoon images ''of our glorious glens''. Hermless, similarly, in the great tradition of Scots understatement, pokes fun, as its author, Michael Marra, tells us, at the

whole idea of militaristic nationalism in song - ''anthems of national prowess''.

These iconoclastic songs turn satirical barbs inwards, really with a view to social improvement. In essence, they are Burnsian exercises which assert that we make ourselves ridiculous in direct proportion to our deviating from the values we have always espoused.

The universality of Scotland's message in song is often conveyed through the theme of ''exile'', the polar opposite of ''freedom''. The notion of exile, in fact, runs throughout so much of our literary tradition and throughout the best of twentieth-century literature.

For the Yiddish novelist, I B Singer, the exiled - or wandering - Jew is a symbol of ''the whole human species'' just as is the ''rovin'' Scot for Brian McNeill:

''And when all of my travelling is over/the next of the rovers will come'' (The Rovin Dies Hard). Both Jew and Scot (and Scottish Jew for that matter - like the protagonist of Chaim Bermant's Patriarch) are figures carrying historical burdens and seeking an end to the long trek across time and space.

Furthermore, within the notion of exile is, as Singer perceptively observes, a lesson for all mankind:

''When all nations realise they are in exile, exile will cease to be; when majorities discover that they, too, are minorities, the minority will be the rule and not the exception . . . Man must be both himself and an integrated part of the whole, loyal to his own home and origin and deeply cognisant of the origin of others.''

(Yiddish, the Language of Exile)

To my mind this is precisely what is behind our obsession with exile, whether it be in the poetry of somebody like Iain Crichton Smith, or

the many songs of exile: Internal Exile, Jamie Raeburn, even the nostalgic songs like Caledonia, and so many others.

Our parliament went out, in the words of the Earl of Seafield, with ''the end of an auld sang''. Let us usher it in with the beginning of

a new sang for ourselves and

for mankind.

n Dr Fred Freeman is honorary fellow in English (Edinburgh University), producer of The Complete Songs of Robert Burns, and a recently released CD, To Be The Nation Again.