Folk, jazz, etc: Sing the praises of a festival that's hit 40

Published on Tuesday 23 June 2009 19:24

CLICHÉ OR not, it seems like only yesterday, during the torrid July of 1976, that some friends and I took the winding road from Hawick into deepest Liddesdale and the Newcastleton Traditional Music Festival, a foray which would prove a crucial experience in my developing interest in traditional music.

I have revisited Newcastleton many times since, but the sounds and sights of that first, marvellous weekend remain vivid: Highland pipes and fiddles in full fling in the yard of the Grapes Hotel under a brassy evening sky, excitable swifts skimming so low that they almost clipped the pipe drones, their shrieks mingling erratically with the jigs and reels. I remember also a room crammed full of Northumbrian pipers buzzing and tootling away, joined enthusiastically by a singing canary and a splendid old character in a straw basher, singing Keep Your Feet Still Geordie Hinnie.

Such memories are stirred up by the fact that, on the weekend of 3-5 July, what is probably Scotland's longest continuously running traditional music festival celebrates its 40th birthday.

Expect, however, no stellar bills or celebrity concerts. Newcastleton has stuck to its guns in promoting grass-roots traditional music, and generally billing no-one except the bands who play at the Friday and Saturday night flings. Yet the "names" consistently turn up, from both sides of the Cheviots, judging the singing and instrumental competitions which are a mainstay of the weekend, participating in its numerous informal sessions and ceilidhs – Northumbrian piping star Kathryn Tickell, for instance, or indeed her father, singer Mike Tickell, who often judges the all-important Border ballad competition.

This 40th anniversary, the organisers are making a rare exception by booking the superb ballad singer Alison McMorland, who is presenting a show on the late Border shepherd and walking song repository Willie Scott, in Newcastleton Parish Church on the Friday night. Based on the many songs she collected from Scott and invaluable book she wrote about him, Herd Laddie of the Glen, the show will also feature local musicians.

"We've got a few bits and pieces laid on," says the festival committee's chair, Kathy Hobkirk. "We've kept more or less the same format as when we started, in that there's not really any big names. Yet if you look at previous programmes you'll see in them a who's who of winners and judges and folk who just turn up."

Among those about this year, if she can re-orientate herself, having just arrive back from touring Vancouver with all-women outfit the Shee, is Border fiddler and former 2006 BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year Shona Mooney. She'll give Sunday fiddle workshops, as well as judging the fiddle competition at a festival she knows well. Other emerging young Border players who have cut their instrumental teeth at the event include Lori and Innes Watson and Christina Marroni.

Accommodation in this neat little village – its squares and ordered streets date from 1793, when it was transferred from the original Castleton a few miles up the Liddel water, as a "model" weaving community – is limited, so many visitors utilise the supervised camping arrangements on the playing field, while others overspill along the river. Some rowdiness which threatened to blight these arrangements some years ago has settled down, says Hobkirk, whose father-in-law was the fine Border fiddler Bob Hobkirk.

"We've had peaks and troughs, but really we've been so lucky, and the people of the village have been so supportive over the past 40 years," she says, anticipating a good crowd next month. "With the credit crunch, people are watching their pennies, but we're the original credit crunch festival."

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