Voicing Scotland: Folk, Culture, Nation

Its 186 pages do not compare with the five volumes of Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads, still less the eight volumes of the Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection containing nearly 2,000 songs gathered from 1900 to 1920 but not published till a century later.

It is "big" in the sense with which singers of songs collected by Child, Gavin Greig and James Bruce Duncan tend to regard this monumental repertoire.

"Tradition is a story, learned from the past, told in the present, looking to the future," Gary West writes.

And it is to understand what the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage meant by this that he has written this book, presented in five different contexts - home, place, war, lands and lyrics and cultural.

He contrasts the "tartanry" and "Balmorality" of many of the fading flowers of Scotland and instead West sees tradition as a living and vital process.

Despite the huge scale of his chosen field, it is highly relevant to today's controversies over Scottish independence.

And, apart from an introduction to the past several centuries of folklore scholarship, his is a very personal odyssey -with some surprising omissions.

In West's section on the tradition's response to war and peace, there is no mention of the "Glesga Eskimos" nor of their anti-Polaris songs of the early '60s.

Is this because they did not restrict their tunes to the Scottish tradition, utilising Let's All Go Down the Strand and She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain for their musical polemics?

The book lacks an index, a major error in such a multi-faceted survey, and a timeline would have aided West's chosen task.

But VoIcing Scotland is a valuable contribution to the ongoing conversation about what it means to be a Scot.

Karl Dallas