A treasure trove of centuries old Scottish ballads, once thought lost to the sands of time, have finally been published thanks to the University of Aberdeen.
Sometime in the very early nineteenth century, most likely in the year 1818, the Reverend Robert Scott, minister of the parish of Glenbuchat in Aberdeenshire, compiled a collection of traditional ballads.
Scott did not say where he collected his ballads from, or name the performers, but the texts appear to have been drawn from oral sources in the local area. As such, they offer a unique insight into the nature of traditional music in the early 1800s.
Most of the ballad collections produced during the Scottish Romantic Revival were anthologised in Francis James Child's seminal English and Scottish Popular Ballads (5 volumes, 1882–96).
However, the Glenbuchat manuscripts, containing 68 ballads in four folio volumes, were not included.
Indeed, they were thought lost until the complete work came to light in 1949 when it was donated to the Special Collections of the Aberdeen University Library by a descendent of Reverend Scott.
Now the Glenbuchat Ballads have finally been published in full, thanks to a partnership between the University Press of Mississippi and the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen. The new volume includes a biography of Scott, a contextual survey of the community, and detailed annotations.
Dr Ian Russell, Director of the Elphinstone Institute, said," We are thrilled to be able to play a part in the long overdue publication of the Glenbuchat Ballads. They are a fascinating insight into traditional song and cultural climate of the 1800s and it's wonderful that they can now be enjoyed again by a wider audience."
The Ballads had originally been prepared for publication by Aberdeen-born David Buchan, one of the leading ballad scholars of the twentieth century. Upon Buchan's death in 1994, his former student James Moreira – now director of the Maine Folklife Center in the US and a past visiting scholar at the Elphinstone Institute – took up and completed his work and wrote the detailed introductory essay and annotations.
Read more about The Glenbuchat Ballads and order a copy at:
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/Elphinstone/
and:
http://www.upress.state.ms.us/catalog/spring2007/the_glenbuchat_ballads.html
The Elphinstone Institute can also be contacted at 01224 272996.