Moving the Tradition On

SUE WILSON caught up with the venerated Lochaber fiddler and teacher Angus Grant on the release of only his second recording in 30 years

WE’VE ALL heard of the “difficult” second album, but a 30-year time lag after the first might seem to suggest more than proverbial tribulations. In the case of veteran fiddler Aonghas Grant, by contrast, the delay in following up his self-titled 1977 debut arose mainly from the easy-going, mañana-minded mores of his native Highland culture.

Newly released on Shoogle Records, The Hills of Glengarry might never yet have seen the light of day, if the 76-year-old hadn’t first been approached to compile a book of his tunes, The Glengarry Collection – likewise named for his family’s home district – due out next year from leading US music imprint Mel Bay Publications.

“People have been at me for years to put my tunes together in a book,” Grant explains, “but my attitude’s always been typical West Coast – no hurry, I’ll do it sometime – so it was good that something gave me a push, otherwise it probably wouldn’t ever have got done. Then while I was deciding what should go in the book, I started thinking that if I was going to do another record I’d better do it now, before my fingers stiffened up altogether.”

Grant’s innate modesty, despite his long being regarded as one of Scotland’s most important tradition-bearers, has been a further factor in keeping his light under a bushel. “Nobody’s more amazed than myself at all this interest that’s been taken in my fiddling,” he says. “I’ve always thought of myself just as a backwoods gut-scraper – I’ve never had a lesson in my life.”

The tunes I picked up from those old fiddlers, 50 years ago and more – I’ve never forgotten them. Whereas a tune that I’ve learned off a page, I can never really play it inside myself, somehow

“My father was 50 when I was born,” he says, “and I was only 11 when he died, but I remember somebody saying at the time that he’d taken 500 years’ worth of tunes and songs and stories to the grave with him. This was in the days before the School of Scottish Studies, of course, or they’d have been camping on his doorstep.”

With the accordion then beginning its post-war ascendancy, Grant was one of the few among his contemporaries to take up the fiddle, and thus represents a rare direct link with those accumulated centuries. His uncle and father were born in 1875 and 1880 respectively, while only a couple of generations earlier, the family tree intersects with the remnants of bardic tradition.

“West Highland fiddle music has always been closely related to piping and Gaelic song, but if you go further back, the clarsach was part of that melting-pot as well,” he explains. “In Glengarry, the last of the great harpers was Ailean Dall MacDougall, who also played the fiddle: he was a great influence on all the Glengarry fiddlers, and my great-grandfather would have been a contemporary of his.”

In place of any formal training, however, the young Grant was bequeathed a priceless legacy of family musical lore. Descended from a long line of fiddlers, pipers and Gaelic singers – a line continued in turn by his son, Shooglenifty fiddler Angus R. Grant – he was first initiated into the tradition by his father and uncle, both noted musicians.

As well as in the lyrically expressive playing and exquisite phrasing showcased on The Hills of Glengarry, Grant continues to build on this venerable inheritance as a highly sought-after fiddle teacher, now with over 20 years’ worth of ex-pupils proudly sporting his signature red tassel on their instruments.

“I got the idea from these Hungarian gypsy players I saw at a festival in England, who all had tassels on their fiddles,” he says. “I make them myself out of wool, usually around Christmas time, and give them to the young ones when I’ve had them for about a year.”

As a boy himself, Grant started out learning the pipe chanter, before the onset of childhood asthma, which persisted until his mid-teens, necessitated a switch of instrument – remembered by Grant as the musical equivalent of love at first sight.

“My uncle Archie gave me my first fiddle, and showed me one or two things to get me started,” he recalls, “and within half an hour I could play “Dornoch Links” on it, one of the tunes I’d learned on the chanter. Right away, I just seemed to have a natural instinct for it.”

Instinct or no, the newly-smitten fiddler was left in no doubt as to the dedication demanded by his four-stringed mistress: “When I first started off, my uncle said to me, ‘You can’t call yourself a fiddler until you can play a tune for every day of the year’ – and that was just to begin with: 365 tunes to learn, all by ear, of course.”

While Grant has since acquired a working knowledge of musical notation, in many respects he still subscribes to the traditional primacy of oral transmission.

“One thing that’s always bugged me over the years,” he says, “is when I hear people say, in a deriding sort of manner, ‘oh, he’s only an ear player’. All the fine old fiddlers that I knew as a boy, none of them could read a note of music – they wouldn’t have known an F sharp if it was walking down the street in front of them. They all just had a wonderful ear, and they each knew hundreds of tunes.

“That’s something a lot of classical players can’t understand,” he continues, “how traditional musicians can remember all these tunes without ever seeing a note of music, but I remember my late friend Tom Anderson, the great Shetland fiddler, saying that at his peak, in his 40s, he’d about four or five thousand tunes in his head.

“And I’d say I had probably something like that myself at one time, though my memory’s not so good now. But the tunes I picked up from those old fiddlers, 50 years ago and more – I’ve never forgotten them. Whereas a tune that I’ve learned off a page, I can never really play it inside myself, somehow.”

At the same time, Grant readily endorses reading music as a valuable tool for younger players, while another clearly vivid memory is of the first time he witnessed one of his own compositions – one of his earliest, dating from the late 1950s, and now the new album’s title track – written down on the stave.

“I was coming back from playing for a dance in Kintail, in the small hours of the morning, and as I came over the top of Glengarry I started to get a bit sleepy. So I got out of the car beside a stream; I had a drink and splashed myself, and I was looking around me, you could see nothing but hills away in the far distance, and the ruins of my great-grandfather’s house, and I thought, that would be a good name for a tune: ‘The Hills of Glengarry’ – and by the time I reached the bottom of the glen, I had it in my head.

“I played it to a music teacher friend of mine, who wrote it down for me – and it was so exciting to see, something that had come out of my head, there on the page.”

There will be around 50 of Grant’s own tunes in The Glengarry Collection, alongside numerous others from his vast repertoire, transcribed to capture the distinctive characteristics of his playing, even if the “West Highland style” he is said to exemplify is a label at which he partially demurs.

“There are some obvious elements, like the closeness to pipe music in terms of ornamentation, and a smoother bow, but I think a lot of it is more down to individual players. Back in the old days, before tapes and CDs, people would just try and copy the best player in their district, so I think that was probably as important in how things got passed down.

“And for me, the great thing about traditional music is that you don’t have to play things in such-and-such a style, there’s so much room to be imaginative: I myself hardly play a tune twice the same way. That’s how the music keeps moving on, with each new generation.”

(The Hills of Glengarry is out now on Shoogle Records)

© Sue Wilson, 2007

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