Image: ‘hear no evil’ gargoyle on Paisley Abbey. Creative Commons Licence CC BY-SA 3.0
Recent posts from Soundyngs have been discussing contemporary music. This is just a short post, unlike some recent epics, signposting a 2014 article by Caitlin Flynn and Christy Mitchell that suggests medieval Scottish ‘flyting’ poetry was a bit like hip hop.
Flyting was a verbal battle, conducted in Scots courtly poetry, using words instead of rapiers.
Hip hop “battle rap”is, well, sort of similar, with a bit more swearing. Although a lot of flyting poetry hasn’t survived, so maybe the original oral tradition was a bit fruitier.
As the authors say, “the poets who engaged in these public invectives were actually amicable rivals competing for increased court status and wealth” (Flynn and Mitchell, p.69). Needless to say, this notion has inspired some hellish puns in recent years – Tim Siddons on the ‘flyte club’ (cue groans) for example.
Rather bizarrely, one academic (the late Ferenc Szasz of the University of New Mexico) even argued that it was the Scots export of flyting to the Americas which gave enslaved people there the idea of doing it. Soundyngs thinks this is, erm, highly unlikely. Let’s give African American culture credit for having its own routes for developing the performance virtuosity that may encourage Scots to reconnect in a lively way with our past tradition. Flynn and Mitchell just get on and give you a good, close analysis of how the Scots verse works, drawing some useful performance parallels to help you imagine this in practice.
The music is in the rhythms. If you want to imagine (or even recreate this) using a drum track, Soundyngs believes there may be a gap in the youtube record for such a thing… Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015) wrote a piano piece called ‘Barra Flyting Toccata’, but that’s not quite what I have in mind.
Have a read – link below.
Further Reading
Caitlin Flynn and Christy Mitchell, “It may be verifyit that thy wit is thin”: Interpreting Older Scots Flyting through Hip Hop Aesthetics’ in Oral Tradition, 29(1), 2014, 69-86.
Tim Siddons, ‘16th Century Scots ‘Rappers’ had verbal jousts at the flyte club’, in Scottish Field, 23rd August 2019
Ferenc Szasz, interviewed by Simon Johnson, ‘Rap music originated in medieval Scottish pubs, claims American professor’, The Telegraph, 28th December 2008
Listening
- Ronald Stevenson, ‘Barra Flyting Toccata’, played by Christopher Guild on Stevenson: Piano Music vol.3 (Toccata Classics, 2019) – not hip hop, but nevertheless a weird and wonderful mix up of compositions inspired by folk traditions around the world, from Ghaana to China by way of the Hebrides.