Image: Imperial Hotel, South Street, St Andrews, from late 1905s postcard
“Dig from where you stand” is a precept that informs some excellent local history projects, and in the next 3 posts Soundyngs is talking to Fife denizen Peter Shepheard, about the impact of the folk revival on his life and times. Pete was born in Gloucestershire, but from his late teens, his head and heart have been Scottish.
If you look in the University of St Andrews library catalogue for ‘Peter Shepheard’ you find his 1969 PhD (on locusts), alongside other books with his name as author or editor on folk music (see the list below for a sample).
Pete’s real passion in his student days was folk music, where he was one of the founders of a remarkable Folk Club that in many ways set a standard for what a local folk club might be in the days of the Folk Revival. Alongside scientific research, he began to learn what he could about the muckle sang (long form ballads) and other traditional repertoire of east coast Scotland, digging into the Child ballads and acquainting himself with Bertrand Bronson’s edition of these (Princeton University Press, 1959-1972) which brought the texts together with the tunes.
‘Folk’ clubs in some places focused on singer-songwriters performing new material, in a kind of international ‘folk’ guitar and mid-Atlantic, country music influenced, vocal style. However, for some people – including Pete Shepheard – the real interest was not in newly composed material but finding and breathing new life into older, traditional Scottish material, giving a platform to those who had learned it orally. St Andrews students were aware of the activity around the Scottish folk revival; Hamish Henderson’s and the Edinburgh University School of Scottish Studies recordings of the Blairgowrie travellers set an example to be emulated.
However, while St Andrews had a jazz club in the early 1960s, it didn’t have a folk club.
The jazz club met in the local Imperial Hotel (now the Kinnettles Hotel). In 1962, a small group of students, including Pete, started to perform a few folk songs in the interval of the jazz nights. The popularity of this led to a separate folk night early in 1963, meeting every other Sunday evening, with takings at the door generating enough to pay the guest a fee of around £5 – with perhaps enough left for a carry-out for a party, usually with the guests. The expense/income account just about broke even on this basis. The folk club shifted to the Star Hotel on Market Street, and throughout the 1960s and 70s became well known for inviting musicians to perform who subsequently became some of the leading household names of their generation.
Visits out of St Andrews to the Aberdeen folk club, Archie Fisher’s club in Edinburgh, and with Dunfermline’s club at The Howff (run by John Watt), and the Elbow Room in Kirkaldy (run by Sandy Cheyne), also helped to create a network of performance venues around the east coast, and the activity also encouraged people to think about creating folk festivals in different locations (see next post ##).
Many of the great traditional source singers of the 1960s were guests at the folk club and Pete was inspired to search for songs from local singers, fisher families, farmworkers and members of the traveller community. In 1968 he met Bertrand Bronson when the folklorist was on a visit to the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh and contributed several ballad versions collected from oral tradition in Fife that were included in the fourth volume in 1972. And many of the newly collected songs became part of the repertoire sung at the folk club in the Star Hotel on a Sunday night.
Musicians who performed at Fife name-checked by Pete included Archie Fisher, the Stewarts of Blairgowrie, Jeannie Robertson (traveller ballad singer from Aberdeen), Cyril Tawney (English submariner and singer), Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, Davey Graham (innovative guitarist of the 1960s) and South Uist singer and joiner Jimmy Hutchison (who came to St Andrews in 1963). Pete left St Andrews after completing his PhD in 1969 and went to Canada for several years; Jimmy Hutchison left in 1972, and now runs Newburgh Handloom Weavers in Fife. Dundee folk singer Sheena Wellington came to live in St Andrews, and ran the club in the 1970s, continuing to create an hospitable atmosphere.
The ‘resident singers’ (the organisers Pete, Jimmy and others) would typically perform the first 30 minutes of the evening, then the guests would take their turn. Floor spots would be invited up in the middle portion of the night, and the guests would take the third portion. The St Andrews folk club therefore operated as what might today be called a core ‘node’, a critical mass of connections that encouraged and inspired further action – the next post will talk about the folk festivals that grew from this community. And Peter Shepheard was – from everything I can gather, not just from himself but from others who were there – a key person in getting this activity off the ground.
Andy Watson has been putting together audio recordings and film footage from this period and uploading this to a Youtube channel – see further listening below for these links.
As a side note to this post on local folk clubs, Pete also mentioned several times in our meeting the importance of Grampian TV – the independent commercial TV station based in Aberdeen – which from its establishment in 1961 was important to local music, through low budget programmes such as the ballad competition show ‘Bothy Nichts’ (1962-1971) – a sort of Doric X Factor. In 1997, Grampian was absorbed into a more centralised operation called STV (Scottish Television), but during its years of operating Grampian provided viewers from norther Fife and Tayside to Caithness to the Western Isles, in areas without their own folk clubs, with traditional music from the north of Scotland. The writer of Soundyngs remembers going to Aberdeen jewellery shop Jamieson and Carry to get an engagement ring because that shop had a long-running local advert familiar to us as ‘local’ viewers. In its own way, Grampian TV was another ‘node’ in the unique mix of regional Scottish culture-making.
Next posts will look at Shepheard’s memories of Scottish Festivals, Competitions and his role in folk record recording, but to end this post, I want also to acknowledge that in all, this is about curating – preserving and helping to transmit – traditional songs. Pete has shared his sound recordings of live performance, made over many years and in many places, with both the British Library (whose sound archive is alas still fragmentary with meta data only, following an internet hack 2 years ago) and the National Library of Scotland (not entirely online, but with links below). Neither archive is therefore fully accessible online, but at least you might be assured that beyond Pete Shepheard’s biologically-housed memory, an electronic off-site backup exists.
Linked posts:
[Pete Shepheard on festivals and competitions due live 19/1/26]
[Pete Shepheard on Springthyme Records due live 2/2/26]
Further Reading and Listening
- Anon, ‘Bothy Nichts’, Scotland-on-Air
- British Library provisional Sound Archive – the BL digitised online collections were severely impacted by a hack in October 2023, and are still being rebuilt. Catalogue searches may yield some material, and an in-person visit (with advanced notice) may access physical materials.
- Nigel Gatherer, Songs and Ballads of Dundee, with forward by Peter Shepheard (Edinburgh, J Donald, 1986) – currently out of print but Gatherer’s website shows contents and second hand copies may be found
- Christy Moore, ‘St Andrews Folk Club 1969’, in The Session (2021)
- National Library of Scotland, Scotland’s Sounds links to many sites, see Soundcloud links to Springthyme music and more – and specifically, their lists for Springthyme Records audio archive
- Pete Shepheard, ‘Fife Folk Clubs, Folksingers and Festivals’, recorded by Stephanie Perrin Smith for the Tobar an Dualchais archives at the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh (n.d.)
- Andrew (Andy) Watson, Youtube channel St Andrews Folk Club Music Archive, with historic recordings and interviews from the period and many who are now household names