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 Introduction to Songs and Ballads
At the
first Blairgowrie Festival in 1966 many people asked where they could get
hold of the words of some of the songs they had heard during the weekend. To
cater for this demand a booklet containing a few songs from each of the
guest-artistes was produced for the 1967 Festival and this proved extremely
popular. We are therefore very pleased to present a new selection of songs
as sung by some of the guest-artistes at the Blairgowrie festival 1968. We
would like to thank the singers for permission to print their songs.
The booklet
contains traditional songs both old and new, some have passed down from
generation to generation for several hundred years, others made up in the
Farm Bothies or deriving from the Music Hall, several quite recent songs and
one industrial song from the Jute-Mills of Dundee.
There are,
of course, as many versions of a song as there are singers, and the older
the song the greater are the differences between one version and another.
The songs are printed here just as sung by each singer. One of the great
things about traditional song and music is the variation it shows and you
may well find you know some of the songs with different words from those
given in the book and perhaps sung to a different tune.
We hope
that many singers will find this book useful in helping them to pick up a
few new songs.
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