The stories behind the songs

As of the beginning of April 2020, it will be approximately one year since I began my journey to learn to play the Great Highland Bagpipes (which you can read about in my previous post here). Learning to play the instrument has certainly proven to be a challenge, but finding a new musical outlet and learning to master a new skill that helps tie back to my cultural heritage and connect me with like-minded people in Seattle has proven to be one of the best decisions I have made in my adult life.

So far, I can play six or seven tunes: Barnyards of Delgaty, Scots Wha Hae, Amazing Grace, Green Hills of Tyrol, When The Battle’s Over, Scotland the Brave, and The Rowan Tree. I can play these relatively competently now, although I’m still absolutely continuing to work on my general playing technique, getting them up to full speed, and so forth. As I’m now up to all three drones and officially playing a full set of pipes, I’m sure my neighbors are gradually going crazy hearing these tunes attempted over and over.

As much as I am enjoying learning and playing these tunes, the one question that would repeatedly come up was about the origin of each of these tunes: what was the story behind them? It’s not something that has been actively talked about in depth during lessons, which is understandable – given our relatively limited time of one hour a week as a group, I imagine the priority is to use the time to focus on learning and playing the core material.

However, the questions still remained. I haven’t made much progress into discovering more communal knowledge or websites or books on the pipes in general – answers on a postcard – but then one day I happened upon a news article as shared with the /r/bagpipes community on Reddit:

“Bagpiper pens book of stories behind Scotland’s most popular tunes”

Kieran Beattie, The Press and Journal | January 9th, 2020

Stuart Archer, a 47-year-old fellow Scot who has also spent time living abroad and who took up piping at the age of 25, had done a lot of the homework and research and put together this wonderful book, which you can order online from Deeside Books. Reading about his story and the book, I was immediately compelled to order a copy.

The book goes over the history of thirty different tunes that are popular in the modern piping repertoire, ranging from tunes traced back all the way to the 13th century up until modern day. From my own personal knowledge, this covered tunes that I can now play myself, tunes I know but can’t yet play, tunes that I recognize by name but don’t otherwise know, and tunes that I have zero familiarity with. It just goes to show how wide the repertoire of music is!

As can be imagined, a lot of the tunes can be traced back to war, particularly the Jacobite uprisings, as well World War I and II, and others such as the Falklands and Crimean wars. Learning about the origin of these tunes, many of them are songs with lyrics by a number of famous people (of course, including the bard himself, Robert Burns).

Putting together the historical context, and indeed revisiting parts of history that I had learned about years ago back in school but with new light shed to them, as well as an understanding of the people that wrote these tunes and indeed the lyrics in applicable cases, really helps portray at least the tunes I know in a new light. As I revisit existing tunes or gradually incorporate more into my own repertoire, I hope that I can really start to embrace the stories behind each tune and incorporate them into my own playing.

Aside from all of this, I also feel inspired that this is coming from someone who has clearly tread a similar path to the one I have started following: having lived in various parts of the world and taken up the pipes in his mid-twenties, it’s inspirational and provides a new role model for me to follow. Thank you Stuart for taking the time to write this book and to help shed light on these tunes. I can only hope you’ll follow up with a second volume in the future!