2015 Recipient of the Hamish Henderson Services to Traditional Music Award Ewan McVicar has been making really interesting websites for many years. Below are his latest websites most definitely worth a visit.
OH BUT THEY SANG BONNY
Ewan McVicar has just created the theysangbonny.website, gathering together information from diverse sources on Scotland’s women singers and song makers, and Scottish songs that feature women, from the earliest 12th Century lyrics up till 1960. Gaelic women songmakers, Scots ballads and songs and the ‘collectors’ who had them printed, gently-born Scots re-makers of traditional songs into art songs, the move from print to sound recordings, the Traveller singers, women in Scottish song lyrics and more.
AULD AIBERDEENSHIRE SANGS
auldaiberdeenshiresangs.com, created by Ewan McVicar, tells of the work around Aberdeenshire of US collectors J M Carpenter, Alan Lomax, Ken Goldstein, Howard Glasser and Englishman Peter Hall, with sampled recordings of auld Scots sangs. The site shares selections from wonderful archives of hundreds of old songs. The achievements of our tireless Hamish Henderson is well known and celebrated, but the work of other collectors is less widely known. The collections of Carpenter in 1930 and Lomax in the 1950s are available on line, but Goldstein and Glasser’s work is tucked away in US universities, and Tom Spiers has promoted knowledge of Peter Hall’s fine work.
KEN GOLDSTEIN AND SCOTLAND
goldsteinandscotland.com looks in more detail at the wide range of collecting done by important American figure Ken Goldstein. In 1960 he spent a year recording many fine ballads and songs in the home of Fetterangus Lucy Stewart, and tunes from her exceptional fiddler brother Ned. Goldstein also stravaiged around Buchan recording other fine singers. Later, back in the States he recorded visiting Scots, including Lucy’s niece ballad singer and pianist Elizabeth Stewart, Aberdonian multi-lingual weaver Norman Kennedy, the touring Boys Of The Lough, and others. This website is still being expanded and added to as website creator Ewan McVicar gradually winkles more tracks out of the Ole Miss University Goldstein archive.
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