HAMISH Henderson always delighted in telling the story of how he brought the singing of the great Jeannie Robertson to wider notice. Inspired as a small child by his own mother's singing, Henderson went on to become a tireless collector of songs from the great oral traditions of Scotland and especially of the travelling people.
After months of fruitless searching for Robertson, he tracked her down in Aberdeen but found her reluctant to tolerate his intrusion. He claimed that she was in the process of physically shooing him away from her door when in desperation he burst int
o song. She shook her head, told him he had it wrong, and bid him to come in and she would sing it properly for him.
The chance to bring Robertson's singing to greater notice was a triumph for him, but only one among many. His own literary legacy as a songwriter, gifted poet and translator (from French, German, Italian, Greek and Latin) is significant, and songs like his celebrated
Freedom Come-All-Ye or
John MacLean's March have taken their own place in Scottish folklore.
Nonetheless, his work as a collector for the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh and his general role as passionate advocate for the power and beauty of oral tradition are his greatest legacy. He fought a notorious battle with poet Hugh MacDiarmid in the letters column of
The Scotsman over the latter's lack of regard for folk song – typically, though, he remained an advocate of MacDiarmid's own work.
James Hamish Scott Henderson was born in Blairgowrie, Perthshire, in 1919, the illegitimate son of a cousin to the Dukes of Atholl and a direct descendant of Robert II, grandson of Robert the Bruce. Henderson was brought up – often in difficult economic circumstances – by his mother, who seeded what became his lifelong passion for the oral-song tradition.
She could sing in three languages - Gaelic, Scots and French. One of his earliest memories was of her marching through the house singing
The Marseillaise. They had a book of songs at home, and one day when he was about seven he asked her where a particular song she was singing appeared.
"Some of the songs we sing are not in books," she told him. He dated his interest in folklore and collecting to that moment.
He was a larger than life, a gloriously contradictory character. A nationalist but also an internationalist, he was a former army intelligence officer who served with distinction in the 51st Highland Division, and a political activist with unshakeable Socialist beliefs even after quitting the Communist Party over the invasion of Hungary in 1956 (Poet Sorley MacLean referred to him affectionately as "Comrade Captain".).
Henderson's gangly, unkempt figure was a familiar staple on the Scottish folk and literary scene, and especially in Sandy Bell's Bar in Edinburgh, still a folk landmark in the city, where he held unassuming court. He was the prime mover behind the Edinburgh Peoples Festival in the 1950s, the precursor of the Festival Fringe.
In his heyday as a collector he spent months at a time on the road with his cumbersome tape recorder, collecting songs, ballads and stories from across Scotland. A native Gaelic speaker (he referred to his Perthshire strain as "tinker Gaelic"), he was able to collect songs and stories in both Scots and Gaelic.
He guided American folklorist Alan Lomax on a visit to Scotland in 1951, and his discoveries are said to have influenced Bob Dylan in his early love of Scottish and Irish folk music. (Dylan is said to have borrowed the melody for 1960s anti-war anthem
The Times They Are A-Changin' from Henderson's
Banks o' Sicily.) When Dylan was being castigated in the mid-1960s for selling out to rock and roll for appearing at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Henderson wrote that "before we start reaching for stones to chuck at Bob Dylan … let us for heaven's sake remember that an unmistakable vein of genuine poetry runs through the best of his work."
It was in 1951 that Henderson secured a position at the newly formed School of Scottish Studies. While his scholarship was acute, his idea of collecting was quite unlike conventional notions of scholastic purity. As fellow folk singer Adam McNaughton observed, Henderson was "never the fly on the wall." The tapes he brought back to Edinburgh often included his own lusty contributions to what he saw as a creative, living tradition rather than a museum artefact.
He was instrumental in handing down that endangered tradition to posterity. He was able to bring together the academic and popular faces of the folk-song revival more completely than anyone else and readily shared his knowledge and discoveries with anyone who showed interest.
Henderson not only brought a host of traditional singers to notice - Jimmy MacBeath, the Stewarts of Blair, and the Border shepherd, Willie Scott, to name a few - but also encouraged or inspired many young performers, including such now-established names as Jean Redpath, Jimmie MacGregor and Dick Gaughan.
His passing in an Edinburgh nursing home on 9 March 2002, age 82, ended a rich chapter in Scottish folklore, yet his legacy endures.
