Enlightenment ballad collector Anna Gordon celebrated on new album of 'muckle sangs'

Some Ballads of Anna Gordon, Mrs Brown of Falkland, complete with 60-page booklet, sees McMorland, supported by two other fine singers, Jo Miller and McMorland’s daughter, Kirsty Potts, give meticulous performances of 12 ballads from the repertoire of Anna Gordon, an important source of outstanding ballad repertoire (including versions unknown elsewhere) towards the end of the 18th century. They’re accompanied occasionally by instruments with which Gordon might have been familiar – fiddle (Daniel Thorpe), flute (Owen Sutcliffe) and guitar (Alasdair Roberts).

The recording precedes publication by Oxford University Press, due early next year, of an important new biography, The Ballad World of Anna Gordon, Mrs Brown of Falkland, by Ruth Perry, Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with whom McMorland has collaborated for many years.

The project should reinforce Gordon’s standing as a key figure in Scotland’s traditional culture. This remarkable woman doesn’t fit the usual conception of a ballad source: living during the Scottish Enlightenment, she was the daughter of Thomas Gordon, professor of humanity at King's College, Aberdeen, and later became Mrs Brown, wife of the Reverend Dr Andrew Brown of Falkland. Yet by the age of 12 she is said to have learned, from the maternal side of her family, 35 ballads (in 52 versions).

Victorian ballad collectors, sadly, all too often published them as texts without tunes: Francis Child, for instance, provided few tunes, while remarking: “There are no ballads superior to those sung by Mrs Brown of Falkland in the last century.” Twentieth-century scholar Bertrand Bronson, however, provided tunes in his four-volume Traditional Tunes of Child’s Popular Ballads, an important resource in this project.

Now, however, McMorland and company render songs such as Thomas Rymer and Queen of Elfland, The Cruel Sister, Lamkin and Lady Maisry as they have never been heard in modern times. Their poised narratives unfold with crystal clarity, declaiming with, one feels, the same authority with which Gordon sang them more than two centuries ago.

There is an important feminist aspect to this project. Gordon’s ballads often recount their tales either from a woman’s perspective or give their female protagonists agency in a male dominated world. McMorland wanted to reproduce the kind of intimate sense of women and family that would have surrounded Gordon’s domestic renditions.

An industrious collector herself, having gleaned songs from such key figures as the Border shepherd Willie Scott and Elizabeth Stewart of Fetterangus (producing essential books on both these singers), McMorland is more than qualified to steer a project such as this. She points out that, although some of the best-known song collectors of that period were men, such as Walter Scott or Robert Burns, the majority of actual tradition bearers were women.

“Anna Gordon was a woman embodied in the Scottish Enlightenment,” she says. “What was important to me was to have this essentially female sound and the intimacy of the world of women and family, so I recruited Kirsty and Jo and [Miller’s son] Owen to play the flute.”

Many of these songs are indeed “women-centred”. Clark Colven, for instance recounts what happens if you ignore women’s wisdom, the protagonist disregarding his wife’s warnings not to dally with a mermaid, and paying the ultimate price for his arrogance.

Sleeve notes include an introduction by Perry, her husband, piper and author William Donaldson, and McMorland’s husband and fellow song-collector, Geordie McIntyre. In her “Singer’s perspective”, McMorland fancies that “time is made audible in singing our cultural heritage”. One is tempted to suggest rather that when listening to these exemplars of Scottish folk memory, time simply stands still.

For more information, see www.alisonmcmorland.com