Bothy Ballads Quotes

“An influential study tells us that bothy ballads got their name because they were sung in bothies, where most northeast male farm servants were housed. But I knew that most of these servants had been lodged not in the bothy but in the chaumer. Further, it soon became clear that if one plotted on a map the spatial distribution of bothies on the one hand and of bothy ballads on the other, then the two distributions would show almost no overlap. Put crudely, in Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, and north Kincardine one had ballads but no bothies, while in Moray, Nairn and south Kincardine one had bothies but no ballads. It was clear that the argument that bothy ballads were written to be sung in bothies was a remarkably inadequate explanation of these songs' genesis.”
― Ian R. Carter, Farm Life in Northeast Scotland, 1840 - 1914: The Poor Man's Country

“We know almost nothing of the rural class relations of lowland Scotland in the last two centuries and, as a consequence, are still struggling to escape from accounts of class relations in lowland agriculture which are in fact generalised accounts of the relations noted by observers (with keen eyesight, to be fair) sitting in Edinburgh. The north-east, the south-west, Strathmore were not like the Lothians; and folk music provides important evidence to support the point.”
― Ian R. Carter, Calgacus 2: Summer 1975