Paisley opens the pages of the Great Scottish Songbook

“My great grandfather, Charles Reader, made a collection of Scottish songwriters and their songs from 480AD to 1898,” she says. “The list fills three or four pages. I never knew him but he was alive at a time when the Scottish song was part of every UK schoolchild’s curriculum in the post-Victorian era. I don’t know if they’re all ‘great’ but Scotland has a fine approach to song. Many of them are spectacular – from songs by the fireside to the singers and songwriters who acted as news carriers, the entertainers and the lawyers who were welcomed into every village.”

She cites a few examples of the continuing tradition: Neil Gow’s tunes, Allan Ramsay’s poetry, Robert Burns, Jack Bruce, Lulu, Alex Harvey, John Martyn, KT Tunstall, Paulo Nutini. “Traditionally, song and story are how we talked to one another and passed news. So if you’re talking quantity, Scots have a big collection.”

Reader is attracted to traditional Scottish music because it roots her to something through life. Native song “connects my heart with my father’s heart and in turn to his mother’s heart and all those others before that. I’m lucky to have been exposed to that tradition through the West of Scotland folk clubs of the late 1970s – but I’m also attracted to songs written with a nod to trends and recent technology.

“In all of the places I have experienced an audience, I find the support of Scots to ‘one of their own’ is remarkable. When Scots like something you create, it feels like you are claimed as their personal family.”

Is it possible to detect links between Scottish music of different generations? Yes, she affirms. “When I sing I'm applying my sense of the Glasgow tenement-party joy and love that infected me with an ability to understand the tones of a song and its ability to overrule every other emotion in the room. I learned that from men and women who learned that from their parents and in turn that was learned from their older ones.”

Reader, whose own place in Scottish songwriting history has long been assured, has her own favourites, of course. “I adore Burns and hear Scotland in all his melodies and lyrics. Of recent writers, I hear very intelligent and creative energy in Roddy Frame as a craftsman. It has ‘new town’ East Kilbride all over it. Annie Lennox has that dark Scottish east-coast lyric writing. [The late] Michael Marra, a craftsman of great worth, delighted us with his wry Dundonian humour.”

She admires Bert Jansch, “from Edinburgh, with his brooding ancient cobblestone-street authority in his guitar playing, and John Martyn and the deconstruction of traditional Scottish melody." Of newer acts, she particularly likes Chvrches, Treacherous Orchestra, Lau and Kris Drever.

DOUGIE Maclean is in demand these days as much as he ever was. Not only has he been chalking up the miles to perform a string of dates, but on October 30, his Perthshire Amber Festival gets underway.

When he talks about the magic of songwriting, he knows what he is talking about: his most famous song, Caledonia, has become a much-covered part of Scottish song culture, having been sung by everyone from Frankie Miller to Ronan Keating.

"My grandparents were Gaelic speakers and my earliest memory is of my grandfather coming up from Dunkeld having had a few glasses of whisky and sitting in the kitchen singing his beautiful Gaelic songs, and the tears would be running down his face. In my family, singing songs was like eating, breathing and sleeping. I think Scotland has that desire to sing, because of that Gaelic heritage that permeates most of our culture.

"But to be able to sing, you need to have songs, and people have to write them. People here have long made their own songs, to sing in the fields or wherever. There's the wonderful traditions of, say, the north-east bothy ballads, of the Gaels making up songs for their work: it's only in modern times that you actually have the concept of the professional songwriter. It's sad we have lost that tradition, of people writing songs for themselves."

Friday's concert "will be a great celebration of the art of songwriting, which I'm a big champion of. I speak as someone who has spent the last 40 years as a travelling troubadour. It's an old tradition, writing songs and travelling around singing them. People used to go from village to village, singing songs about what was happening – it was almost like a news-delivery thing.

"The brilliant thing about songs in general is that when you combine a bit of lyric and a bit of melody, the sum of the total is greater than the individual parts. There's something quite magical about songwriting when you do it for the right reasons. If it's just being churned out in an attempt to make a hit single, sometimes it doesn't have that magic. There's magic inside a song. A song can really move people. It can have quite simple lyrics – it doesn't have to be a piece of literary genius."

While not singling out any Scots songwriters in particular, it does please him that there's a "wonderful range, from the folky type to the very poppy type. Scotland has created a huge amount over the years to that part of the creative arts."

He has seen his own "little song" Caledonia "become part of common culture. It's sung at weddings, at funerals. It transcends something when people start to use a song in their everyday lives, in their own celebrations and ceremonies. That's a fantastic thing."

EMMA Pollock - solo artist, former Delgado, co-creator of Chemikal Underground - is mildly surprised, but delighted, to find herself on the bill for the concert this Friday."I guess I still just see myself as one of the many singers and songwriters in this country, and it's always a privilege to be invited to take part," she says. "Given that the last time I produced a record was in 2010, I’m looking forward to getting back out over coming months to play some new material which is what I’ll be doing at this show as well as playing a couple of my favourite tunes."

Pollock, whose next solo album, In Search of Harperfield, is out in January, says that though all the artists on stage in Paisley represent different genres, there's still substantial overlap. "Eddi Reader," she says, "is a great example of an artist I was introduced to when I was a lot younger, with Fairground Attraction. Everybody knew that great song [Perfect] - it was one of those songs that was part of the landscape of Scottish pop music at the time.

"The Trashcan Sinatras were a hugely important band for me when I was in The Delgados. When I was 18, in 1989, I moved to Glasgow to go to university. For me - I'd grown up in Galloway - that was an incredible introduction to the music that existed in Scotland, because so much was coming out of the west coast, Glasgow and surrounding districts. It's wonderful now, 20-odd years on, to be taking part in some of the retrospective celebration of a lot of that music which was responsible for me becoming involved in the first place "

Pollock acknowledges that there is "an incredible heritage of songwriting in this country, and it continues to this day"; her aim on Friday night "is to hark back to the music that was there when I was a kid, and growing up, and getting to the point where I wanted to get involved in music."

For Pollock, one of the great strengths of Scottish songwriting is its pop sensibility and unerring grasp of melody. "When you look back at a lot of the Postcard bands like Orange Juice, when you look at Edwyn Collins, Aztec Camera, at many of the songs that came out of Bellshill, it's all melodic. That's what counts for me. Atmosphere and texture are incredibly important, but if the song can't be boiled down to a fantastic melodic line ... It doesn't have to be limited to the vocal, it can be a fantastic melodic line in the instrumental backing, then that’s what often makes it stick. Melody for me is key, as is pushing chord progressions so that they are not predictable."

It will be interesting to see her final choice of songs for Friday night. Safe to say that melody - that hallmark of so many great groups, including many from Scotland - will feature rather prominently.

A Celebration of Scottish Songwriting is at Paisley Town Hall on Friday; tickets (£22.50) from 0300 300 1210. For full details of the festival, see www.bringitallhome.co.uk