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Dance to Your Shadow:  Chasing a Song Across the World

    The following excerpts are from travel in Scotland, including a sound sample for the Scottish

waulking song described in Chapter 5.  (All material copyrighted, no copy or re-print

is authorized without written permission of the author.)

    For general information about the book click here.  To contact Pam call (510) 530-7826

or e-mail  pamswan@pamswan.com

From Chapter 1:  Road to the Isles

    The last time I was in Edinburgh, I accidentally learned to tango. Normally you’d expect to

have some kind of warning that you’re about to go sliding around, in a dramatic Argentine

fashion, with a stranger in a kilt--but then nothing on this trip had been what I was expecting.

I had come to Scotland to do music research, tracing the origin of a mysterious Gaelic song.

I expected dusty archives, I expected soggy weather. I expected to wade, hip-deep in history,

through the gorgeous gray stone streets of Edinburgh, dodging tourists and poking through

museums (or possibly poking tourists and dodging through museums, if I got bored.) But I didn’t

 expect, by lunch on Sunday, to be hanging upside down, staring at a parquet floor, whilst bent

 across the kilted knee of a Scottish accountant. You just can’t plan for everything.

From Chapter 5:  Harris Dance

    I never believed in love at first sight, not logical, not logical at all. Then one cold summer

afternoon I stepped off a ferry onto the Scottish island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, and all

bets were off. I was in love, and I knew it immediately.

    Harris has ruined me for other islands. It is absurdly beautiful. Spare and impossible, brilliant

 and wild and obscure. The angle of light in this extreme northern latitude creates intensely

blue-green water. With every passing cloud the kaleidoscope shifts to reveal riots of wildflower

colors against bright green grass. Bone white beaches give way to a jigsaw of peat bogs and

purple-brown heather moors. Even in the mist, shades of gray seem richer and more varied,

like an artfully developed black and white photograph, too perfect to colorize.

    When my research on traditional music led me to Harris, I had no way of knowing how

beautiful a place it is. Tourists–-even people from the Scottish mainland–-rarely visit here.

It wasn’t until I came here myself that I realized how much Harris is like its music–-haunting

and weird and beautiful.

    Its landscapes are familiar in the way things are familiar to you in a strange dream. You know

the kind of dream where you’re talking to someone and suddenly they’ve become a kitchen

appliance, but that seems sort of normal? You’re vaguely aware that something’s odd about it,

but it feels just real enough that you don’t question the moment.

    That’s Harris. Okay, things don’t actually turn into kitchen appliances on the island (at least

not that I’m aware of) but if they did, you wouldn’t necessarily question it at the time.

    I had arranged for a rental car to be waiting for me when I got off the ferry in the small

village of Tarbert. This does not, on the surface, seem to be a monumental sentence. I rented

a car in Tarbert.

    In fact, however, there are no cars in Tarbert to rent. There are no cars for rent on the

entire Isle of Harris, this one had to be imported, imported from the neighboring Isle of Lewis,

and specially delivered to the ferry landing by a very confused young man who then had to

take a ferry and two buses back to the place where he lived.

    I would have been happy to get around Harris by bus instead of renting a car, but there are

also no buses on Harris. Well, that’s not true–-you can book a tour bus that allows you to

observe the native habitat from the safety of a coach window, as though you’re traveling

through a giant diorama in a lunar museum, or a theme park safari on Mars. But I just needed

basic transportation, not a docent tour, so I jumped through all the necessary hoops to rent a car.

The thing I hadn’t counted on was that after two weeks on the road–-on foot, by bus, in planes

and ferries and small boats–-my new form of transportation would be the most bizarre driving

experience of my life.

    On Harris, things are almost what they seem. It looked liked an ordinary little car, the

roads looked like ordinary little motorways. I had some experience with right-hand drive,

decent hand-eye coordination, and a good driving record.

    But like the guy at the dinner party who turns into a toaster, this little car became a surreal

vehicular capsule for me as I pulled out of the ferry terminal. My brain began to feel like it was

swimming against a strong current–-I was on the wrong side of the car, with the wrong hand on

the gear shift, on the wrong side of the road, in a deserted village of steep hills and one way

 streets, on an island where all of the road signs are in Gaelic.

    Everything was almost normal, but just wrong enough to make me feel nervous and excited

and a little queasy. Sure signs you’re falling in love.

    Less than a mile out of town, you leave behind everything you ever expected to see on a road.

Twisting mountain two-lanes give way to a single-track ribbon that skitters across the top of

ridge lines and plunges around turns where only certain species of athletic goats have any business

exploring.

    While you’re trying to breathe normally and avoid breaking the steering wheel with your grip,

you happen to be passing some of the most breathtaking scenery in the world. Not that you can look.

    If you were and ant, driving a tiny four speed rental car over a gravel pile at the seashore, you

might get some of the same scenery. Everything is out of proportion. Boulders the size of

Volkswagons are carelessly strewn around on the backs of immeasurably large slabs of pink granite.

Between them, tiny skyscrapers of rock jut out from the earth in jagged configurations like a New York

 skyline in miniature. Below you (as the phrase ‘plunging to her death’ springs to mind at regular

intervals) you catch glimpses of the spectacular Minch, the giant rushing strait that separates the Outer

Hebrides from the mainland of Scotland.

    Careening around sheer curves toward the west side of the island, you encounter the mighty North

Atlantic, throwing herself passionately against the craggy coastline of Scotland’s final edge. Look closely,

and you might also notice the odd surfer throwing himself passionately against the craggy coastline.

Though it might be difficult to picture Rob Roy, William Wallace or Mary Queen of Scots hitching up

their garb to hang ten, if they had only known about it they could have taken advantage of what surfers

here call "supreme European hard-core conditions" on the chilly windswept coast of Harris. Duuude.

    In fact, those tanned and tousled surfer dudes (and lasses) are among the few species of tourists to

regularly brave these roads. The sight of little cars wearing giant surfboard hats, toddling around the

rocky Scottish Highlands would have cracked me up if I hadn’t been so thoroughly occupied with my

own impending death each time I met one coming around a steep mountain road.

    The sight was a little cheerful, I must admit–-a small reminder that you’re not alone in this wild

and empty landscape. You don’t see a car for an hour, then the first one you pass is filled with grinning

surfer zombies and has a neon green wing strapped to its roof. Another pleasantly surreal moment in

the Hebrides.

  While we’re on the subject of driving on Harris, I would now like to say a few words about sheep.

Sheep are evil. Lambs are cute and evil.

    They dance and trot and cavort around the roads as though they were paid to terrify tourists.

    Here’s the typical scene: An evil mother and her evil wee lamb will be standing quietly on the

roadside, grinning conspiratorially. You slow down to make sure they’re not going to startle and dart

out in front of you. (Which of course is their plan.) They seem steady, so you proceed. When you

get about 6 feet away, the evil lamb kicks up its rotten, adorable little hind feet and bounces merrily

into oncoming traffic (you.)

    Since there is nowhere that you can swerve, being on a ribbon of pavement roughly the width

of an Olympic balance beam, you slam on the brakes, killing the engine of the car (which you forgot

was a standard shift) and skidding on little bits of gravel leftover from the last time a driver

encountered the fluffy little Devil’s spawn along this stretch of road.

    The evil wee sheepie is now standing in the road ahead of you, and is casually being joined by

Mom. You catch your breath, re-start the car, and wait for the little monster to move. He does not.

Mom lies down on the road and continues chewing her grass. No amount of horn blowing, engine

 revving, stomping-around, arm-waving or even the eventual sheep-butt-slapping convinces her to

hurry in any way.

    By the way, did I mention that these are single track roads? So now your choice is to wait

 in your carfor Mommie Dearest and lambikens to amble away at their leisure, while another

car or tour bus comes inevitably hurtling toward you in a head-on fashion, or abandon your

vehicle and wait in the ditch while you amuse the sheep with a variety of noisy threatening

gestures.

    Sheep were brought to these islands in the late 1700s during the brutal Highland Clearances,

because they’re a low-maintenance animal who can graze unattended for most of the year with

minimal supervision. During this horrible shift in the sociological structure of the Hebrides,

wealthy land owners destroyed the homes, communities and lives of subsistence farmers

(crofters) who had worked the difficult land for generations, in order to bring in more profitable

and less troublesome sheep.

    Left in the wake of the Clearances were people of the Highlands and Hebrides who were either

 forced onto emigration ships bound for Canada, or in some extreme cases even sold to America

as indentured servants to pay off their debts. Over the next 150 years, family after crofting family–-

hundreds of thousands in all–-would be driven out of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, their

homes burned and farms destroyed– and in their place, the sheep.

    In1868 Lady Dunmore, who owned the entire island of South Harris, recognized the potential

of the beautiful local cloth woven from these sheep on Harris. She began a merchandising

campaign which brought international attention to the ancient craft of making woolen clothes.

Now, nearly a century and a half later, the famous Harris Tweed made here must still meet three

specifications: It must be woven in the Hebrides, in the home of the weaver, without the aid

of any power. Harris tweed has become an internationally recognized standard for high-quality

wool cloth, and an important staple of the local economy.

    Today crofters have added the raising of sheep to farming and maintaining other livestock,

 in order to make a living on the island. The sheep are mostly Cheviot, a bare-faced variety with

black muzzle and feet, which roam freely, intermingling with other flocks as they graze the hills

(and confound local drivers) until shearing time. The crofters then shear the ones marked with

their own blotch of paint, and turn them loose again to begin growing another crop of wool.

    Although I accumulated a bag full of the famous Harris tweed to bring home to family and friends,

I could never resist collecting for myself little tufts of wool found floating around the hills and

beaches on Harris. There’s something so pleasing about holding a puff of fiber in your hand, freshly

rubbed from its owner’s coat against a bramble or fence, and imagine it being spun, dyed, carded

 and woven into the same cloth that has kept people of this island warm and dry through the centuries.

    The tuft of wool, more than the finished tweed, reminds me of Harris. And it reminds me of

Harris’ music most of all.

    The music of the Hebrides overlaps in style and function from one island to another.

Songs are regional, one is from Uist, another is specific to Skye or Benbecula or Harris. But into

the common tradition each island contributes a set of songs made for the same purposes–-songs

for dancing, or for milking, songs that tell stories or offer charms, and songs for waulking the

wool of these sheep.

    Those are called oran luaidh, fulling songs. After the wool was woven into fabric, the wet

cloth had to be worked for hours to open the fibers, and shrink the threads into a tight,

weather-resistant unit. Waulking or fulling the wool was hard work, done traditionally by a

group of women pounding the cloth in rhythmic patterns over several hours, to the haunting

melodies of the oran luaidh.

    And now, a few words about urine. If you’re still reading (and haven’t thrown the book

down in disgust) you might be wondering how the subject of pee would find its way into a discussion

about a lovely island song. A healthy curiosity that will not go unrewarded here.

    It seems you can’t discuss the traditional process of preparing wool cloth without running afoul

(you should pardon the expression) of a little talk about excrement. You see, the magical tuft of wool,

as it issues in its original state from the speedbumps on Harris, is designed to keep sheep dry

and warm, not humans. Toward that end, it is a coarse, kinky, hard fiber which repels water.

Perfectly fabulous if there are 12 kilos of it growing out of your skin, and your job is to stand

around in the North Atlantic rain directing traffic.

    Not so perfect once it’s shorn and spun into threads which resist absorbing dye. Unless you

want greasy, lanolin-filled clothing that’s a dirty gray-white sheepy sort of color, you have to

find a way to break down the oils in the fibers, and coax them into accepting the dye. Once the

fibers are open and the dye has entered, the colors could still bleed and fade. You need a chemical

called a mordant which will fix the dye chemically to the wool.

    Guess what naturally occurring product of a night at the pub is nature’s perfect dye mordant?

Yup. As it gets stale, urine becomes richer in ammonia because of the decomposition of the urea.

Ammonia is an excellent dye mordant– so much so that in the heyday of the British chemical

industry, demand for urine outstripped the supply that locals could produce each day! For a few

years urine was actually collected and shipped from Newcastle and London to the English dye

factory at Ravenscar.

    But that’s not all, folks. Stale urine also has the chemical advantage of being highly alkaline,

which breaks down the naturally occurring oils in wool, opens the fibers, and shrinks the

interwoven threads into tightly locked fabric. This makes the finished garment waterproof and

wind-resistant, two excellent qualities if you live in the Hebrides.

    Before you begin looking suspiciously at your Harris Tweed jacket, take heart that the

process of dyeing and fulling wool today is done entirely without benefit of the chamberpot.

Alum mordants and detergent alkaline takes care of the chemical part of the process, and industrial

 fulling machines have taken over the all-day task of pounding the cloth by hand. Still though, the

beautiful, rhythmic oran luaidh are an important part of the musical heritage of the Hebrides.

    Waulking songs are almost always in a modal scale that is unusual to the American ear.

Most folks can easily identify the cheerful sound of a major scale, and the sadder sound of a minor

scale. For much of the Western world, those are the only two modes ever heard. But Hebridean

music is based on other combinations of intervals, adding Dorian, Mixolydian and others to the

palette from which a tune can be painted. This is one of the key factors (sorry) that goes into

making the music of the Hebrides sound a little exotic, primal, ancient to our ears.

    A waulking was a social as well as a practical activity. Stories were told, gossip was swapped,

young girls were teased about potential suitors. In such a barren countryside, communities

were tightly linked through customs and music, handed down from one generation to the next

in the oral tradition.

    The group worked together for hours, and the waulking songs set a united rhythm which

gained pace as the wool became dryer and could be moved around the table faster. These songs

could have dozens of verses, each punctuated by a chorus.

    The chorus for a waulking song is usually a series of vocables–-meaningless syllables and word

 fragments from the language–-which are chanted in a repeating pattern between each verse.

Once the vocable chant was established, one singer weaves the story of a song over the course of

20 or more short verses, and everyone responds with the chant. The result is both energizing

and hypnotic.

    To me, one of the most beautiful of these is Heman Dubh, which Christine Primrose taught me

years ago while staying at my house. Around the dining table late one night, we put out a bottle

 of scotch and began to sing. By morning I had the song, although my Gaelic pronunciation has

 never felt good enough for me to trust. I love to sing the story in English, though, so people

 can appreciate the meaning of this song in which a man named Heman (pronounced HAY-man)

 dreams of a way to rescue his sweetheart from a castle. The chant calls him ‘dark Heman’,

 or in Gaelic Heman dubh.       Click here for sound sample.

Heman dubh ‘S truagh nach tigeadh

Heman dubh Siud gham iarraidh

Heman dubh Gille ‘s litir

Hi-ri- oro Each ‘s diallaid

#

Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo

#

Heman dubh Nam biodh agam

Heman dubh Sgiath a’ghlaisein

Heman dubh Iteag nan eoin

Hi ri oro Spog na lachain

#

Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo

#

Heman dubh Sheolainn na caoil

Heman dubh Air an tarsuinn

Heman dubh An Caol Ileach

Heman dubh ‘S an Caol Arcaibh

#

Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo

#

Heman dubh Rachainn a steach

Heman dubh Chun a’ chaisteal

Heman dubh ‘S bheirinn a mach

Hi ri oro As mo leannan

#

Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo

#

The following English translation is verse by verse, but it doesn’t correspond word for word.

Much of Gaelic poetry is hard to express in literal English phrases. But the thoughts are so

powerful they deserve to be understood even by those of us who aren’t fortunate enough to

have the gift of Gaelic.

Heman dubh If only I had

Heman dubh A horse and a saddle

Heman dubh A messenger, a letter

Hi-ri- oro Coming for me

#

Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo (Vocables, wordless sounds)

#

Heman dubh If only I had

Heman dubh Wing of the sparrow

Heman dubh Flight of birds

Hi ri oro Claw of the wild duck

#

Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo

#

Heman dubh The straits I would sail

Heman dubh Across the narrows

Heman dubh The Sound of Isla

Hi ri oro The Sound of Orkney

#

Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo

#

Heman dubh I would enter

Heman dubh Into the castle

Heman dubh I would bring out

Hi ri oro My dear sweetheart

#

Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo

Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo

Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo

Heman dubh hi ri oro Ho ro huo

    Harris is filled with traditional songs and tunes today, in the pubs at the village of Tarbert,

 and all over the island at ceilidhs, a gathering where friends tell stories, sing and dance.

Oddly, though, the custom of waulking a piece of wool while singing the oran luaidh has

disappeared from Harris and Lewis. No longer a practical necessity, the traditional activity

is not usually demonstrated here.

    Across the Atlantic on the island of Cape Breton however, where so many families from

Harris were forced to emigrate in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, it survives and thrives.

Men and women together participate in what Cape Bretoners call ‘milling frolics’ where

cloth is waulked and the traditional songs are sung on a regular basis as a social, educational

and practical event.

    In fact, a tremendous amount of culture and music of the Hebrides has been preserved

in Cape Breton, a beautiful island in the Maritime Province of Nova Scotia, Canada.

I had been there as a kid, but my only surviving memory was of a misty visitor center,

where a kilted man stood outside playing Highland pipes. Now that the music and

culture of the Hebrides had a new place in my life, I looked forward to returning to Cape Breton

 as part of the research on this song.

    I wanted to see the place that emigrants went when they left Harris during the Clearances.

I wanted to ‘hear the Gaelic’ in the fiddling of the wonderful modern bearers of tradition on

the island today. And most of all, I wanted to find out if a little Gaelic song about bands

of ribbons had made its way across the Atlantic with the emigrant families, and might be surviving

somewhere on Cape Breton today. Stranger things have happened.