Folk, Jazz, etc: Singing a song to accompany the threads of Scottish history

WHEN I was a small lad, my mother had a Bayeux Tapestry tablecloth, so we had William the Conqueror’s invading hordes charging round the fringes of our teatimes. It was particularly exciting if you got to sit at the bit where the hapless Harold gets the arrow in his eye.

Whether the Great Tapestry of Scotland will depict such sanguinary gems I can’t say. I only know that, as reported in this newspaper a couple of months back, the world’s largest tapestry, some 141 metres long, is currently being embroidered in one-metre square panels by volunteer stitchers throughout the land. Each panel depicts a key episode or personality in Scotland’s history, from prehistory to modern times. Now the woven image will be complemented by music and song, as a double CD is to be launched in association with the project, as well as a songwriting competition.

The Great Tapestry is the brainchild of author and polymath Alexander McCall Smith, well known to readers of these pages for his 44 Scotland Street tales. He was inspired when he saw the 104-metre long Prestonpans Tapestry woven in 2010 to commemorate Charles Edward Stuart’s victory at the Battle of Prestonpans. He spoke to the local artist behind that project, Andrew Crummy, and recruited author, historian and director of the Borders Book Festival, Alistair Moffat, and the Great Tapestry of Scotland was underway.

Now however, the major Scottish folk music label, Greentrax, is compiling a companion double CD, under the working title of Music and Song of the Great Tapestry of Scotland, with some 40 tracks selected from its back-catalogue, as well as from other labels, to represent the tapestry’s 120 plus panels. The East Lothian-based company released a well-received single-CD compilation in association with the Prestonpans tapestry two years ago.

The songs and tunes already earmarked for the compilation match some of the myriad images being designed and woven for the Great Tapestry.

The Proclaimers’ Letters From America, for instance, will represent “the Scottish Pop Boom” panel, the Scottish National Orchestra playing The Hebrides Overture refers to the “first Edinburgh Festival of 1947” panel, Eric Bogle’s now universally sung No Man’s Land evokes the First World War, while the McCalmans’ Who Pays the Piper partners a panel depicting the North Sea oil boom.

Meanwhile, the children of Prestonpans Infant School have just recorded local singer-songwriter Alex Hodgson’s song The Toun o Prestonpans to partner the panel “The Scottish Reformation – A School in Every Parish”.

In addition, Ian Green, managing director of Greentrax, has come up with a songwriting competition, with a £1,000 prize to whoever writes the best song to reflect one of the tapestry images as yet unmatched to an existing piece of music. The winning song will also be recorded for inclusion on the CD. Entries will be judged by a panel including singer and producer Ian McCalman, as well as McCall Smith, Moffat and Crummy.

A list of the still “unmatched” tapestry panels, plus other competition details, can be accessed on the Greentrax website below, but the topics are the General Strike of 1926, Scotland in Africa, James Watt and the Steam Engine, Robert Louis Stevenson and Scotland at the Movies – an intriguing range of subjects which should challenge any songsmith’s ingenuity. Those contemplating complementing any of these images in song might do well to recall Robert Burns’s famous remark: “Those who think that composing a Scotch song is a trifling business – let him try.” They might also bear in mind Alistair Moffat’s comment that the Great Tapestry of Scotland should be “a tapestry that distils Scotland’s unique sense of herself, to tell a story only of this place, and without bombast, pomp or ceremony, to ask the heart-swelling rhetorical question, Wha’s like us?”

• See www.greentrax.com and www.scotlandtapestry.com