Song Recordings

‘Gladstone dancing with Lord Rosebery’ . Credit: Wellcome CollectionCC BY

Bill Adair

  • Reform Song This song is a roll call of the principal reformers that dominated discussions on franchise extension in 1832. It appeared in broadside form in Paisley in 1832.
  • Bright Glow Charity  Religion remained a live political issue in Scotland throughout the period covered by this project. This poem addresses voluntaryism and the relationship between the Presbyterian churches that: themes that informed politics in the latter decades of the century. It appeared in the Paisley Herald and Renfrewshire Advertiser in 1866 as part of a lengthy fictional piece about the romantic courtship of widow Free Kirk and Mr U. Peabody.
  • An Old Man’s Lament This poem regrets that now anyone might participate in politics. It was published in Paisley in The Hoo’let

The McNeill Sisters Duo

  • Song (The Miller of the Cart): A song to the tune of ‘The Miller of the Dee’, published in the Paisley periodical the Hoo’let in 1868. It dramatises the rivalry between periodicals backing the different candidates in that year’s election; the Hoo’let was the Conservative outlet.
  • A Veteran Tory’s Lament: A ‘devil’s lament’ song about the 1868 election in South Ayrshire, by John Ramsay (1870).
  • Newington Butts were lively: A song to the tune of ‘Annie Laurie’, written by Dr Alice Ker and published in Holloway Jingles (1912), a collection written by suffragettes serving sentences in Holloway Jail.
  • Green Grow the Rashes O: A comic adaptation of Burns’s song which comments on the suffragettes’ window-smashing campaign, published in 1913.

Adam McNaughtan

  • Thomas Muir of Huntershill: A song by Adam McNaughtan himself about the trial of the Scottish radical Thomas Muir; it originally appeared on his 1996 album Last Stand at Mount Florida but this version was recorded especially for The People’s Voice.
  • Dark Bonnymuir: A broadside ballad commemorating the 1820 Radical War, originally from the 1830s but republished in a socialist newspaper in 1912.
  • A New Whig Garland: A broadside ballad about the 1832 Edinburgh election, to the tune of ‘A begging we will go’.
  • Reformers’ Election Song: A Glasgow election broadside from 1837.
  • The Glasgow Clothlappers: A song about an 1855 clothlappers’ strike.
  • A New Song on the Short Time Movement:  A song from the 1870s in which farm workers in the West of Scotland call for shorter hours and better wages.
  • Women Shall be Free: A song by the Glasgow suffragette Helen Crawfurd.

Gaelic Songs (Celtic Connections 2017)