Webspinner: Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller

By John D. Niles, Helen Beccard Niles, Alan Niles and 2 more

Born in 1928 in a tent on the shore of Loch Fyne, Argyll, Duncan Williamson (d. 2007) eventually came to be recognized as one of the foremost storytellers in Scotland and the world. Webspinner: Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller is based on more than a hundred hours of tape-recorded interviews undertaken with him in the 1980s. Williamson tells of his birth and upbringing in the west of Scotland, his family background as one of Scotland’s seminomadic travelling people, his varied work experiences after setting out from home at about age fifteen, and the challenges he later faced while raising a family of his own, living on the road for half the year.

The recordings on which the book is based were made by John D. Niles, who was then an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Niles has transcribed selections from his field tapes with scrupulous accuracy, arranging them alongside commentary, photos, and other scholarly aids, making this priceless self-portrait of a brilliant storyteller available to the public. The result is a delight to read. It is also a mine of information concerning a vanished way of life and the place of singing and storytelling in Traveller culture. In chapters that feature many colorful anecdotes and that mirror the spontaneity of oral delivery, readers learn much about how Williamson and other members of his persecuted minority had the resourcefulness to make a living on the outskirts of society, owning very little in the way of material goods but sustained by a rich oral heritage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781496841599

John D. Niles

John D. Niles is author of Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature and a number of other books relating to early medieval literature and the theory and practice of oral narrative. Before his retirement in 2011, he taught at Brandeis University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was the Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities.

Book preview

WEBSPINNER

WEBSPINNER

Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller

JOHN D. NILES

Line drawings by Helen Beccard Niles

Musical transcriptions by Alan Niles in consultation with Linda Williamson

Photographs by Leonard Yarensky and others

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI / JACKSON

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context

Copyright ©2022 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2022

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Niles, John D., author. | Niles, Helen Louise Beccard, 1903–1994, illustrator. | Niles, Alan, transcriber. | Williamson, Linda, 1949– consultant. | Yarensky, Leonard, photographer.

Title: Webspinner : songs, stories, and reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller / John D. Niles; line drawings by Helen Beccard Niles, musical transcriptions by Alan Niles in consultation with Linda Williamson, photographs by Leonard Yarensky and others.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2022. | Includes lists of songs, stories, and transcriptions, and a glossary of Scots words and travellers’ cant. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022025498 (print) | LCCN 2022025499 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496841575 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496841582 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496841599 (epub) | ISBN 9781496841605 (epub) | ISBN 9781496841612 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496841629 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Williamson, Duncan, 1928–2007. | Scottish Travellers (Nomadic people)—Folklore. | Storytellers—Scotland. | Folklore—Scotland.

Classification: LCC GR144 .N56 2022 (print) | LCC GR144 (ebook) | DDC 398.209411—dc23/eng/20220624

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025498

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025499

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

List of Songs and Stories

Chapter 1: Williamson and the Travellers

Chapter 2: Those Who Went Before

Chapter 3: A Childhood in Argyll

Chapter 4: Making a Living

Chapter 5: Courtship, Marriage, and Raising Children

Chapter 6: Food and Health, Drink and Conviviality

Chapter 7: Music and the Flow of Life

Chapter 8: The How and Why of Storytelling

Chapter 9: Scenes from a Vanished World

Chapter 10: Webspinner: The Book, the Poem, and the Man

Commentary

Appendix 1: These Recordings and How They Were Made

Appendix 2: Transcribing Oral Texts from Voice to Page

List of Transcriptions

Glossary of Scots Words and Travellers’ Cant

Selected Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my deep gratitude both to the institutions that advanced the research underlying the present book and to the many individuals who gave generously of their time to assist my fieldwork and its subsequent processing.

The initial task of mastering my Scottish field tapes was undertaken by the Sound Archives of the University of California, Berkeley. The recordings were subsequently digitized at the Digital Media Center of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The bulk of my field collection, including notes, logs, and transcriptions as well as audio and video recordings, is housed at the Archive of Folk Culture of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. My thanks go to Joseph Hickerson and Michael Taft, former directors of the Archive of Folk Culture, and to the Archive’s other staff for hosting me in Washington and for working to ensure that the collection is preserved under optimal conditions where it will be available to the public in futurity.

Extensive selections from my fieldwork as a whole, including both color and black-and-white photographs and documentation of festivals, games, landscapes, and the ecosystem within which cultural practices take place, are now available to the public via the searchable Scottish Voices website of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center. I am grateful to members of the University Library’s staff, including Peter C. Gorman, Vicki L. Tobias, Jesse Henderson, and Karen Rattende, for having embraced this multimedia project and for guiding it to its present state of completion. Kaitlin Fife, lecturer in film at Central Washington University, was my skilled project assistant. The Scottish Voices database both complements and extends the portrait of Duncan Williamson that is offered in the present book, presenting many recordings and photographs that could not be included here for lack of space.

I have a longstanding debt to the School of Scottish Studies, Edinburgh, now subsumed into the subject area of Celtic and Scottish Studies of the University of Edinburgh, for its encouragement of my fieldwork. Dr. Alan Bruford, the School’s former archivist, pointed me in the direction of my research during a conference of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research held in Edinburgh in 1979. And I will not forget the warm welcome that Hamish Henderson—accompanied by his dog Sandy—offered me in 1984 in his fourth-floor walk-up office at 27 George Square. This was among other courtesies that have been offered to me over the years by the school’s staff, including Professor John MacQueen, its former director, and Dr. Cathlin Macaulay, the current curator of the School of Scottish Studies Archive.

The Committee on Research of the University of California, Berkeley, provided financial support for the purchase of equipment and supplies and for the hiring of both graduate and undergraduate students to help me in the task of logging and transcribing field tapes. Margaret Binney, Rhea Gosset, Herbert Luthin, Margaret McPeake, and Rebecca Renfrew were among those wonderfully capable research assistants. I am likewise indebted to Anna Beck, a PhD candidate in the University of Wisconsin Department of Geography, for drafting the three maps included in this volume.

I have a particular debt to the University Research Expeditions Program (UREP) of the University of California for having sponsored four two-week group fieldwork expeditions in Scotland, two in the summer of 1986 and two in the summer of 1988, and to the volunteers who signed up for those projects. Those persons provided invaluable help by note-taking, taking still photographs, helping to catalog field tapes, running audio recorders or video cameras on occasion, and conducting certain interviews on their own. Just as importantly, those warmhearted individuals provided a receptive audience for the singers and storytellers whom we interviewed. Holly Tannen in particular, my field assistant in the summer of 1986, supervised a number of recording sessions while also enhancing the conviviality of our ceilidhs with her own music and singing. The names of all participants in these expeditions are provided at the head of the List of Transcriptions at the back of the book.

Two anonymous readers for the University Press of Mississippi offered a number of suggestions for the improvement of an earlier draft of the book. I am sincerely indebted to those persons for their astute and well-informed critiques and for helping me avoid errors and infelicities. For help with locating archival photographs and gaining permission for their use, I am grateful to Alison Diamond, the archivist at Argyll Estates, Inveraray, and, going back to the 1980s, to Hugh Gentleman and Mrs. L. Malcolm of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Scotland’s Travelling People, St Andrew’s House, Edinburgh. Among others who offered encouragement, advice, or hospitality during my stays in Scotland were Sheila Douglas and her husband Andrew Douglas of Scone, Perthshire; Peter Hall of Aberdeen; Adam McNaughtan of Glasgow; Timothy Neat of Wormit, Fife; R. Ross Noble of the Highland Folk Museum, Kingussie; and Peter Shepheard of Kingskettle, Fife.

Other debts incurred in the course of this project are acknowledged toward the end of the following chapter. My greatest debt—one that I can never repay, though this book makes a gesture in that direction—is to Duncan Williamson himself, together with his wife Linda, for their unstinting generosity.

JOHN D. NILES

Boulder, Colorado, 2022

ABBREVIATIONS

LIST OF SONGS AND STORIES

1. SONGS

Bonnie One

Collechan

The House That Jack Built

The Mousie’s Wedding to the Frog

The Marlin Green

Bogie’s Bonnie Belle

The Flower of Sweet Strabane

Banks of Red Roses

Lambs in the Green Field

My Wee Maggie

Johnny You’re a Rover

Nancy Whisky

When the Yellow Is on the Broom

Come Aa Ye Perthshire Folk

Down in Yonder Bushes

The Factory Girl

Big Jimmy Drummond

The Nicknames

The Shanghai Ballad

My Old Horse and Cart

2. LEADING STORIES

Betsy Townsley gets tatties to go with her herring

Betsy Townsley sees a frecht

The old Duke is taken away by the fairies

Willie Williamson makes a big mistake

How Willie Williamson recovered a lost riveting tool

A famous fight on the green at Aberfeldy

John MacColl breaks the water pump

Bett MacColl rings the bell at Tarbert

Great-grandfather MacDonald runs off with the travelling people

How much land does a man need?

Duncan is born by the shore of Loch Fyne

Memorate: Struck dumb on a Pictish stone

Memorate: Finding two ducks that went missing

Memorate: Absconding from school

Memorate: The long long courtship

Memorate: The Duke resolves a poaching incident

Story, The Elf and the Basketmaker

Memorate: An uncanny sight near Achnagour

Memorate: Bothy days at Kirriemuir

Bothy story, The Lad Who Knew No Fear

Memorate: A policeman baffled at Crieff

Memorate: Harassed by the police when his wife was in hospital

Memorate: Harassed in a village outside Cupar

Memorate: Thirty days in jail in Perth

Memorate: How to sell a stone to a scrap merchant

Memorate: A pony, a boy, and a goose

Memorate: The pheasant and the gamekeeper

Story, The Boy and the Horn Spoon

Memorate: Take only what you need

Humorous tale, The First Tea in Scotland

Memorate: How Jock Williamson dealt with snakebite

Memorate: The story of Granny’s purse

Humorous story, The Silence Wager

Bedtime story, The Skeletons and the Tinker

Recitation, Webspinner

WEBSPINNER

Chapter 1

WILLIAMSON AND THE TRAVELLERS

If friends of mine were to drop by and, to pass the time, we thought we would make up a list of geniuses that we had personally come to know, then my list would start with Duncan Williamson (1928–2007). Beyond any doubt, Williamson was the finest storyteller I have ever encountered. Other people who knew him and who heard him perform have had no hesitation in coming to a similar conclusion. By the time of his death in 2007, correspondingly, Williamson was widely regarded as the finest traditional storyteller in Scotland.

One of the great privileges of my life is that I was able to spend hundreds of hours with Williamson in a variety of settings during the mid-1980s, when he was in fine health and spirits and had only fairly recently come to be recognized by many as a stellar performer. During a series of visits to the United Kingdom from my home in Berkeley, California, I sought out a number of talented Scottish tradition bearers to record their songs, stories, and reflections on tape. This book is a selective record of the hours I spent with Williamson.

Almost the whole of the book—all of chapters 2 through 9—is Duncan’s, not mine, for what it consists of is a set of faithful transcriptions of his spoken words, interspersed with songs and with occasional exchanges with other people who were present on these occasions. I have organized the transcriptions that make up the bulk of the book into a coherent thematic sequence, whether chapter by chapter or within each chapter. Only in chapters 1 and 10, as well as in the Commentary and other back matter, do I speak in my own voice at any length. What readers will therefore encounter here, as they survey the main part of the book, is a faithful record of the words of a single masterful storyteller as he reflects on his family background and upbringing, tells anecdotes based on his personal experiences while on the road and while making a living, and shares with his interlocutors an occasional song or story drawn from his deep well of memory.

My recordings were made not in the vacuum of a sound studio, nor in a concert venue (except on certain occasions), but rather in a series of relaxed, informal settings where Duncan was free to interact with his listeners from Scotland or abroad, some of whom were skilled singers, storytellers, or musicians in their own right. Most of the recordings were made in the comfort of one or another home, chiefly in Fife but also in the United States, in circumstances that ranged from the quiet and intimate to the boisterously convivial. As a result, there is no one monologic Duncan’s voice on display here, but rather a variety of styles and linguistic registers, each one shaped to the contours of a fluid social setting. More information on this topic will be found in Appendix 1, These Recordings and How They Were Made.

In Scotland, during informal sessions of this kind, periods of talk naturally alternate with the performance of songs and stories, often in an impromptu manner. I have made a point of imitating that flux of genres in my ordering of these transcriptions for publication. As much as is possible in the medium of print, with its constraints of word length and legibility, Williamson’s performances are integrated into the social and intellectual matrix from which they arose, rather than being presented in isolation, while his comments or reflections are presented on an equal footing with his songs and stories. The book’s design is thus unusual among publications of its kind, and it may possibly be unique.

Definitely unparalleled is almost all of the book’s contents, for in choosing selections from my field collection that make for a coherent ensemble, I have tried to avoid duplicating material that is available elsewhere, whether in print or in audio publications. The result is a book that consists largely of reflections and anecdotes based on Williamson’s personal experiences, told in a natural manner and transcribed faithfully. Correspondingly, the book reveals a great deal about Williamson’s character and values as a man. The book not only shows how Williamson told stories, doing so often in an animated way in interactive social circumstances. It also reveals how he thought of his life in the world through the medium of stories, for they were his heart’s blood, so to speak.

Just as importantly, for those readers whose interests extend to social history and ethnography, the book provides an insider’s insights into what it was like for one person to grow up as a Traveller in the west of Scotland in the 1930s and 1940s, or to make one’s living as the head of a Traveller family during the middle decades of the twentieth century. These aspects of Scottish social history may have vanished or may have been transformed practically beyond recognition, but they should not be forgotten.

My fieldwork was not initially undertaken as a study of one gifted individual, however, nor was it meant primarily as a contribution to Scottish social history. Rather, it was an attempt on my part to gain a more complete understanding of the art of oral, traditional storytelling itself: its social foundations, its cultural significance, its adaptability, its educational value in the home, the dynamics of its transmission from one generation to the next, and its interactive qualities in terms of performers and their audiences. I wanted to learn about this art not from books but from life. For me, that entailed going to a part of the world where this art was confidently practiced, in a language whose idioms I could readily understand. Scotland presented itself as an obvious choice for a North American of my background and education, especially given my special affection for Scottish balladry and my delight in the unvarnished, earthy language that is characteristic of much of the best Scots poetry and song.

Figure 1.1 Duncan Williamson storytelling, Auchtermuchty, Fife, 1986. Photo by Leonard Yarensky.

One pragmatic aim of my research was to come to a better understanding of what changes are entailed when the words of an oral performer are transmuted into print, for I was not satisfied that this topic had been treated adequately in the prior scholarly literature. Too often, when I have come across studies based on a collector’s interviews with a particular person, family, or group, the question has arisen in my mind: "But whose words are these, anyway: the performer’s or the collector’s? And why is this point not addressed more precisely? At what point, moreover, does editorial mediation merge into fraud?" Readers of the present book, by way of contrast, will be in no doubt whose words are whose.

Another of the aims that motivated my research, one that was more basic and more elusive, was to gain a clearer understanding of the role of oral art forms in shaping the mental world that human beings inhabit. I believed it was possible to see in some of the masterful traditional singers and storytellers of today a reflection of their counterparts in earlier eras, going back even to prehistoric times when all storytelling was oral storytelling. The potential significance of this topic is underscored by the observation that, as the prehistoric archaeologist Peter Boguki has observed, Over 99 percent of the existence of the genus Homo to date occurred prior to the development of written records.¹ While the stories and storytellers of prehistoric times are obviously not available to us, something of their art can be recovered, I believe, through close attention to the literary records of ancient civilizations and of their medieval and early modern counterparts, as well as through close study of the living narrative traditions of various peoples inhabiting the world today.

Among the singers and storytellers whom I recorded in Scotland in the 1980s, Duncan Williamson stood out as someone in possession of a huge gift. He was also a person who never failed to gain the admiration of those who met him and who heard him spin out tale after tale relating to both the real world that we inhabit and imagined worlds of wonder and delight. It did not take me long to realize that I could not go wrong if I focused much of my attention on Duncan. At the same time, I continued to record many other talented singers and storytellers, including other Scottish Travellers, in part to provide points of comparison for my more sustained work with Williamson.

§1.1. INTRODUCING A REMARKABLE MAN

Duncan Williamson spent his childhood in poverty at the shore of Loch Fyne, Argyll, as a member of a denigrated social group, the Scottish Travellers, or tinkers.* He grew up in an environment where the shore was a constant presence, offering young people of his somewhat rebellious nature a refuge from the confining rigors of ordinary society. At the same time (as visitors to the western coastal regions of Scotland will be aware), the shore provides a luminous liminal zone poised between the land and the loch: the land, with the solidity of its hills, fields, woodlands, and settlements, and the loch, with the ephemera of its changing light effects, its abundant birdlife, and its now you see them, now you don’t aquatic creatures, including both real seals and the seal folk of legends and the imagination. Williamson likewise grew up in an environment where the material poverty of the people of his parents’ generation was offset by the richness of their oral culture, which was deeply inflected by Argyll’s Gaelic heritage.* Since most of the Travellers of his parents’ generation were unlettered (as was the norm for people of their social status going far back into the past), they relied on oral communication for almost all purposes, including entertainment and the informal education of their children.

Williamson absorbed additional elements of what eventually became his vast repertory of songs, stories, and other lore while in school in his native village of Furnace. He absorbed yet more of such lore throughout his life, after leaving home in his mid-teens to travel, work, or take up residence in various parts of Scotland, returning to Argyll periodically to visit his parents and other relatives while they were still alive. By the time that I first met him in 1979, shortly after he had turned fifty, he had become a standout performer at Scottish folk festivals and folk clubs thanks to his good voice, his deep well of knowledge about the Travellers and their way of life, and the ebullience that he brought with him almost everywhere he went. And by the time of his death in 2007, he had come to be recognized as one of the preeminent storytellers not just in Scotland but in the entire English-speaking world: some would ask, Was he not the foremost of them all?*

Like the gifted Scottish fiddler Aly Bain (b. 1946), from whose fingers music flowed as effortlessly as water from a Highland stream, Williamson became a master of his chosen medium chiefly by practicing it. In addition to being a person of strong individual character, he was also someone in whom the knowledge and capabilities of prior generations coalesced, doing so without fanfare or ostentation. This is what it means to be a tradition bearer, as distinct from those performers who project their own personality at the forefront of a stage. Of course, Williamson too was a consummate performer, but to my mind he was wholly unlike those well-educated storytellers who resemble stage actors in their style of delivery. Instead, he told stories because that was his calling—his inner, irresistible vocation—and because he wanted you as a listener to hear those stories, enjoy them, and learn from them. In this sense he was a natural-born teacher. Like other born teachers, he knew that there is no better means of education than stories that strike home and are heard with delight. So Williamson was both a tradition bearer and a consummate performer; and it is this conjunction of knowledge and talent that made him such a compelling verbal artist.

While functionally literate, having attended school as a child in the village of Furnace, Argyll, from age four to age fourteen for the legally required minimum of two hundred half days per annum, by the time that I first began recording him in 1984, Williamson had absorbed a huge repertory of songs and stories by ear, whether in his native Argyll or in other parts of Scotland. When one heard him tell a tale, one had the sense that what one was witnessing was far more than technical mastery of an oral art form. One was also aware of deep wells of knowledge that were fed, as manmade reservoirs of water are fed, by a fortunate conjunction of mountains, seas, winds, and human engineering. To put this seemingly fanciful notion another way, Williamson was a natural performer in more than the ordinary sense, for ever since he was a boy growing up in a tent outside the village of Furnace, he had lived much of his life closer to nature than most of us will ever know.

Far from being a recluse who wished to escape into the quietude of nature, however, Williamson was an outgoing person who loved to join in a singsong, to open a tin of beer in the company of friends or acquaintances, and to have a crack, as the Scots call it when they trade news, stories, and jokes with one another. More than that—turning into a virtue what in others might be a vice—he loved to be at the center of a group’s attention, taking undisguised delight in the pleasure that he was able to bring to others through his seemingly limitless fund of songs and stories. Perhaps paradoxically, Williamson has also been called something of a loner, a maverick, for he was a staunchly independent man who did not fit comfortably into the categories that other people might wish to impose on him.² If his personality had a dark side, as I believe it did, then in my own experience he never showed more than glimpses of it to others.

Williamson was not just a singer and storyteller. He was also a serious collector and critic of the songs and stories that he heard from others. At one stage of his life, influenced by the Folksong Revival, he had used a tape recorder himself to record the performances of other singers and musicians, though his tapes from the 1960s are now evidently lost.* More significantly in the long run, whatever he collected by word of mouth he stored in boxes in his head: three thousand little boxes, as he liked to affirm when speaking of his mental thesaurus of stories alone. Correspondingly, when he heard a new version of a song or story, he had the ability to compare that version feature by feature with other versions that he had heard in the past. It is this ability that enabled him, at times, to gather scattered fragments from oral tradition and convert them into satisfying wholes.

I believe he was the best listener I have ever known. When another person was singing or telling a story in his presence, he gave that performer his unswerving attention. His encouragement of that man, woman, or child was invariably warm and enthusiastic, even if the person’s performance had been less than brilliant. (Here I can speak from personal experience!) But if it was a good song or story, then no one enjoyed it more than he did, sometimes greeting it with whoops of delight. It was an easy step for him then to add that item to his personal repertory, as long as occasions arose when the person from whom he had heard it—the owner, in his philosophy—was not around.

This matter of being a good listener is worth emphasis, for I believe it was the key element contributing to Williamson’s brilliance as a storyteller. A good voice helps a person have the confidence to stand out from the crowd; stamina can matter, and charisma never hurts; but a passion for songs and stories—a positive hunger to hear songs and stories, ones of the kind that one can live by—is the sine qua non for masters in an oral tradition.

§1.2. A TRAVELLER IN TWO WORLDS?

It is an understatement to say that Duncan Williamson became a celebrated storyteller during the last twenty years or so of his life. His reputation has not diminished in brightness since his death in the year 2007, and as far as I am aware, the Duncan Williamson chair—a real chair, not a metaphorical one—still holds a central place on the stage of the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh.*

Correspondingly, at least three prior book-length studies have dealt substantially with Williamson’s life and repertory. One of these is my own book Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (1999). This study draws selectively on my training as a medievalist and comparatist, as well as on the fieldwork that I undertook with Williamson and others in Scotland in the 1980s, to make a case for the foundational nature of oral narrative—and in particular, of the contrary to fact capabilities of storytelling—in shaping the human condition in a manner that is both pleasurable and saturated with meaning.

A book with related content is Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories (2002) by the American folklorist and storyteller Donald Braid. This account of the social conditions that make for a strong family tradition of storytelling is anchored in fieldwork that Braid undertook in Scotland chiefly during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The book draws on recordings the author made not just of Duncan Williamson but also of other members of Duncan’s family or circle of friends, including Jimmy Williamson,* Duncan’s oldest son from his first marriage, a fine singer and storyteller in his own right. Braid adopts the voice of an informed, sympathetic, academically well-trained outsider who probes how storytelling functions within Traveller communities, serving as a means of strengthening the bonds between individuals and their families and thus helping to maintain Traveller autonomy and identity in the face of pressures to assimilate into the settled society.

A study very different in style is David Campbell’s pair of volumes A Traveller in Two Worlds (2011–2012). As someone who became a professional storyteller himself in the course of his life, Campbell writes of his complex and sometimes turbulent friendship with Williamson during the 1990s and later years. The collaborative relationship of these two men extended to Linda Williamson,* Duncan’s American-born second wife, during a period when all three of them were active in the Scottish storytelling scene. The first of Campbell’s volumes focuses on Duncan Williamson’s experiences during his earlier life, while the second volume tells of Duncan’s later life while also devoting close attention to Linda Williamson as a fascinating individual herself. David Campbell generously stepped in to help to promote Duncan’s career as a storyteller in the schools after Linda’s partnership with Duncan had broken off, for Linda and Duncan separated in the mid-1990s after a period of increasing strain in their marriage.

Campbell’s and Braid’s books make for instructive complements to the present one, as I hope is true in reverse, as well. I have taken care to see that there is very little overlap between our respective publications, though a limited amount of duplication of songs, stories, or personal reflections is inevitable and is indeed welcome. In those relatively few instances where overlap occurs, specialists may be interested in tracking down the parallels as evidence for the workings of variation: the soul of a vibrant oral tradition.³ Moreover, Campbell’s perspective as a native of Scotland and an active storyteller himself provides a welcome contrast to my own point of view as a North American university professor, now retired, whose visits to Scotland have necessarily been of finite duration. If Campbell and I could sit down together today, however—after complimenting him on his frank and openhearted tribute to Duncan—I would want to discuss his choice of a book title.

In my own view, to speak of Duncan Williamson as a Traveller in two worlds has only limited explanatory power when one considers the trajectory of his life as a whole. Perhaps a complementary criticism could be made of the tendency of certain writers to focus on Williamson and other Travellers as if they were inhabitants of a single closed world, that of their traditional cultural heritage; but it is the notion of some kind of existential binarism that I wish to address here. While Williamson himself may sometimes have thought in binary terms when contemplating the course of his life,⁴ it was his habit in my interviews to make a distinction between the travelling people of Scotland as a collectivity and his own personal identity, customarily speaking of the culture of the travelling folk in terms of they and the past. This distinction can clearly be seen, for example, when he affirms that they had their own tradition, and they lived in their little world, apart from the world outside (see §7.1 below). By his birthright, he himself was one of that relatively isolated ethnic group, which he associated especially with his parents’ and grandparents’ generations; but he also looked upon that group with the eyes of an outsider who was a participant in a much larger and more cosmopolitan society. It is largely due to the conjunction of these two perspectives—that of the insider and that of the outsider—that he became such an outstanding communicator about Traveller lifeways during his later years.

To a person like me, having lived most of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area, Campbell’s title phrase two worlds calls straight to mind the figure of Ishi (ca. 1861–1916), the Yahi Indian who grew into adulthood in a remote part of Northern California entirely on his own, in hiding, before he was discovered by chance in 1911 and was brought to San Francisco, where he lived out the relatively short remainder of his life. This story is told in Isidore Kroeber’s haunting study Ishi in Two Worlds, a book whose title is suggestive of a drama in two acts separated by a rupture. That same language of two worlds, however, applies less forcefully to Williamson, a man who inhabited with remarkable fluency the multiple social worlds that he encountered, whether as a child in his homeland of Argyll or in those parts of Scotland where he travelled or resided as an adult. Williamson’s emergence on the Scottish folk scene of the 1960s and 1970s could not by any means be mistaken for that of a Yahi emerging from the wilds.

Moreover, Williamson maintained close ties with some highly educated people during much of his adult life. These relationships began in 1958, when the poet and folk music enthusiast Helen Fullerton, later to be appointed lecturer at Glasgow University, called on Duncan’s aged parents at the woodsman’s hut where they were then living on the grounds of Inveraray Castle, Argyll.* Fullerton wished in particular to tape-record Duncan’s mother Betsy, who was known for her fine diddling, or mouth music. Subsequently, in May 1967, Fullerton’s friend, the Glasgow-based folksong collector George McIntyre, recorded certain of Duncan’s songs, whether as wholes or fragments, both in Inveraray and, later that same year, in Fife. These archival tapes, as far as I know, are the earliest extant recordings of Duncan’s voice.⁵

The fieldwork that Fullerton and MacIntyre undertook with members of the Williamson family during the period from 1958 to circa 1974 sparked Duncan’s interest in the Scottish Folksong Revival,* which was then in its heyday. His encounters with well-educated non-Travellers sharpened his awareness that his own Traveller family, though subject to being stigmatized and ostracized by others, could lay claim to a special heritage. Through ensuing encounters with people active in either the Folksong Revival of the 1960s and 1970s or the Storytelling Revival of subsequent decades, Williamson gained esteem as an authoritative interpreter of Traveller traditions.

In this regard Williamson was not unlike the great Aberdeenshire ballad singer Jeannie Robertson.* After having spent much of her life in relative obscurity except among other Travellers, Robertson was discovered in 1953 by the poet and scholar Hamish Henderson.* Before long, thanks largely to Henderson’s encouragement and sponsorship, she became the most prominent of the singers being introduced to the public at this time as custodians of a priceless Scottish oral heritage, one that was expressive of the genius of ordinary people rather than an educated elite.

In this way and in others, Henderson took to the next level a program of recovery that had been initiated by Alan Lomax,* the American folksong collector who did more than anyone else to promote appreciation of the richness of vernacular singing traditions not just in his native country but in other parts of the world as well. Those other lands included Scotland, where Lomax and Henderson collaborated in a program of fieldwork in 1951. In turn, Henderson became a leading light of the Scottish Folksong Revival, embarking on an ambitious program of fieldwork of his own and providing inspiration for the Edinburgh Peoples Festival (founded in 1951), the Blairgowrie Festival (founded by Peter Shepheard and other members of the TMSA in 1966), and other events where traditional singers of sundry backgrounds found an enthusiastic audience. Concurrently, Henderson spearheaded a successful effort to establish the School of Scottish Studies,* with its invaluable Archive, as an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh.

Thanks in part to Henderson’s charismatic efforts to promote a wider appreciation of the role of nonelitist culture in Scotland’s cultural identity, a number of singers of Scottish Traveller heritage or affiliation emerged from obscurity during the 1950s and 1960s to become known to the public through their appearances at festivals and folk clubs. One of these was the Aberdeenshire street singer and man of the