Book review: A Traveller In Two Worlds Vol 2: The Tinker And The Student by David Campbell

THERE’S an inevitable romance about the life of Duncan Williamson, probably the only other figure to rival Hamish Henderson in the annals of the Scottish folk movement, and a hero to several generations lucky enough to sit at his feet and hear his stories.

A Traveller In Two Worlds Vol 2: The Tinker And The Student

David Campbell

Luath Press, £14.99

As his biographer David Campbell acknowledged in the first volume, this is primarily “the fairy story of a barefoot tinker boy born in a tent becoming an acclaimed international storyteller”. But, as Campbell makes the point many times, the real “fairy story” aspect was the degree to which Williamson’s art was his life, his life was his art. He represented what a lot of people spend their lives searching for and never find: a sense of meaning and purpose, a harmony between what they do and who they are.

This second volume, candid and touching, the best kind of memoir, could have risked all that honesty and feeling for too much romance, ­given that it focuses on Williamson’s second marriage to the much younger American student, Linda Jane Headlee, whom he met in the 1975, after the death of his first wife. But Campbell doesn’t want to sugar-coat it, and neither should he. Williamson might have spent his life in happy obscurity, telling his stories to family and friends round a camp-fire, if it hadn’t been for Linda, who recognised his ­value to the emerging folk movement in Scotland, a response to the counter-culture heroes and heroines across the Atlantic. She organised his school events, where he would entertain youngsters with his gypsy tales; her contacts got him invites to Edinburgh University and beyond, where the recording of Scotland’s rich oral culture was just beginning to happen.

But lives with artists are never easy, and after 17 years and two children, she took off one night with another man, and began a peripatetic lifestyle and other relationships. Campbell, a friend of both parties, is sympathetic to each, and touches on the difficulty for women, particularly during those years, who were cast in a supporting role: ­Linda “was serving Duncan’s life”; much of her nature, he says, “was dormant”, squashed out by a dynamic, driven and very captivating personality. What may have begun as a fairy ­story for her – deeply attracted to the freedoms of the tinker lifestyle in those counter-culture days, Linda gave up a marriage, a stable home and income to be with Williamson – possibly ended with nightmarish aspects, and all credit to Campbell, Williamson’s “other marriage partner”, for not trying to hide it.

Campbell also doesn’t hide Williamson’s sudden rages at perceived betrayals, nor his intractability, necessary to give us the most rounded picture of the man. Williamson was not a maker of fictions – as he made clear to one German professor, “I never made up a story in my life. All my stories I collected. Fifty years from everybody I met on the road. I tell them in the way they were told to me.”

This authenticity was key to Williamson’s impact, and it is key to Campbell’s appreciation of his friend. There isn’t an ­inauthentic note here, a fitting tribute to a remarkable individual.

Edinburgh International Book Festival, 26 August, 8.30pm