The pioneering folklorist Hamish Henderson played a crucial role in recording, collecting and preserving the great ballad tradition of Scotland. A songwriter and poet, he began travelling in search of balladeers in the early 1950s. His work was then archived in the newly formed School for Scottish Studies in Edinburgh, for whom he was an inspirational figurehead. Here he describes one of his earliest trips. A Cornkister is a bothy balladeer.
Jimmy learned the ‘bothy style’ – the way of life of the farm servants of the pre-First World War North-East – the hard way. He left school at thirteen and was fee’d at Brandane’s Fair to a farm in the parish of Deskford, south of Cullen in Banffshire. … His most vivid memory of that first year was a savage beating with the back chain of a cart for not being in proper control of his horses: ‘Ye ca’d oot muck wi’ your pair at that time ye used your pair at that time. The foreman went oot first, and of course I was oot ahin’, man; I happened til miss my hin’-sling, o’ my cairt like – and the horse gaed agley, dae ye see. H [the foreman] pulled me oot-ow’r the cairt and thrashed me we’ a back chain – richt ow’r the back wi’ a back chain. An’ the fairmer was passin’ at the time, and never lookit near hand.’
… No wonder Jimmy MacBeath later described the North-East farm servants of that period as ‘a very sad-crushed people, very sair crushed doon’. Conditions of work, living accommodation and the food (generally brose) provided for the lads were all the subject of outspoken complaint in bothy ballads, and when Jimmy sang ‘Drumdelgie’ to audiences far outside the North-East, he was able to communicate more of the immediate reality of a farm labourer’s life in the old days than a hundred Government papers or bureaucratic reports could possibly have done.
The outbreak of World War I did at any rate provide a chance of a break from this ‘hard slavery work’. Jimmy enlisted in the Gordons, and saw service in the trenches of France and Flanders. … When he was demobilized, he was faced with the depressing prospect of re-entering farm service, but fate – in the shape of Geordie Stewart of Huntly, a wealthy travelling scrap dealer. … – willed otherwise. Geordie was a connoisseur of ballad singing, and it was he who put the idea into Jimmy’s head that he might be better employed using his by-ordinar voice, with its unique gravely tone, as a street singer than meekly submitting to the necessity of a return to the bothy life. Geordie not only assured Jimmy that fame, money and a great lyric future lay before him on the road; he also taught him two or three dozen of the songs which he was afterwards to make famous, including the best version collected to date of ‘Come a’ ye Tramps and Hawkers’ …
The time of the year when Jimmy really came into his own was Aikey Fair … When Jimmy MacBeath turned up, he at once became the centre of a lively group of farm servants, who urged him on to sing ‘The Banks o’ Ross-shire’, ‘Torn a’, rippit a’’, ‘The Ball o’ Kirriemeer’ and other colourful items from his repertoire …
Afterwards Jimmy would repair to a hotel bar in Old Deer, and the fun would continue. I remember well seeing him in his glory in that same bar in the evening of the Fair Day in 1953; one of the young farm servants, who had obviously formed a strong attachment to him, was sitting and listening attentively, while Jimmy taught him ‘Airlin’s Fine Braes’ verse by verse. I felt it was a real privilege to witness the actual act of oral transmission, especially when the transmitter was none other than the reigning ‘King o’ the Cornkisters’.
Jimmy also used to sing at ‘Turra Market’ (Porter Fair), and it was in Turriff that Alan Lomax and I made our first recordings of him in 1951. The lead that carried us to Jimmy came from ‘Lordie’ Hay, a veteran bothy singer whom I had met on an earlier tour … We recorded a number of songs from him in the Commercial Hotel in Turriff; in addition, he provided a graphic account of the career and personality of Jimmy MacBeath, and obligingly told us where we would probably find him; this turned out to be the North Lodge, a model lodging-house in Elgin.
The following day we drove west from Turriff, via Banff and Buckie. Alan dropped me off at Jessie Murray’s house in Buckie and drove on alone to Elgin to pick up Jimmy. Jessie, a great ballad singer, was in rare fettle and I hardly noticed the two hours go by, when suddenly I heard Alan’s car draw up in front of the house. A moment or two later, Jessie and I had a simultaneous first vision of Jimmy’s beaming, rubicund, booze-blotched face as he walked into the kitchen, followed by Alan. There was a moment of silence. Then Alan said: ‘Hamish … Jessie … I want you to meet Jimmy MacBeath.’
Half an hour later we were en route for Turriff, and Jimmy was singing in the back of the car. … When he learned that we were heading for ‘Turra toon’, Jimmy was none too confident of his reception. The last time he had been there, he had been slung out of the town by the local police, who had told him never to set foot in Turriff again. However, Alan assured him that this was a ‘special case’ – as indeed it was – and Jimmy rode back into Turra in triumph. He was shortly taking his ease, and a royal dram, in the best hotel in the town.
Indeed, Jimmy, who was never slow to claim descent from the Macbeth who ‘stabbed King Duncan through the mattress’ – and, given any encouragement, from the best-looking of the three Weird Sisters too – was quick to realize that here, in the shape of two wandering folklorists, was fate in a Ford Anglia, and that his reappearance (against all the odds) in Turra toon signified a qualitative change in more than his own personal picaresque career. Those early recording sessions in the Commercial marked the intersection in space and time of the old world of Aikey Fair and the new world of the as yet undreamed-of Keele Festival of the future, with its hundreds of youthful enthusiasts from all over Britain gathered to hear Flora MacNeil, Ewan MacColl, Margaret Barry, Felix Doran, Bell and Alex Stewart – and Jimmy MacBeath himself, the symbolic unifying factor in the whole clanjamfrie.