I just went to a performance of the songs of Allan Ramsay by (mainly) Ian Bruce, assisted by Marc Duff (whistles, recorder, mandola and bodhran) and Chris Stout (fiddle). This was sponsored by the Saltire Society and a local pub so it was free, with free beer, wine & biscuits. Well-attended as you might expect. Fred Freeman researched it and did the introductions (through one of the silliest-sounding throat mike setups I've ever heard).
This was obviously not a professionally-rehearsed, slick show, but it made an almost-persuasive case for a very different image of Ramsay than the usual one. Freeman appears to believe that Ramsay was a man of the people with democratic instincts that prefigured Burns, and Bruce did the songs that way; heavily rock-influenced guitar-playing with pounding bodhran backing, sung much faster than I expected. Did it work? Sort of. I hope he records some of this, because it points to a way of rescuing a lot of Ramsay's songs from oblivion; you *can* do them as pub-folk-rock numbers and get away with it. Problems? Quite a few. Ramsay's words are not as familiar as Burns, and he tends to go in for more complicated syntax, which means that singing them as fast as Bruce did loses the meaning a lot of the time. The gorilla thrash guitar and bodhrans didn't aid audibility. And the lack of rehearsal meant that the supporting musicians (Chris Stout in particular) were often at a loss for something interesting to do. Some of the tunes got streamlined down to fit the guitar-led style; I don't think this was ever an improvement over the best versions from Ramsay's own time. But overall, nothing that couldn't be fixed with a bit more rehearsal and studio time (and greater familiarity on the part of the audience - e.g. having the texts on the CD liner) and I'd like to see a recording company take this stuff on. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
