2021 is the 70-year anniversary of the 1951 Edinburgh People’s Festival Ceilidh, the seminal event that heralded and generated the Scottish Folk Revival of the 1960s. Alan Lomax was on hand to record it in the Oddfellows Hall, and thus able to preserve a document of a legendary concert that alerted the astonished urban audience to the continuing vitality of Scotland’s rich heritage of traditional song. People in the rich folk culture of the Gaelic-speaking West, or speaking the Doric accent of the North East, still held and sang their vibrant old ballads and songs of work, but the Central Belt city folk thought the songs entombed in old books. Until the 1951 Ceilidh.
After it came a groundswell of enthusiasm for Scots song, house ceilidhs, concerts and campfires. The first of a wave of folk clubs began in 1960, with young people learning and singing the songs through lyric booklets and recordings. Dozens of artists—over the intervening decades to the present—have expressed the debt owed by Scotland to Ceilidh organizer Hamish Henderson and the original singers by sharing their own versions of songs performed at the event.
Read more about this amazing anniversary https://archive.culturalequity.org/1951ceilidh