The Scottish singer duetting with her late 'bothy ballads' ancestor

A Scottish-Burmese musician has recorded a song on which she duets with her ancestor who died almost 70 years ago.

Fiona Soe Paing, an ancestor of renowned ballad singer John Strachan, created her own version of his song, Bonny Udny, intertwining her voice with archive recordings of him in a duet across time.

She is now to perform the song, along with other tracks inspired by the north east of Scotland, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

The project was sparked by discovering a family connection to Strachan after Ms Soe Paing moved back to Aberdeenshire from London to care for her mother.

“She had been doing a lot of work on her family history,” she said. “I didn't know anything about John Strachan until his name popped up when she was doing her research and she said she remembered my granny talking about him. He used to live on a farm which is quite near to us.”

Inspired by her newly discovered family heritage, Ms Soe Paing uncovered recordings of his songs.

Fiona Soe Paing will perform at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Pic: Isla Goldie. | Isla Goldie

Strachan, who was born in 1875, was a Scottish farmer and traditional singer of Bothy Ballads - songs depicting the life of a farm worker in Aberdeenshire. He had a huge repertoire of traditional songs, and was recorded by the likes of James Madison Carpenter, Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson.

She said: “I started researching him and discovered that he was a a singer and then the more I delved into finding out about him, I found he recorded a whole album of songs from Aberdeenshire. Being an electronic musician and singer, it just seemed like the obvious thing to do, to try to marry up my electronic style with his singing.”

Singing partly in the Doric dialect of her rural Aberdeenshire upbringing, Ms Pang uses language to connect with heritage, identity and belonging.

She said: “One of the songs that he recorded on that album was about a beautiful little village nearby called Udny. I thought, ‘I recognise that place’. So that grew arms and legs and just developed from there. I'd never known before there was any link to any sort of singer in the family, so that was really exciting, discovering that connection with him.”

Ms Soe Paing, whose Burmese father was lost at sea when she was a toddler, left Scotland when she was 17 to pursue a music career in London.

“Through the connection with John Strachan, I was delving back into my family history and heritage, because I'd spent most of my life outside Scotland,” she said.

“I had felt really quite disconnected from my my roots and I felt like a bit of a tourist coming back.”

She said her mother and grandmother had spoken in the Doric dialect but that she had felt it was “a bit frowned on at school”.

“I toned it down when I was in London,” she said. “But through doing those old songs and singing with that voice, it just brought back childhood memories. I felt so connected to my granny through that singing.”

The audio-visual show, which uses historic maps to accompany Ms Soe Paimg’s music, runs from Aug 7–22, excluding August 9 and 16 at Greenside @ George Street.