Bho mhoch gu dubh – from dawn to dusk

In musical terms, most world cultures have their own traditions of songs sung to accompany labour of some sort. There are two main reasons for singing while you work – in group situations it can improve efficiency by co-ordinating people working together, but also, crucially, it relieves the monotony of what may be a tedious or physically demanding job, which in turn helps to improve the workers’ morale.

The islands of the Outer and Inner Hebrides are no exception to this tradition and Canna House holds thousands of various types of Gaelic work songs. John Lorne Campbell, together with music ethnologist Francis Collinson, produced three seminal volumes of work songs in Hebridean Folksongs (1969). These books provide us with the lyrics, melodies and translations of the songs, as well as vivid descriptions of the situations where the songs were sung and of the people who sang them.

It was a hard life in the Highlands and Islands in centuries past – a life filled with many kinds of work. But Hebridean folk were not ones to succumb to the pressures of heavy work, and so to make their work lighter they would sing.

These songs give us a picture of their lifestyle; to them the songs may have been a ‘hobby’, but to us they are a mirror of their lives. And although their lifestyle was somewhat different to ours, we can understand, through the songs, that their feelings and emotions regarding work were just as similar as our own.

Although the men had their own type of work song, usually songs connected to the sea, it was perhaps the Hebridean women whose work changed most over the centuries. They were under enormous pressure with all the work entailed in keeping home and croft, since the men were often away fishing. This means that we have an incredible store of songs connected with the work of both home and croft and the animals associated with them.

There’s a Gaelic proverb – ‘s ann às a ceann a bhlioghas a’ bhò’ (it’s from the head that the cow is milked) – meaning that you get from the cow what you feed her, and there are many references to cows giving a better milk yield when their milker sang to them. Milking songs form one of the largest groups of Gaelic work songs and very often the subject of the songs is the cow herself. Cows were always treated with respect and looked after well, as their milk was one of the mainstays of the croft larder. They were also prone to knocking over the pail if the milker stopped singing or didn’t sing the cow’s favourite song!

The picture below was taken by Margaret Fay Shaw c1930, of her landlady Peigi Macrae milking Dora the cow on the North Glendale croft in South Uist. And here is Peigi singing Till an Crodh, Laochain – ‘Turn the cattle, my lad ... You will get a playful wife, Turn the cattle, get the cattle, you will get a beautiful wife.’

A common feature of many Gaelic work songs is the ‘repurposing’ of a song and it’s not unusual to find a milking song being used for spinning, or vice versa. The rhythm of the milking action is reminiscent of the hypnotic motion of a spinning wheel .

Spinning songs are often made on the topic of the spinning process itself. In the main picture, taken by Margaret Fay Shaw in the garden of Canna House, Peigi Macrae is spinning at the wheel with Pooni the Siamese cat at her feet. Margaret wrote of Peigi:

‘She’s a beautiful spinner and the wheel in the hall, which looks to be only a museum piece, is brought to the fireside, and Peigi spends her days making yarn for socks and pullovers.

She sings all the time she spins and I hear such tunes that I rush in to ask her – what one’s this? Or what’s that? But she’s now well past the one I fancy and there’s no going back. If you can’t find a line of the words she can never find it. What treasures have gone into the yarn and the socks she knits! The wheel is the secret of bringing it to her memory songs without number, stored in her mind from childhood, the exquisite little songs never heard at concert or ceilidh.’

By far the largest corpus of Gaelic work songs is made up of ‘òrain luaidh’ or ‘waulking’ songs. Waulking is the process of fulling or finishing a newly woven tweed by soaking it and thumping it rhythmically to shrink and soften it by a team of around eight women. But there’s no one type of waulking song – the process of waulking involves several stages of work and each stage has its own variation of song. The main, vigorous, songs (the ‘bualadh’ or ‘beating’) would have verses sung by one woman with the other waulkers joining in on the chorus of ‘vocables’, which are meaningless words of sounds to fit the rhythm. This also helps the singers to memorise the lines.

Once the cloth had been waulked to the correct thickness, the waulkers would sing an ‘òran pasgaidh’ or ‘folding’ song, usually a slower, more mesmeric type of song, followed by an ‘òran basaidh’ or ‘clapping’ song – a joyous celebration of the end of toil. Here is good friend and principal contributor of songs, Annie Johnston of Barra, recorded by John Lorne Campbell in 1938. This is a waulking song with references to the MacNeils of Barra. The composer says that if she had power, she would share out various islands on the west coast of Scotland, which includes Canna.

Margaret Fay Shaw was unable to take images of waulkings in the Hebrides, generally because they were usually held indoors and the lighting wasn’t good enough. But in Canna House we’re lucky enough to have images of waulkings on Eriskay, taken c1890 by engineer and historian Walter Blaikie.

Other work songs include songs for singing while churning butter, harvesting crops, weaving and even for lulling a baby to sleep – often very hard work to achieve! Here is Mrs John Currie (Peigi Nill) singing a lullaby O Ba, Mo Leanabh, o ba, o ba (O Ba, my baby), recorded by John Lorne Campbell in 1954.