Folk, jazz etc: With a book in the pipeline, Gary West takes a look outwards

The event was the launch of a scholarly edition of folk tales from the area, collected a century before in the dying Perthshire Gaelic, by Lady Evelyn Stewart Murray, whose obsession with folklore resulted in invaluable collections, but also in her estrangement from her aristocratic family.

West, who had delved into Murray’s archived notebooks himself when an undergraduate at Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, found himself standing under the gaze of the unfortunate Lady Evelyn’s portrait, playing a tune he had written in honour of her, by way of a companion piece to a notable pipe march composed for her more conventional sister, Lady Dorothea, more than a century earlier.

“My composition,” he writes in his new book, Voicing Scotland, “aimed to sit alongside it – a sister tune for a shunned sister, if you like.”

The anecdote, one of many such in the book, encapsulates West’s viewpoint, both as a folklorist and senior lecturer at the university’s Scottish Studies Department and as a highly regarded piper who has played with such eminent folk bands as Ceolbeg and Clan Alba, as well as with the Vale of Atholl Pipe Band, practising, one might say, what he preaches academically. It also sums up his concern that the evidently healthy Scottish folk revival must remain forward and outward-looking, open to contemporary influences but without losing touch with its roots.

Voicing Scotland, subtitled Folk, Culture, Nation, is an engrossing assessment of where Scottish traditional music stands, at a time of resonant political developments in the nation’s history but also of globalisation and the threat of cultural homogenisation in today’s “liquid society”. West, however, writes from a distinctively personal point of view, and many of the singers and musicians he cites are artists he has known and played alongside, including such distinguished names as Dick Gaughan, Davy Steele, Gordon Duncan and Martyn Bennett. All of them, he says, are or were people “who stand on their own soil, looking outwards”, defying any tired accusations of folk culture being insular and inward looking.

When he first pitched the idea of the book to the publisher, he says, he had in mind a more conventional overview: “But then, when I was writing about someone I’d played with, I started to say a bit more about my relationship with them, and it quite quickly became more personally reflective.”

In targeting his readership, West has also been influenced by his role as presenter of BBC Radio Scotland’s Pipeline. “As well as addressing an expert audience, you realise that most people have just either accidentally tuned in after the football or are just general listeners dipping in and out, so you have to communicate to both audiences, and I hope I’ve taken that lesson to the book.”

But, he laughs, “the hardest thing about writing a book about voices is that it’s on paper.” And clearly, a volume so richly suffused with personal recollection, music, song and anecdote, both archival and contemporary, is begging for a good radio treatment: BBC Radio Scotland – or, for that matter, Radio 3 – take note.

West is also open to the realm of e-books and their potential for downloading with integral sound files; or to presenting the book at festivals with musical accompaniment from himself and/or others. He still performs regularly, after all, with musicians including harpist Wendy Stewart.

“I want to make this book live for people hearing it, on whatever platform.”

• Voicing Scotland, published by Luath Press, is launched at Blackwell Bookshop, Edinburgh on 22 October, with a subsequent musical launch by West and friends at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, on 27 November as part of Book Week Scotland.