It isn’t every book which has an introduction by Dolly Parton, and the very thought might put some off investigating further, but Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr’s ‘Wayfaring Strangers: the Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia’ is a book whose range of inclusion is vast.
The result of a ten-year collaboration between these two musical scholars, involving also many others, ‘Wayfaring Strangers’ charts the exchanges and transformations that occurred when Scots and Ulster Scots settlers emigrated to what became the United States, taking their instruments and song traditions with them.
Some moved through want of land, opportunity or as a result of religious discrimination. The upheavals in the north of Ireland throughout the seventeenth century made many what we once termed refugees, and in times of adversity familiar music and song becomes a solace and also a source of joy when there may be little else.
Howked from the soil they’d grown on, such people made homes where they could in a rapidly expanding country.
As they travelled, the songs changed to fit with changing circumstances and experiences, and it is these changes and developments that Orr and Ritchie discuss and illustrate in their book. Ritchie presents the most listened-to ‘Celtic’ music programme on United States PBS radio, while Orr is an emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina, and they share an enthusiasm for and extensive knowledge of the genre.
North Carolina, was, of course a largely Scottish colonial enterprise, more successful though less well known than the so-called ‘Darien Scheme’, and it was this success that attracted the many who made their way west, taking their music and remaking it along the way.
Reproducing the sounds of both the tradition from which it sprang and the ways in which it changed, both Len Graham from Ulster and Sarah McQuaid from California offered a number of examples. ‘Wayfaring Strangers’ provides a glimpse into a tradition that remains strong, but like many another is under threat in an increasingly homogenised and commerce-driven society. Accompanied by a 20 track CD and lavishly illustrated with photographs, it represents a labour of love by both authors and a definitive work on the subject for, one imagines, some time to come.
‘Wayfaring Strangers; the Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia’ by Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr, University of North Carolina Press 2014, £24.99 isbn 9781469618227