Different Kinds of Love Songs: Dick Gaughan
Singing as piobaireachd.
Everyone was riveted by the truth in his voice. Even people who understood hardly a word. There was a truth within the sounds that surpassed the sentries at the brain to travel straight to the heart and impact in ways that are not forgotten.1
As I send this out, it’s about two months since the release of R/evolution 1969/83—a 7CD+DVD boxset that collects together live and studio recordings of the great Scottish folk singer, guitarist and songwriter Dick Gaughan—and about a month since my copy arrived in the post. As one of the people who helped fund Colin Harper’s Kickstarter project to release this music, I’d been looking forward to it for months. Getting to know it in January and February has been a rewarding experience on several fronts.
As Harper notes, the set is designed as an act of preservation and as a way to get Gaughan some compensation in his retirement:
Dick Gaughan is alive and well, up to a point. He can no longer play guitar and is legally blind, but his optimism remains. He lives totally ‘off the grid’ in terms of internet presence and together with very little activity around his back catalogue (explained below), there is a danger that the memory of Dick Gaughan – and the music of Dick Gaughan – is fading from view, his pre-90s career of 20 years boiled down to periodic reissues of one album, Handful of Earth (1981).
Indeed, Handful of Earth has just been reissued again.
Harper details the ‘legacy gap’ of the rest of the pre-1990s work on the Kickstarter page:
Four of his 70s albums (including one with the Boys of the Lough) for Leader/Trailer and Rubber have never or only briefly (in one case) appeared on CD and are not available on streaming. Their current ownership makes licensing all but impossible.
Two of his three Topic albums (1977–81) are available on streaming but have not been remastered or physically reissued in over 30 years.
His two Folk Freak/Wundertüte albums (1982–83) are available on streaming but have not been remastered or physically reissued in 28 years. The owner of this material has long retired from the music business.
His three 1985–88 Celtic Music albums are long out of print on CD and are not available on streaming.
The boxset includes some previously released material from the studio albums (with the exception of the Trailer/Leader records, which are subject to ongoing legal issues, currently aided by a separate crowdfunding project), though the bulk of the material comes from live performances and broadcast sessions.
Gaughan’s is a voice I fell for with A Handful of Earth when I heard it around the end of the 1980s. Not long after, I heard No More Forever, Gaughan’s first solo album from 1972. With its time-stopping takes on ‘MacCrimmon’s Lament’, ‘Jock O’ Hazeldean’, ‘Flower of Northumberland’ and ‘Green Linnet’, it remains a classic record, one that has stood the passage of the years.
That passage is scored into the surface of my vinyl copy of No More Forever, obtained only recently after decades of knowing the album as a cassette. Though I remain miffed at the Discogs vendor who charged too much for it, grading a G record at VG+, I’ve come to appreciate its crackles and pops. Not only does the mournful siren of Gaughan’s voice blast through the noise, the wear also bears witness to the presence of that voice and guitar (and Aly Bain’s wonderful fiddle) in at least one other person’s listening life.
The album takes its title from the words to ‘MacCrimmon’s Lament’ (though not the version included on the record, where Gaughan sings ‘no more MacCrimmon’ instead). Of the standout songs, only ‘Green Linnet’ is unrepresented on R/evolution. It’s a song that recalls Napoleonic times, joining a large group of such songs that have lived on to our own times. As Gaughan says in his liner notes, ‘the defeat of Napoleon was the inspiration of some of the finest songs ever’. An idea for a future post.
By No More Forever, Gaughan’s voice has already gained the slow deliberation of the piobaireachd, the music of the highland bagpipes. A bedrock of sustained drones gives way to elegantly weathered peaks. It all comes together on ‘MacCrimmon’s Lament’. The boxset features two versions: a Gaughan/Bain take from a 1972 BBC Radio 4 broadcast that is similar to the one on No More Forever (with the lovely air ‘Mistress Jamieson’s Favourite’ appended), and an unaccompanied rendition from an Edinburgh concert the following year. The boxset extra Untroubled: Live in Belfast 1979-82 has Gaughan stunning a Belfast crowd with another unaccompanied rendition in 1982. The song is also included on the excerpts from the box released separately as Live at the BBC 1972-79.
The lyric sheet in Kist O’ Gold, an album I’ve owned longer than No More Forever, shows the words written as sung (almost: Gaughan always takes words into untranscribable directions). ‘O whaur hae yo been Lord Randal my son / O whaur hae ye been my bonnie young man’.
Kist O’ Gold includes Gaughan’s first studio attempt at Hamish Henderson’s ‘51st (Highland) Division’s Farewell to Sicily’. It’s a captivating recording, but one he’ll come to feel failed to capture the dynamics he’s after due to ‘the technical limitations imposed by tape noise’. He’ll return to it two decades later for the album Sail On, with Mary Macmaster’s harp accompanying his vocal, guitar and keyboards. Reflecting on his later digital recording in the liner notes of the Prentice Piece compilation, he’ll write, ‘I had also had those 20 years in which to develop my understanding of the song and its structural relationship with piobaireachd’.
R/evolution carries two live renditions of Henderson’s Sicily song, two attempts from the late 1970s to learn what the song has to teach, to understand its contours.
Graeme Thomson, who provides a lengthy essay to one of the two booklets in the R/evolution box, writes of Gaughan’s ‘passionate, free-flowing vocals, almost mystically attuned to the essence of the song’. It’s there from the beginning. Certainly there in one of the first performances I noted down while listening, the unaccompanied rendition of ‘Derwentwater’s Farewell’ from 1971. The way he sings ‘Northumberland’ at the song’s close exemplifies the essence Thomson writes about.
Influenced by Davy Graham, he takes up nonstandard tunings, going beyond the then-popular DADGAD. Those listed on Kist O’ Gold include CGCGCE, DAAEAE, DGDEAD, EAAEAE. Mesmerising modal explorations, the perfect foil to what his voice does with language. He retunes the strings of the words he sings: in ‘Rigs O’ Rye’, ‘dead’ becomes ‘deed’.
He learns how to pace a song from his mother, who tells him ‘the song has its own time’. The way he comes to stretch time is different to the legato used by other notable folksingers of the time (think Sandy Denny, Anne Briggs, both singers he finds inspirational). It’s more visceral, a breaking open of the song’s inner time. As if, in each song, there were others wanting to escape.
From early in the career, there’s a reminder that folk ballads were the protest songs of the day, that they live on as political message and historical record. They offer a rebuke to that comment often made about topical songs that they too easily lose their meaning (I’ve made that comment). They come back into focus, the timely returning as the timeless.
Coincidence leads to me reading You Call It Madness, Lenny Kaye’s book on Russ Columbo and ‘the sensuous song of the croon’, at the same time I’m getting to know R/evolution. Kaye writes of ‘the calculus of time as musical space’, and I can’t prevent a thought experiment: Dick Gaughan as crooner. As absurd as it sounds, there’s something to pursue, even if it’s only a jazz-informed exploration of singing, an intimacy with the microphone.
I think of some of the more lulling songs—‘Jock O’ Hazeldean’, ‘Jamie Foyers’, ‘Schoolday’s End’—as a move into the sensuous. Different kinds of love songs.
Columbo and Gaughan. Such different worlds. But something connects, something to do with the sonority of the voice taking over from the narrative of the words, what Kaye calls ‘lyricism beyond the lyric’. Kaye’s chapter on the ‘oo’ sound is fascinating. A sound crucial to crooning, as Kaye shows, but also to songs from Scotland and NE England. I live in a city known as ‘the toon’, once famous for a beer known as ‘broon’.
Kaye: ‘the rounding of the lips, preliminary to a kiss. The slight purse. A prime sound, primal. Ooooo’.
Gaughan’s voice can be as wild as free jazz, as in your face as punk, the very opposite of twee. An instrument as freely, as spiritually, as politically deployed as Coltrane’s horn. At times it can be as startling as jazz bagpiper Rufus Harley, a sound listeners were just not expecting in that world.
All these live versions of the 1970s material are wonderful, but they serve as a reminder of the absence of the studio recordings. Gaughan doesn’t have the options of a young, wealthy, world famous pop star. He can’t remake the music now as ‘Dick’s versions’. So what do you do? The archival recordings sourced for R/evolution are an elegant solution, one that highlights the importance of live performance for artists like Gaughan. By all accounts he was no fan of the recording process, at least in the period covered by the boxset (1969-1983), and those records he made were generally attempts to capture the way he sounded in concert.
That said, these were always songs in process. Not only the long decades and centuries of the folk process, where ballads swap characters, outcomes, melodies and more, but also the shorter evolution that occurs within a performer’s career as they learn new things about their material and their abilities, as they lean into where songs want to take them. Hence the ‘evolution’ part of R/evolution, early and later versions of the same song providing a sense of the directions Gaughan followed.
‘Willie O’ Winsbury’ is a song I first knew, via Fairport Convention, as ‘Farewell Farewell’, with Richard Thompson’s lyric and Sandy Denny’s aching, mournful vocal. Later I’d fall for Thompson’s version of ‘Winsbury’ when it was released on the RT boxset.2
Gaughan recorded the song for the 1977 Topic album Gaughan. He included it in his sets (there are versions on R/evolution) until an unspecified date in Liverpool when he decides the song has achieved its purpose.
Under a YouTube clip of Pentangle performing the song on British television, someone comments that they could linger in the song for hours. So could I. And so could I linger in Gaughan’s versions (and have) as he runs the song to over eight minutes that I always find too short.
There’s a good discussion of the song on the Cover Me website. A feature called ‘Good, Better, Best’. Tom McDonald has Richard Thompson offering the good, Pentangle the better, and Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer the best. I don’t agree with all the points and have reservations about the format. I’m critical of that ranking process because there’s a tendency to present subjective favourites as objective bests (see also: year-end lists). At the same time, I also indulge in these practices from time to time. And anyway, we all know about the whole subjectivity-as-objectivity game don’t we? It’s all part of engaging with culture as a fan.
I think I just question those narratives that insist on definitive versions of songs at the exclusion of others. Because even when I have favourites, they never make me want to stop listening to as many other versions as I can. If the song is good—and this one, ‘Willie O’ Winsbury’, is superb—then bring it on in all its forms. I’ll find my inner jukebox switching from Jacqui McShee to Sandy Denny to Richard Thompson to Dick Gaughan, all within the space of minutes, and I just end up with more respect than ever for the song itself, for song as a palimpsest of versions and experiences.
If Gaughan’s renderings of songs sung by others are usually among my favourites, R/evolution also provides some counterexamples. I find his ‘Arthur McBride’ from 1976 too rushed, especially for a singer who is so adept at stretching time. If I were playing ‘good better best’, I’d be lining up that much-viewed clip of Paul Brady again.
I hesitate to compare Gaughan’s ‘Seven Gypsies’ to Nic Jones’, given its variation of source material, but the basic story is the same and I’d rather hear Jones spin the tale over his wonderful ‘Canadee-i-o’-like guitar arrangement. I hesitate to say any of this because of what I’ve just said about definitive versions, and because music’s not a competition. The wonder of great songs is the variety of shapes they can be set into. But perhaps I do need some kind of comparative approach, if only to try and figure out what makes so many of Gaughan’s performances so remarkable.
I start to collect favourite words: hae, wae, lang, braw, doon.
We hear Gaughan mock apologizing over and over for being indecipherable to audiences in many parts of the non-Gaelic world. He seems to revel in the confusion he’s about to unleash.
‘Can you understand me? This is my best English’ (introducing ‘Now Westlin’ Winds’, Berkeley, 1981).
No one south of Berwick will understand a word—and maybe not many north of Berwick either (at the start of ‘Gillie Mor’).
‘I sing in Scottish, which is not English’ (‘Magdalen Green’, Vienna Folk Festival, 1981).
A stubborn pride in obfuscation? A touch of self-exoticizing? Or just an honest reckoning with what he’s doing to language (of any kind), to song as communication?
Gaughan’s humour comes through in these live performances. The ‘English’ comments and the fond accounts of other musicians and song sources. ‘Cathal’s a hard man not to get a tune off’; ‘The second one’s called “The One After”’; ‘[the Scottish are] the original permissive society—it’s permitted to do anything except enjoy yourself’.
He brings several of his favourite tropes together introducing ‘Bonnie Jeannie O’ Bethelnie’:
a song about a very quaint thing we used to have in Scotland—a thing called “aristocracy”. We managed to get rid of it. We gave it to the English. Scottish ballads are either extremely violent or extremely pornographic. And this is one of the non-violent ones … Fear not, it’s in Scots. If you see me laughing, you know that’s when to be offended.
Parallel Lines, the album Gaughan released with Andy Irvine in 1982 on the German Folk Freak label. As always when Gaughan’s placed against other voices, it’s his I crave. That’s no slight on the brilliant Irvine, just the truth of a relationship between an ear and a voice.
This is the album with Gaughan’s version of Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages’. I don’t like the appended ‘Afterthoughts’, with its sax and mandolin, but Gaughan nails the main song. A rendition of this much-covered number that has a voice as affecting as its author’s. If I were to pick just one verse, it would be ‘In a soldier’s stance …’
His ‘Floo’ers o’ the Forest’ here is pure vocal sonority, tone and timbre taking precedence over semantic clarity. Here, the additions—a lengthy electric solo (DG), hurdy gurdy (Irvine) and Fender Rhodes (Bob Lenox)—absolutely work. Sound art of the first order.
There’s an affinity with Appalachian song, with a journey into the drone. I’m reminded of what the musicologist Wilfrid Mellers once wrote about the contrast between ‘vocal bloom’ and ‘a monody of deprivation’ found in Appalachian song. I don’t think Gaughan’s voice ever achieves the almost depersonalised quality Mellers found in a Nimrod Workman, but it comes close in some of the most drawn-out numbers, where the drone becomes a primal reckoning with the landscape of the song.
Andrew Means writes of ‘the hardy weathered character of songs like “MacCrimmon’s Lament”’. Yes, I sense geology and meteorology in Gaughan’s singing: landscapes. seasons, hardiness, renewal. Means made his comment in a 1972 review that’s included in R/evolution’s second booklet of press clippings. I think of how much more weathering that song was to gain in the following years.
Gaughan distrusts intellectualism, we are told on one of the booklet texts. Distrusts ‘armchair balladists’ too. I distrust anti-intellectualism, especially in these days and on these platforms where it’s so rife. I trust Gaughan’s music, though, and what it does for me, what I feel and think when I hear it.
‘Song for Ireland’. A standout from A Handful of Earth, and from the Berkeley set included in the boxset. A Scottish singer performing a song by an Englishman about Ireland for an American audience.
In an interview for BBC Scotland’s Spectrum programme in 1982 (included on the boxset’s DVD), a clip of ‘Song for Ireland’ is followed by a question about romanticism and sentimentalism. Gaughan admits a pleasure in such indulgences and then tries to square that with his politics:
All Marxists are open to the accusation of being romantic. It’s an optimism … I think the human race is a wonderful idea … I like people, I like what goes on between people. And if that’s romantic, yes I’m romantic.
Ireland is a constant refrain on A Handful of Earth. He thanks ‘the many fine singers of Northern Ireland’ in the liner notes: ‘it took me years of listening to understand and fully appreciate your skills, and to be aware of how much you have influenced me’. Introducing one of his many migration songs to an audience, he quips that his Irish grandparents had the choice of emigrating to America or Scotland and chose the Promised Land.
The DVD that comes with R/evolution adds so many pleasing elements: Gaughan filmed by a Danish TV crew playing in an Edinburgh room for fellow folkies, his hair dark and luxurious, sideburns and goatee adding to the elegance; the two main instruments—voice and guitar—already so finely honed, so him; the cans of McEwans lager his colleagues are swigging between collective choruses of ‘Fiddler’s Green’; Gaughan’s jumper. I feel I could watch this clip over and over.
The Sunday gallery feature on BBC NI from 1972 with the Boys of the Lough: Gaughan’s stripy socks; Aly Bain’s boot heels; the thick frames of Cathal McConnell’s glasses . Bain, the narrator tells us, has ‘been playing fiddle since he was a bairn’.
Then we jump a decade. Most of the footage on the DVD is from the 1980s, when the politics of the songs turn more contemporary.
The Spectrum broadcast includes a brilliant take on ‘Bonnie Jeannie O’ Bethelnie’. ‘I like ballad language’, Gaughan confides in an accompanying interview. ‘And every time I sing that song, I learn something from it’. Singing as education and archaeology. All the things preserved in the strata of songs.
He tells Bill Paterson that the songwriters worth modelling yourself on are Robert Burns, Woody Guthrie and Bertolt Brecht.
As with another of my favourite song interpreters, Nina Simone, most of my treasured Gaughan performances are not explicitly ‘political’. But like Simone, Gaughan’s an artist who cannot be detached from political song or from performance as political act.
Gaughan performed Ed Pickford’s ‘Worker’s Song’ for the Spectrum broadcast. That version doesn’t appear on the DVD, but is available on YouTube.
‘Now Westlin Winds’, Gaughan’s haunting adaptation of a Robert Burns poem, was also included in the Spectrum broadcast. This is substituted on the DVD by two other performances of the song, one from a BBC2 Edinburgh festival special and one from the Vienna Folk Festival in 1981.
Lauren Laverne described Burns’ poem beautifully while promoting the R/evolution fundraising project last April.
Burns Night fell while I was working on this piece. Sharing Gaughan’s Spectrum performance of ‘Now Westlin’ Winds’ on Substack Notes, I became aware of David Wilson’s splendid post on the poem and song from last year.
Steve Byrne provides a brief essay to one of the R/evolution booklets on Gaughan’s traditional song repertoire. He includes the several works by Burns that Gaughan performed as they ‘would be considered by many nowadays as traditional song’. Of ‘Now Westlin Winds’, he writes that few can hear it ‘without thinking of the way the vowels and rhymes flow from the Gaughan voice, to the extent that one rather wishes Burns had lived to hear it’.
We see Gaughan performing ‘A Different Kind of Love Song’ for an unknown STV programme in 1988. This was the title track of his 1983 album, a song that deals with the dynamic tension between ‘protest songs’ and ‘entertainment’. It’s far from my favourite of his songs, but I admire his decision to explain why he wanted to sing, and later write, these different kinds of love songs.
So I’ll keep trying to make people happy I’ll keep trying in the best way I know how And for me to help make the most people happy I must make you even more sad and angry nowSo you see where you misunderstand me If you listen again then you might even find All the songs that I sing are love songs But their love is a different kind
In 1978, Gaughan released an album with the folksingers Tony Capstick and Dave Burland, The Songs of Ewan MacColl, on the Newcastle-based Rubber Records. I own the 1986 reissue on Black Crow, a subsidiary of Rubber. Because these labels were bought by Celtic Music, the album hasn’t been available for years and its songs couldn’t be included on R/evolution (though there are solo Gaughan versions of ‘Shoals of Herring’, ‘Jamie Foyers’ and ‘Schoolday’s End’ from other sessions).
Gaughan is quoted in the R/evolution booklet: ‘they were all the very safe MacColl songs. Very little of his Maoist stuff’. Fine by me. These are humanist songs and all the more moving for it. All three singers are superb. The album introduced me to Burland and Capstick and I’ve been glad to pick up records by them in the intervening years (Burland’s 1971 Trailer album A Dalesman’s Litany being a favourite).
I’ve always been glad that all three provide verses on ‘Shoals of Herring’. Capstick (good) and Burland (better) drive the story forward, their voices moving and clear. I’d doubtless enjoy a rendition from just the two of them. But it’s what Gaughan (best) does with his bookend verses that makes this unforgettable: shaving the ‘g’s off MacColl’s gerunds, stretching words to their limit, sailing far from shore. While the other verses roll out like fireside tales in a harbourside inn, Gaughan’s pitch us into the storm-flecked waters. The opening verse is an astonishing portent of what’s to come. The final verse contains one of the most dramatic and moving vocal attacks I know, all the more effective for its slow emergence from the waves of the song.
Day and night the sea we're darin' Come wind, come hail or winter gale Sweatin' and cold, growin' up, growin' old and dyin' As we're following the shoals of herrin'
MacColl has already strained the limits of meter with that third line. Gaughan takes it and explodes it, examining the phonemes from all angles. Singing as cubism.
R/evolution’s six CDs take the Gaughan story to 1983, the DVD to some years later. There was much more to come in the 1990s and 2000s, but I’ll save those years for another post.
Tommy Sands, ‘A Thing About Truth’, liner notes to Dick Gaughan, Untroubled: Live in Belfast 1979-82. Gaughan Records, 2025.
Thompson quoted in the RT booklet: ‘I don’t know whether you’ll find a good version of [“Willie O’ Winsbury”]. I played it as a request the first time, something of a challenge to rise to. Word spread and it was asked for a number of times after that. The appeal is probably because it provided the tune for “Farewell, Farewell”. It’s a great song, though. Tell people they need to hear Andy Irvine doing it really … He actually set it to this tune, which is the wrong one but works beautifully. I don’t think I can claim in any way to add anything to the performance’ Which only goes to show how wrong musicians can be about their performances. He’s right about needing to hear Andy Irvine’s version with Sweeney’s Men, though. I’m guessing this was the version Gaughan used as a source for the tune, though he wrote in the liner notes to Gaughan that he ‘first heard it by Anne Briggs to a different tune’.
'Gaughan’s voice can be as wild as free jazz, as in your face as punk, the very opposite of twee. An instrument as freely, as spiritually, as politically deployed as Coltrane’s horn.' Oh Lord yes.
'Gaughan is quoted in the R/evolution booklet: ‘they were all the very safe MacColl songs. Very little of his Maoist stuff’. Fine by me.' And yes, regarding the last point. Mao after all killed 50 million + of his own people.
I still remember us down in Falmouth playing 'Songs' to death. Peace and love to you and your kin.
'No More Forever' is his greatest album.