06/07/2024
A lecture at the Willie Clancy Summer School in Miltown Malbay, Co Clare. Saturday 13 July 2024.
Peter Shepheard & Jimmy Hutchison: "Music and Song in Miltown Malbay: Sound recordings from the 1960s."
Sixty years ago in August 1964 two young folk enthusiasts came from St Andrews in Scotland to the Clare Fleadh in Scarriff. With a small tape recorder in hand they recorded music in the bars, at the song competitions, and traveller singers in the streets. There they met Ciarán Mac Mathúna who enticed them down to Miltown Malbay where they spent many hours – usually in Tom Queally's Bar – recording singers and musicians, including Willie Clancy, Seán Mac Donnacha, Joe Cuneen, Terry Wilson, Seán Keane, Mick Flynn, Tim Lyons and Jimmy Ward, among many others. Pete and Jimmy will talk of those times and play audio clips of some of the singers and musicians they recorded. Their visit to the Fleadh and to Miltown Malbay led them in 1966 to run the first Blairgowrie Traditional Festival in Perthshire, and that led a year later to the forming of the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland (TMSA). Competitions started in Blairgowrie in 1969 and are still held - now in Kirriemuir - and TMSA festivals and events are held throughout Scotland.
Peter Shepheard is an acknowledged authority on folk song. Originally from Stroud in Gloucestershire, he was a founder member of the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland (TMSA) in the mid 1960s while still a student at the University of St Andrews, studying for a BSc in Zoology. His contacts with the Scottish traveller traditions of the Stewarts of Blairgowrie and Jeannie Robertson’s family in Aberdeen, led to exploration of the traveller tradition and extensive song collecting in Ireland and England as well as Scotland. After graduating he specialised in neurophysiology and animal behaviour, obtaining his PhD from St Andrews in 1969. For the next three years he had research fellowships in Canada, firstly with the Canadian Fisheries Research Board in New Brunswick and then at the University of Guelph before returning to Glasgow University in 1972. His enthusiasm as a singer and collector resulted in the creation of Springthyme Records in 1973 specialising in the release of traditional music and songs.
He is himself a fine singer and melodeon player, with a song repertoire that includes many songs from his own collecting, and he has recorded two albums as part of a trio with Tom Spiers and Arthur Watson. He has presented lectures and workshops - based on his song and music collecting - on ballad repertoire, traditional singing style, song repertoire among the Romany gypsies of Gloucestershire and among the Scottish travelling and farming communities in Fife, Tayside and Aberdeenshire.
Jimmy Hutchison was born at Frobost, on the Isle of South Uist. His mother was from the island, his father from Glasgow. There he lived until the age of ten when the family moved to Perth. He was raised bi-lingual, speaking both Gaelic and English.
He has by trade been a joiner but folk song has been a major influence, learning the songs of great source singers like Jeannie Robertson, Jimmie McBeath and the Stewarts of Blair. He was at the Traditional Music and Song Association’s very first festival in 1966 in Blairgowrie and was the first winner of the Willie Scott Cup for men’s traditional singing when the festival introduced competitions in 1969. Forty seven years later he won the same cup at the 2016 Kirriemuir festival. That same year he appeared in the line up of the 2016 Celtic Connections opening concert, The Carrying Stream, a celebration of fifty years of the TMSA, singing to over two thousand people in a sold out Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
Ten years ago Jimmy decided to revive his interest in weaving and converted his joiner shop into Newburgh Handloom Weavers, reviving the old style of tweed and blanket production, once a huge industry in his native Uist and across Scotland.
This lecture will be presented on Saturday 13th July at 2.30pm.
8.00 pm - Oscailt Oifigiúil/Official Opening by Peter Browne, renowned uilleann piper and former RTÉ presenter and producer.
