Scotland has a small but highly creative group of independent recording labels, which do important work in curating and shaping our evolving sense of the pasts and presents of Scottish music. Soundyngs discussed Pete Shepheard’s Springthyme records earlier this year – a label with a particular strength in ballads and ethnographic contextual notes. Linn Records might be your go-to label for high quality art music, including Scottish art music, and jazz. Those interested in contemporary environmental issues may well be on the subscription list of Hudson Records. Back in the 1950s, you might have been watching out for additions to the Gaelfonn catalogue, and before that, perhaps pounced on the rather white-heather-bound issues from Beltona records (see our 2024 post on discographies and the National Library of Scotland). This list is by no means exhaustive: the point is, that Scottish music heritage owes a great deal to the efforts of its domestic recording industry in curating and helping to make community awareness of music history and traditions.
Greentrax Recordings is particularly interesting for those interested in Scottish music history for not simply curating artists performing traditional music, but imaginatively designing series of recordings to help listeners to engage with archive material, packaging projects to help imagine the sounds of particular historical moments. Many of their more ‘traditional’ music items (e.g. Fred Freeman’s Robert Tannahill Songs Volume CCL) reflect a meeting between tradition and modernity, a sense of ‘living’ and evolving tradition.
Founded back in the 1980s by a folk music-loving policeman, Ian Green, who was also a founding member of the Edinburgh Folk Club, this record company is important to Scotland’s musical life because it builds bridges between historical soundscapes and contemporary listeners. Ian Green died in March 2024, and this is a belated thank you to his vision. The Hands Up For Trad Hall of Fame has a short biopic of his life which is worth reading – see below.
My suggestion is to go in via the Greentrax ‘Collections’ page, which organises the catalogue into conceptual buckets in a manner that allows you to appreciate the historical alignment of their material. These “collections” attest to active history-making through music-making, and show the power of music to sustain communal historical memory. I’m highlighting 3 such portals.
- Wars and Battles. Click here for albums that take us back to the sound worlds of the first World War; of songs that in 2014 commemorated the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn; of poems, stories and music associated with Scots who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. A collection themed around the 1745 Battle of Prestonpans is a companion piece to the Prestonpans Tapestry, and has Jacobite material and stories associated with that remarkable community project. More sombre tracks feature in the 2013 collection that marks the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Flodden, which brings together both professional and community performers to meditate on the traumatic import of that event.
- Scottish Tradition. As the name suggests, this is a collection that helps to articulate what ‘tradition’ sounds like, making available material from the School of Scottish Studies (University of Edinburgh) archives in coherent bundles, a tasting board to the full archive: bagpipes, fiddle, Gaelic song, ballads from various regions from bothy to muckle ballads, and again the spoken work (stories and poems). Chokit On a Tattie – a steal (current price) at £6 – is a collection of children’s songs and rhymes. Gaelic Psalms from Lewis helps us to understand that unique practice. Localities – Barra, Tiree, Skye, North Uist, Orkney, Shetland – are given their own albums to showcase how these places made unique contributions to Scottish musical traditions. While the School of Scottish Studies Tobar an Dualchais sound archive makes a lot available for free, this strategic use of designed concept albums is a helpful guided pathway for less expert listeners, making coherent, imaginative packages of material at astonishingly reasonable prices. As Katherine Campbell of the School of Scottish Studies and the general editor of this series makes clear in her writing, recording releases are vital elements in effective public communication of academic historical research: Greentrax in this respect is collaborating in research outreach.
- Masters of Piobaireachd highlights two particular players who have been central to the transmission of this repertoire: Robert U Brown and Robert Nicol, great teachers, showing how they taught by both playing pipes and vocalisation (canntaireachd).
Part of my enthusiasm for these projects is that vinyl and CDs can include extensive sleeve notes that add immensely to the listener’s understanding of contexts and meanings. These are much more difficult to integrate within streaming services.
In addition to all this historical work, the Greentrax Recording sub-label G2 has encouraged more diverse contemporary forms of hybrid music, reflecting Scotland’s place in the wider world of folk music (e.g. Salsa Celtica, South American and Scottish fusion).
The economics of the recording business are fragile. Online streaming has significantly trimmed the profit margins, and as Greentrax point out in their blogpost summary of 2025, shifts in technologies (i.e. the swift decline in CD sales and absence of playback devices) have made trading challenging. However, their creative approach to music recording and distribution continues. Greentrax have been entrepreneurial in exploring digital streaming solutions alongside physical sales; their webpages contain a lot of short samples. However, if you want to support them more fulsomely, dig a few pennies out for their back CD catalogue.
Perhaps start with Sandy Bell’s Ceilidh, referencing the famous folk bar in Edinburgh, a recording from the 1970s which features some of the famous names from the folk revival: Aly Bain, Dick Gaughan, The McCalmans, and more – Ian Green’s starting ground for his enterprise.
Further Reading and Listening
- Greentrax Records homepage and Collections.
- Anon, Hands Up For Trad, Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame, ‘Ian D Green’ accessed 11 Feb 2026
- Bob Anderson, ‘Doing It For Themselves: A Brief History of Scottish Independent Record Labels’, in Made in Scotland: Studies in Popular Music ed. Frith and Cloonan, (Routledge, 2023): see pp. 24-32 on 20th century popular music independent record labels
- Katherine Campbell, University of Edinburgh, ‘The Scottish Tradition Series: Impact and Community’ in The Carrying Stream Flows On: Celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of the School of Scottish Studies Bob Chambers (Islands Book Trust, 2013): pp.138-154
- Naomi Elysia Harvey, Sound Archiving and Traditional Song Transmission in Scotland: exploring a confluence of practice, doctoral thesis, Heriot-Watt University, 2021 see p.40 on Greentrax’s relationship with the School of Scottish Studies, along with an evaluation of the Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches archive alongside other, smaller, archives of Scottish music collections. This is an interesting piece of work which draws attention both to the richness of small collections as well as large, and to the fragility of these, and the challenges of opening up historical sounds to a wider public.