Robert Tannahill’s (1774 to 1810) contribution to Scottish song lyrics is known to Scots song enthusiasts but, in this 250th year since his birth, could be more widely celebrated. He was born in Paisley to a family of weavers, and saw this occupation shift from being one of modest working class respectability to one of increasing urban poverty. The poems he published in his lifetime appeared both separately in magazines and in a single volume, published in 1807 alongside a short dramatic interlude called “The Soldier’s Return’. These were clearly imagined as song lyrics, often headed with suggested tunes. While some appear to be simple pastorals drawing on his intimate knowledge of the countryside around Paisley, others explore themes such as the fate of those mobilised to fight in the Napoleonic wars, or the melancholic home-sickness of itinerant Irish labourers, providing a radical undercurrent that reflects the politics of his changing times. Paisley was a fast-industrialising town, with weavers becoming tightly-bound into factory systems that benefited the owners more than workers. Tannahill did not live to see the 1819 riots in the town that responded to the shooting of working class radicals in Manchester by armed militia (the Peterloo Massacre), but his poems show the beginning of a radical consciousness that would feed into the emergence of a new kind of working-class political ballad.
An ambitious project led by Fred Freeman to perform all of Tannahill’s songs has reached its conclusion in a fifth and final CD. The collection uses a range of 21st century contemporary folk styles rather than attempting to reproduce the sound of what Tannahill himself might have imagined. Freeman formerly lectured at the University of Edinburgh School of Scottish Studies, and for some time has been attached as a visiting Professor at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, where his insights into the connection between Scottish dance rhythms and Scots poetic meter have been helping singers and audiences to understand how embodied knowledge feeds into literature. What we have in the CDs, however, is reflective of 21st century embodied knowledge rather than a straightforward reconstruction of 19th century sensibilities.
It was Tannahill’s curation of his own local countryside that continued to make him a local hero in Paisley when his literary reputation more widely suffered by comparison with Burns. Nevertheless, the Collected Songs recording project reimagines the songs, modifying and editing the original lyrics and combining these with new-composed material alongside traditional tunes. Instruments are not simply Scottish fiddles and “box” concertinas and melodions, but also reflect a wider European folk world, from eastern European klezmer style playing to Greek bazoukis and even on one occasion an African drum. Jazz and Latin American dance rhythms can be heard alongside jigs and reels. The thesis is, perhaps, that these songs connect with a trans-national working class identity. The CD liner note in the final album suggests that Tannahill would have had much to say to fellow radical folk musicians, Hamish Henderson, a leader of the 20th century folk revival, and also an advocate of ‘international’ working-class folk music.
Tannahill himself came to a sad end; he drowned in a Paisley canal after finding it impossible to get a second volume of poetry published. Those involved in the Collected Songs project – particularly Fred Freeman – have found the resilience to push through multiple difficulties, with this final CD being on a different (self-published?) platform to previous volumes. Well done to them. What they have produced does demonstrate that Tannahill’s poems – albeit in many cases significantly transformed – still have the ability to speak to the feelings and experiences of the marginalised, and various clusters of songs highlight Tannahill’s empathy for outsider figures in ways that are thought-provoking.
It would be useful to have, somewhere, a listening guide that provides more information about the exact sources of lyrics, so the pre-modified versions could be seen alongside the new versions, and for the tunes, giving names rather than simply ‘traditional tune’ along with sources, and the rationale for the new arrangements. Listening to this disc, while the radical humanitarian messaging is clear, it might be even clearer if we had more explication of the creative decisions.
However, for those new to Tannahill’s songs, this is an interesting collection of some very enjoyable performances from an accomplished collective of musicians, and for those familiar with Tannahill’s songs, this is a thought-provoking exercise in the studio-album remix as a new form of transformative orality.
Further Listening
- Robert Tannahill, Complete Songs of Robert Tannahill vols. 1 to 4 (Edinburgh: Brechin All Records, 2006, 2010, 2012, 2016)
- Robert Tannahill, produced by Fred Freeman, Various Artists, Robert Tannahill Songs Volume CCL (Edinburgh: Duende Records, March 2024) available inter alia from HMV
Further Reading
- George S. Christian, ‘”In the Shadow of Burns”: Robert Tannahill’, in Beside the Bard: Scottish Lowland Poetry in the Age of Burns (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020),127-151.
- Jim Ferguson, A Weaver in Wartime: A Biographical Study and the Letters of Paisley Weaver Poet Robert Tannahill (1774-1810), PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, (2011)
- Robert Tannahill, The Soldier’s Return: A Scottish Interlude in Two Acts. With other poems and songs, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Paisley, 1807).
- Christopher A. Whatley, ‘”It is said that Burns was a radical’: contest, concession, and the political legacy of Robert Burns, ca.1796-1859’, in the Journal of British Studies 50(3), (2011), 639-666
- Christopher A. Whatley, Immortal Memory: Burns and the Scottish People (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2016) – suggestive history of how conservative forces used the pastoral aspects of his poetry to suppress Burns’s radicalism