Afro-Gaelic Sound Systems

The long history of African(-American) Musicians and Scottish Highland tradition

It’s not unusual to hear people make claims about music and dance that imply that it is somehow embedded in DNA: “The Highland bagpipes stir my blood”; “She’s inherited her family’s love of jazz”; “White men have no rhythm”; and so on. This view of human nature and culture is an essentialist one, in that it assumes a simple, unchanging, and inherent association between some set of traits and a person’s presumed identity.

It is very likely that genetics play a large part in setting a baseline for certain key skills needed to play music in general, such as the dexterity of someone’s fingers, their lung capacity, or their ability to discern and create pitches accurately with their voice. What laypeople seem to miss, however, is that music and dance are very broad categories, and that musical styles and genres are culturally specific. They cannot be passed genetically from one generation to the next – that, instead, requires exposure, training, and effort.

We could draw a simple parallel with food and culinary traditions. All humans need to eat and satisfy that need by ingesting food, but every culture has evolved different means to transform similar kinds of natural resources into edible dishes, different rituals around food (when and how to eat), different associations between food and their religious and cultural icons, and so on. Our desire to eat is genetic, but culture influences and largely determines how we express our need to find, prepare, and intake food.

There is no better way to debunk the essentialism surrounding music and dance than to understand how traditions such as these develop, spread, are borrowed by other social groups, mutate, go out of fashion, and reappear in wildly different contexts. Studying tradition demonstrates the fact that human beings and their cultures are in constant flux, can evolve dynamically and quickly, and often contradict our expectations.

I have researched how the bagpipes were adopted by Highlanders and were grafted into the Gaelic musical tradition in the seventeenth century, later than most people assume (see this article). In other research, I have also traced how Scottish Gaels were exposed to social dance in the courts of the French and other European élites, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and brought those influences into the Highlands, where these forms of music and dance evolved into forms such as the strathspey and reel (for example, see this article and this article). Specific genres of these musical and dance forms evolved under the influence of Gaelic speech rhythms, accomodating Gaelic cultural aesthetics and norms – and then took on a life of their own, spreading elsewhere through all sorts of migration, cultural exchange, and interaction.

(Image from University of North Carolina website.)

I started working with Rhiannon Giddens in 2003, exploring the many historical intersections between Scottish Gaels and African-Americans. Within a couple of years, I had found a modest number of fascinating references to people of African descent who were musicians renowned in their communities for their skill in Scottish Gaelic music and song. We experimented with ways to recreate and perform these American crossroads (see a video of her performing Gaelic mouth-music on this YouTube recording). I published an article in the magazine History Scotland in 2005 about my initial findings.

After presenting these ideas at the Scottish Heritage Symposium at St. Andrews University in Laurinburg, North Carolina, c.2006, and performing a creative reconstruction of these cross-fertilizations with Rhiannon, a couple of people shared further material with me about local anecdotes from the Gaelic communities of the Cape Fear of the Carolinas. This blog post attempts to synthesize most of these materials, in honor of Rhiannon’s continuing work on these topics.

I have already published an article offering the most comprehensive overview of people of African descent who were members of Gaelic communities in the Americas and thus were Gaelic speakers (see here), so I will not reiterate all of that key material. Suffice it to say that music and dance were ubiquitous elements of Scottish Gaelic life, whether in Scotland or in the diaspora, as long as tradition was allowed to continue according to native norms (both anglicization and religious reform were antithetical to them). It is thus no surprise that people in Gaelic-speaking communities – regardless of their genetic inheritance – participated in them, given the value invested in them by Gaelic culture.

The earliest evidence for people of African descent engaged in Gaelic musical tradition actually comes from the eighteenth-century Highlands. Captain Simon Fraser’s collection of Gaelic song airs, published in 1815 as Airs and Melodies peculiar to The Highlands of Scotland, contains the following note about the Gaelic song “Mo nighean dubh nach tréig mi”:

General S. Fraser, late second in command in Scotland, had a black servant who sung it so well that his master frequently called him in for that purpose when there were Highlanders present.

This snippet gives us a rare insight into inter-racial relations at the time. The title of the song could be literally translated as “My black girl who I will not abandon” or “My black girl who will not abandon me.” Although colors in Gaelic refer – in normal, traditional usage – to hair color rather than skin color, I’ve explored how Gaelic colors could become re-purposed as racial codes in the late nineteenth century in this chapter, which appears in this volume. It’s not difficult to imagine that this song of attachment to a woman with dark coloring – and the pledge not abandon her or be abandoned by her – might have meant something very different to this singer of African descent.

Another reference that I’ve found to a Gaelic speaker of African descent in the Highlands comes from the manuscript travelogue “A Slight Sketch of a Journey through parts of the Highlands and Hebrides” written by proto-folklorist Alexander Campbell in 1815. He noted that he encountered a young African boy in Perthshire who was fluent in the Menteith dialect of Gaelic, adding that this should not be altogether surprising given that there were many black Jamaicans who were excellent bagpipers in the Scottish style. I have not encountered other references to black Jamaican bagpipers at this time period, unfortunately.

People of African descent who became skilled performers of Highland musical tradition are to be found primarily – although not exclusively – in the context of small-scale slaveholding. Surviving wills demonstrate that Highlanders owned slaves as early as 1760. In 1790 in Cumberland County, the focus of Highland settlement, about a quarter of the Scottish immigrant families had slaves and the average number of slaves for those holding them was 4.7. This small scale would have facilitated sustained inter-personal interactions and therefore inter-cultural exchange between Highlanders and their laborers, unlike large-scale plantations.

The owners of plantations and their sons did not allow themselves to indulge too much in such frivolous pastimes for fear of not keeping up with their work. As a result, it was people of African descent – enslaved and free – who were the master musicians of the South, often providing the music for social occasions. It is estimated that half of the fiddlers in the upper South were of African ancestry from in the antebellum period. African-American bands dominated the music scene in the lower Cape Fear between the 1830s and the 1850s; only the creation of white bands shortly before the Civil War heralded the end of African ascendancy in music.

One of the attendees of the Scottish Heritage Symposium, Jean Casper of Milwaukee, shared excerpts with me from a manuscript written by John David McGeachy about the year 1899 which describe John “Jack” McGeachy. Jack was born in May 1769 and came to Robeson County (of North Carolina) in 1801, enslaved by Alexander McGeachy.

He was a type of darkey that we seldom see now and was a great fiddler and in the days when the good old Scotch thought there was no harm in the “reel of Tullahgorram” and “Scotch Rumble” would be often called in to their weddings and feasts to give them music one that that [sic] he took pert[icular?] pride in telling was when Neill McArthur and Polly McNair were married at that time there was a wandering bard in Robeson Neil McAlpin who made a piece of poetry about old Johnnie could repeat it all but I can only recall one verse.

John Little was the Squire
McAlpin was the clark
McGeachy’s Jack the fiddler
And the cook belong to Mark….

Similarly, another attendee, the late (and unforgettable) Judith Nisbet of Charlotte, gave me an excerpt of a family history on which she was working. It contains the following sketch:

The following poem was written for the golden wedding [in 1882] by one of those attendees, Col. William McMillan …

We meet in memory to recall
What took place in this same hall
Just fifty years ago;
When Barber Nelson drew the bow
And the gay and merry went around,
The dancers turning to the sound,
When he so merrily did play
The good old turn of “Cabba Faidh.” …

“Barber Nelson was a colored fiddler of much skill, who played ‘Cabba Faidh’ at the dances of ‘quality’ and was much in demand in Fayetteville and vicinity,” said Mary McK. Vaughan.

That would make 1832 as the year of the wedding, and the playing of Barber Nelson at it. Note the degradation of the Gaelic name Cabar Féidh as “Cabba Faidh” in the local anglophone vernacular.

The most remarkable piece of evidence that I have recovered about people of African ancestry who were engaged in Gaelic tradition in the Cape Fear was actually recorded by Hugh Ray (Darrach) of Eldon, Ontario, in 1920. His father, Angus Ray Darrach, had left Islay with his family in 1818 and initially settled in the Cape Fear. In 1834, however, he relocated to Ontario . He related many of his experiences living amongst the Cape Fear Gaels to his son. The following anecdote appears in Hugh’s paper “Reminiscences of the Highland Pioneers in Eldon, Victoria ” published by the Ontario Historical Society in 1927 (I have corrected the Gaelic spelling):

Angus Ray, father of the writer, was emplyed on one of those boats of which James MacLachlan, brother-in-law of A. MacFadyen, was skipper, and all the crew were Islay men. The Company had another barge manned by an all-negro crew, one of which was so fond of being with the Highlanders that he would scheme to be with them, and would play sick when their own boats would be ready to start. When MacLachlan’s boat was about to start “Tom” would crawl down to the warehouse and the manager would ask him if he would be able to go as one of the MacLachlan crew. He would claim to be a little better and would try, but as soon as the boat turned the first curve in the river “Tom” would dance and sing —

’S ann am Bail’ an Àbaidh
A rugadh mi ’s a thogadh mi
’S ann am Bail’ an Àbaidh
A bha mi riamh.

It is in Ballinaby
That I was born and raised,
It is in Ballinaby
That I always was.

“I would not go with those black trash, I like to go with my own country people.” He could speak Gaelic better than English, and hearing the Highlanders speak of the Highlands he knew all their friends and the places they came from, till he seemed to believe that he was from there himself – and he as black as could be. Meanwhile the row-boats served their time and steamers supplanted them, and Angus Ray was steersman when he quit the river.

It takes a little effort to unpack the subtleties of this anecdote in the context of Gaelic tradition, culture, and identity, but it is entirely consistent with my observations about communities in Scotland and the diaspora – namely, that a knowledge of the Gaelic language and the ability to participate in cultural tradition qualified one to be a member of a Gaelic community, and that this sometimes contrasted with a person’s biological descent (see Chapter Two of Warriors of the Word and this article).

In this case, Tom was a fluent Gaelic speaker and was intensely interested in and loyal to Gaelic culture and its norms. He is also keen to participate in its main forms of cultural tradition: song and dance. The words of the song he sings are key to this message. This is a well-known port-á-beul “mouth music” whose words normally state that the singer was born and raised on the island of Islay. Tom, however, knows much more about specific locations and placelore to be content with the “standard” words: he instead asserts that a specific township within the island of Islay is his birthplace and place of attachment. I have never seen this exact text elsewhere, so it is possible that he created this variant himself.

This anecdote accords well with one that I was told by American folklorist John Shaw, who spent many years recording Gaelic oral tradition in Nova Scotia. There were large, concentrated settlements of Gaelic-speaking communities in Nova Scotia for several generations, so it is not surprising that people of African descent who happened to live there would have also learned Gaelic.

According to the anecdote that Shaw relayed to me, one of these Gaelic speakers of African ancestry came to work in one of the mines near Sydney. This man had grown up in a rural part of Cape Breton and was thus unfamiliar with the practice of racial segregation dominant in urban areas and amongst anglophones. When break time came in the miners’ schedule, this man went and sat amongst other Gaelic speakers, not noticing that the miners had separated themselves by race. This caused surprise, consternation and unease amongst some of the men, especially those who did not know him. To break the tension, the Afro-Gael began to sing a popular Gaelic song that had a chorus. The other Gaels around him joined him on the chorus and let down their guard.

Live musicians and performances were in high demand before equipment and devices enabled recordings to displace them. Fiddlers in particular were needed for social dances and events, and they were often able to accommodate the styles and repertoires wanted by those who could pay them.

The Highland polymath John Francis Campbell of Islay took a trip through North America in 1864. His expertise in Gaelic tradition, and his interest in music and ethnic traditions, allowed him to realize that African-Americans in Missouri were playing Highland music, as he noted in his travelogue A Short American Tramp in the Fall of 1864:

One fellow as black as my boot was playing Scotch reels on a fiddle; another was strumming on a banjo; a great many were singing and playing at various games… I see black and white children fraternizing everywhere; … There is no real antipathy of race; that is sufficiently proved by the complexion of three-fourths of the coloured people.

He saw an example of more specific Highland influences at a dance in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, and remarks on the irony of racial segregation given such free and fluid interchange:

The music was a fiddle, and the performer a darky dressed like a lord … I knew the Gaelic name of nearly every tune the nigger played … The dark Orpheus tucked his barbiton under his chin, rosined his bow, and struck up a strathspey … Are we not all men and brothers — Britishers, Yankees, and nigger slaves? and didn’t we dance on the roof of Lethe in 1864, before the black cook?

Highland musical traditions may have been preserved longer and more faithfully by the African-American community than the Scottish immigrant community in America. There were a number of factors which estranged Scottish Highland descendants from their roots, but these all boil down to the ways in which Scottish immigrants were remolded to become generic “Anglo-Americans.” Highlanders were particularly weak in resisting such pressures because Highland culture in Scotland had been subjected for generations to aggressive anglo-conformity. Highlanders were already predisposed to equating this with “progress” when they came to America.

Gaelic and the native traditions of the Highlands were disadvantaged in American institutions, which were modeled on those of the European élite and the metropolitan centers of English-speaking America. Grammar schools taught English and “proper singing styles,” sending the implicit message that the Gaelic language and folk songs and singing styles were not worthy of teaching or preserving. The Highland community was subject to the authority and influences of singing schools, dancing masters, brass bands, hymn books, and gala events on plantations attempting to capture the grandeur of European high society.

And then there are religious influences. The congregations of the Cape Fear were noted as being largely indifferent about religion in the eighteenth century; complaints about the lack of enthusiasm for their salvation are common into the early 1800s. Evangelical revivals began then and reached their peak in the two decades before the Civil War, changing forever the spiritual complexion of the area. In their wake, secular music and dance traditions were largely abolished.

When he travelled in North America in 1869, the Rev. David MacRae took particular interest in the Highland settlements in North Carolina. He must have expected Gaelic musical tradition to survive better, for he notes:

Highland songs and dances were once common; but “Dixie’s Land” is better known now than the pibroch, and the Church has done a great deal to put dancing down, though its zeal has often been more than its success.

Even spokespeople for Scottish heritage did not always find a clear definition of who was qualified to call himself Scottish: there was room for debate in defining Scottish ethnicity. A letter was addressed to the editor of The Scottish-American Journal in 1874 asking who should be eligible to membership in a Caledonian society. The editor replied:

The rule is— Scotsmen, sons of Scotsmen, and sons of members. … A more difficult case than yours was lately submitted to us. A negro, “as black as jet,” a native of Dundee, Scotland, whose parents escaped from Georgia, applied for admission as a member into a Southern Caledonian Club. Could he be admitted? If so, could he be elected chief and wear the costume? We gave this up. It was too difficult a conundrum.

The politics of race have obscured these unexpected intersections of Scottish Highland and American history. From the vantage point of modern America, where skin color still largely determines privilege and poverty, few people are even dimly aware of the complex ways in which early Americans of all sorts enriched and participated in each other’s traditions.