For A’ That

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Coronavirus, along with horrible death and division, brings in her drear train a span also, of precious intercalary time. This is a once-in-a-lifetime gift — like the gift of living through the Blitz; or being the poor sot who gets to watch, and write about, the Vandals carrying off the ancient gods, to melt into the rings of their prostitutes. Intercalary time. This is holy time, sacred to the individual conscience, unaccounted for in the clocks and schedules of the paymaster or priests or proud lords of state. Any world is now possible, the old having really really badly failed, again. As it must. So what will ye, Patient Reader, mak’ o’ it? What will ye fancy for the future?


Let the Bards of Scotland, who are the world’s finest, sing of their own profound understandings. No Patient Reader will fail to shed tears, at each and every one of these fine songs. These Scots know life. Rabbie Burns needs no introduction, only a bended knee.

That’s Lady Nairne, up in the header portrait. She wrote the following great song: Jean Redpath’s voice is as the sap renewed in spring, bursting forth in autumn berry.

The Rowan Tree, by the fabulous Lady Nairne. She is Scotland’s great Lady Bard, with Burns and Scott the Triumphant Arch of the Scottish Enlightenment — which, along with its other benefits for mankind, such as BLOODY PUBLIC HEALTH, also saved “Laelans Scots” — Lowlands Scottish — as a distinct poetic language. No song captures the importance of bountiful Enlightenment Nature to the Scottish family, the Scottish soul, the Scottish people, quite like this one. Don’t try not to weep.

“Oh rowan tree, oh rowan tree
Thou’lt aye be dear to me
Entwined thou art wi’ many ties
O’hame and infancy.
Thy leaves were aye the first of spring
Thy floors the simmer’s pride
There was na sic a bonnie tree
In a’ the countryside.
Oh! rowan tree.
How fair wert thou in simmer time
Wi’ a’thy clusters white,
How rich and gay thy autumn dress,
Wi’ berries red and bright.
On thy fair stem were mony names
Which nu nae mair I see;
But they’re engraven on my heart,
Forgot they ne’er can be.
Oh! rowan tree.
We sat aneath thy spreadin’ shade
The bairnies roond thee ran
They pu’d they bonnie berries red,
And necklaces they strang.
My mither, oh! I see her still,
She smiled our sports to see,
Wi’ little Jeannie on her lap,
And Jamie at her knee.
Oh! rowan tree.
Oh there arose my father’s pray’r
In holy ev’ning’s calm;
How sweet was them my mother’s voice,
In the Martyrs’ Psalm.
Now a’are gane! We meet nae mair
Aneath the rowan tree;
But hallow’d thoughts around thee twine
O’hame and infancy,
Oh! rowan tree.

Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne: The Rowan Tree; “The Scottish Minstrel,” 1822.

By now the Proclaimers need no introduction, only the notice of how brilliantly their lyrics traverse multiple levels of existence, like the great Spirituals. I love them for their optimism, their…….well, Sunshine on Leith. If you don’t know “I’m On My Way”, listen to it first in the great 1980’s video; then, Patient Reader, click on the link below it for the song, delightfully re-used as part of a PROCLAIMERS MUSICAL MOVIE!! Holy herring, who knew? I am TOTALLY the audience for this — a Proclaimers fan-boy from Year 0! (That’s 1984.) How come I never heard about “Sunshine on Leith?” It looks like a real charmer. You’ll love the clip — two singing, dancing Scottish soldiers with twenty-four hours leave in Leith. Seriously!




Millonaire’s Shortbread From The Scottish Songbook

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“While I’m worth my room on this Earth,
I will be with you.
While the Chief puts SUNSHINE ON LEITH,
I’ll thank Him, for His work, and your birth, and my birth.”

— The Proclaimers, Sunshine on Leith

JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.

You remember I had a fine heron’s nest up in Milne’s Court atop the Mound, one of the best dorms in Edinburgh (really, look at it) for receiving all kinds of official and unofficial radio, which was much of my (rich) musical life there. The View has somewhat narrowed, but has still mercifully remained unblocked for centuries. This room got the Sunshine on Leith, and it also got great reception.

We don’t hear “Hail to the Chief” very much these days, but in 1984 Ronald Reagan was (RE!)-elected President and everyone heard it all the time. Me, less so, being in Scotland, but I got an earful when I got home. Anyway it is one of the tunes in our first crucial 15 pages or so (meaning, about 30 numbers) in the Great American Songbook — of which so many were old Scottish songs. Anyway this one became so popular and revered in America so early, it is rightly among the first. The Hopkinsons of Philadelphia, for instance, were trying to write just songs like this, the latest theatrical anthem of anti-British sentiment imported from Edinburgh. Was this Scott fellow the new Robert Burns? Patient Sheet Music Buyer, he was. Listen below to the NECESSARY and divine Anne Lorne Gilles, accompanied by the equally divine Rhona Mackay:

“Hail to the chief, who in triumph advances,
Honour’d and blessed be the evergreen pine!
Long may the tree in his banner that glances,
Flourish the shelter and grace of our line.
Heaven send it happy dew,
Earth lend it sap anew,
Gaily to bourgeon and broadly to grow;
While every Highland glen,
Sends our shout back again
“Roderigh Vich Alpine Dhu, ho! i-e-roe!”
[Vich Alpine, i.e., MacAlpin]

Ours is no sapling, chance-sown by the fountain,
Blooming at Beltane, in winter to fade;
When the whirlwind has stript every leaf on the mountain,
The more shall Clan Alpine exult in her shade.
Moor’d in the lifted rock,
Proof to the tempest’s shock,
Firmer he roots him, the ruder it blow:
Menteith and Breadalbane, then,
Echo his praise agen,
“Roderigh Vich Alpine Dhu, ho! i-e-roe!”

Row, vassals, row for the pride of the Highlands!
Stretch to your oars for the evergreen pine!
O, that the rosebud that graces yon islands,
Were wreath’d in a garland around him to twine.
O, that some seedling gem,
Worthy such noble stem,
Honour’d and blest in their shadow might grow;
Loud should Clan Alpine then,
Ring from her deepmost glen,
“Roderigh Vich Alpine Dhu, ho! i-e-roe!”

Sir Walter Scott, Hail to the Chief, from “The Lady of the Lake” 1810; set to music for theatrical performance by James Sanderson, 1812. Debuted in Edinburgh and New York, the same year. Then performed in Philadelphia in 1815, in memoriam George Washington, at a celebration of the Signing of the Treaty of Ghent, ending “Mr. Madison’s War.”

The Corries were my BBC Scotland (and Radio North and Radio Forth etc.) radio gods when I tuned them in, up there in Milne’s Court. I missed hearing them live, but I used to hear great Scottish folk singers, almost as thrilling, at “Misty’s On the Mound,” just 100 crunchy wet yards awa’ from the Pend, two or three nights a week. Below the video location looks like Misty’s; the perfect traditional pub, comfortable asa living room, with a blazing fire always.\. Roy WIlliamson and Ronnie Browne give the most tear-jerking version of Loch Lomond you ever heard.

The Proclaimers were just as popular on the various (AMAZING) radio stations I had on offer at Milne’s Court. They were the up-to-the-minute-darlings, Scotland’s Great Hope for a number one world act. (America’s reigning entry was Michael Jackson, the King of Pop.) As real troubadors of Scotland, the Proclaimers acquitted themselves brilliantly with this album. I loved hearing them and their songs which were covered even then at pubs and clubs. They are at the very top of contemporary Scottish rock, but it’s no’ sae contemporary now, is it…naw…no’ rilly. But still it’s — bonnie as hell, and I sure was glad I got this at the Eric Liddel gym, not the King of Pop.

  • Note the lithographer misinterpreted the Pend as a shadow; the first twa raes o’ windies don’t exist.

Vir(tu)al Hollywood Bowl

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Patient Reader, it is the most beautiful night in California that Queen Califia ever ordained for her grateful subjects. Yet there is no Hollywood Bowl. My heart has been sunk way low in the muck of the breathless La Brea Tarpits. How can these summer weeks go by without a Bowl concert to look forward to?



The closest thing I can find to bring the drama, the fresh delight, the majestic splendor, the joy of music on a summer night: this magnificent performance of “Grand Canyon Suite” by Ferde Grofe — Ferdinand Rudolf von Grofe, the child of German immigrants in New York, who grew up in New Jersey, became Paul Whiteman’s chief arranger, from there got to know everyone in music from Gershwin to Paderewski to Toscanini, and wrote much on his own, admired by all of the above, but nothing so great as this, Grand Canyon Suite. It has been played at the Bowl almost yearly since I think, he wrote it. At least it should have been.



You have to click through the “Skip Ads” after each of the five movements; but this recording, by the fabulous Detroit Symphony, features magnificent photography of the Canyon; it’s highly worth it to enjoy the whole thing as a suite, to imagine oneself under the stars in Hollywood, a famous visiting orchestra down in the glare, the searchlights criss-crossed overhead, looking at the purple back of the hills, reading how Grofe was a New Jersey boy in Hollywood, having seen the great West, and trying to express it all, in tone and time, before the artistic greats of the 20’s and 30’s, gathered here together. God bless the Bowl, and Ferde Grofe, immortal in California music.

Holy F#$!

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…Fire, that is, which apparently struck San Gabriel Mission last night, taking out “the roof and much of the interior.” This place was founded in 1771. The story is below. San Gabriel — all the Missions — are world heritage sites to the View, if to nobody else. This is a terrible time for a monument of human civilization, to be in distress. The Missions are pariahs of the state, which is anyway bankrupted by coronavirus. We can expect little from the city of San Gabriel, ditto. Mission history and preservation are of ZERO interest to the Catholic Church. The View is reduced to hoping that, as in France with Notre Dame, as with the first Mission restorations fought for by C.F. Lummis and the Landmarks Club, individual benefactors may be our only hope.

https://patch.com/california/northhollywood/s/h6a64/fire-destroys-roof-historic-san-gabriel-mission

https://valleyvillage.home.blog/2019/10/14/mission-san-gabriel-archangels-indigenous-stations-of-the-cross/