James Hogg and the reunion of lyrics to song

Published on Monday 30 October 2006 10:54

JAMES Hogg, otherwise known as the Ettrick Shepherd, is probably best remembered today for his many Scottish tales and the doppelgänger drama of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Throughout his life he also composed many songs full of love, humour and pathos.

When his first full collection, The Forest Minstrel, was published in 1810, the title page said that its "selection of songs" was "adapted to the most favourite Scottish airs". But the volume contained no actual music and many of the songs merely had tunes indicated for them beneath their titles. Hogg said he had been advised that to print music would have heaped unnecessary expense on the book and that most of the relevant music could be found in published collections known to people with a taste for Scottish music. He therefore provided new verses set to well-known, genuine Scottish tunes rather than to ornate music he described as "Italian tirlie-whirlies".Hogg stressed, however, that "one-half, at least, of the excellency of the song depends upon the tune to which it is to be sung" and was as avid a collector of tunes as his close acquaintance Sir Walter Scott was of the verses of the old Border minstrels. In 1816, Hogg told a friend that for several years he had been engaged in "picking up old border airs and chaunts that are just hanging on the verges of oblivion and have not I believe been heard for centuries save at the shepherds' ingle nook".

Many of the tunes in The Forest Minstrel are no longer at hand. Recognising the potential loss of part of Scotland's rich heritage, Edinburgh University Press has released a book that effectively recreates the experience provided from the original volumes by making available 73 of Hogg's favourite airs.

The music is closely based on extensive research from the many books containing Scottish tunes published before 1811. Several old versions of each tune were studied and the final selection was based on how the original music supported the lyrics.The aim has also been to illustrate the range of versions that entertained different levels of society from fiddlers' "pocket book" publications to arrangements by famous composers such as Franz Joseph Haydn. The edition contains a description of the contemporary Scottish musical scene and of the books of music and song then available.

Although some of the tunes named by Hogg also inspired Robert Burns, there are others that are now re-discovered for the first time. Hogg may have had an advantage over Burns in the ability to bring such tunes readily to mind. When he was 14, Hogg saved five shillings of his wages to buy an old violin which occupied all his leisure hours. In his Memoir of the Author's Life in 1832, he said that when not fatigued by daytime labour in his masters' fields he "generally spent an hour or two every night in sawing over my favourite old Scottish tunes". As years passed Hogg became a reasonably competent violinist and also jumped at any chance to sing in public.

Burns's sister Isabella is on record as saying of her brother that, "His playing was like his singing – rude and rough; But crooning to a bodies's sel'/ does weel enough." Although Burns could read and write music, she noted that he couldn't play the fiddle well enough to actually dance to his playing.Burns, who died in 1796 at age 37, was fortunate in that he was able to introduce many of his songs to the public through the medium of musical notation in the six volumes of James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803) and it is through that medium that we rejoice in one aspect of his genius today.

Hogg was not so fortunate and the new edition remedies this deficiency. A significant element in Scotland's heritage of music and song will be forgotten if Hogg cannot be provided with the kind of musical support that Burns received from Johnson and later from George Thomson's volumes of Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1793-1841).

Like Niel Gow, Scotland's famous 18th-century fiddler, Hogg fed upon and nourished a long-standing and still-vibrant Scots tradition. The Ettrick Shepherd said he loved his "favourite old Scottish tunes" believing that, with the help of these and his verses, a society accustomed to cling together could sing together.

Richard D Jackson is a retired senior civil servant, keen amateur musical performer and co-editor with Peter Garside of James Hogg: The Forest Minstrel, published in July 2006 by and available from Edinburgh University Press and from Columbia University Press. Part of the Stirling/South Carolina Edition of The Collected Works of James Hogg, The Forest Minstrel, with musical notations by Peter Horsfall, represents the first full collection of songs by Hogg.

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