A duet with Natalie MacMaster
There’s a new video clip up on the TED site of a song I performed there a few years ago with the wonderful Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster. Someone on my Forum spotted it (topic = “Thomas at TED; new stuff!”) and posted the URL, http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/117
….but they said I was singing a traditional song. Not correct! It was actually an original song I wrote specially for the occasion. It’s got a nice story behind it:
I was very taken with Natalie when I saw her performing solo in 2002. Between her lovely jigs and reels she told how her great uncle (I believe) had brought the traditional music with him when he arrived in Nova Scotia from Scotland, and how it had been passed down at barn dances and in the warmth of neighbours’ kitchens! Natalie grew up with a fiddle and bow in her hands, and it’s as if she was born to play it. But as well as the uptempo, knees-up stuff, there was a more plaintive, lamentful side to her playing that took me by surprise. There’s no more powerful music on the planet than that made by people made to leave their homelands.
Next time I was at the public library I did some research. I was interested to learn more about how Natalie’s ancestors came to be on those boats to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in the first place. I found an edition of Encylopedia Brittanica, dated about 1905, and obviously written by Oxford scholars in their ivy-covered towers. I found a section under ‘Scotland’ entitled ‘The Highland Clearances.’ It went something like this: “During the potato famines of the late Eighteenth to mid-Nineteenth centuries, fearing for the livelihoods of their tentants, many English landowners offered free passage to the New World aboard specially commissioned ships.”
How very compassionate of them! This is what we teach our children. The reality was completely different. In truth the English landlords, with their inherited Scottish land yielding little produce or rent, saw more value in converting their estates to profitable sheep farms or—worse yet—to grouse hunting and trout fishing getaways for the pleasure of their rich Victorian friends from the South. So the landlords forced their tenants to vacate the Highlands and abandon their homes, with little or no compensation. Villages were burned along with the surrounding trees, to prevent rebuilding. Some were forced to move to barren coastal crofts where their only choice was to gather kelp on the beach. In the most extreme cases, for example on the Hebridean island of Barra in 1851, tenants were forced at gunpoint on to freighters bound for settlements in Australia, Canada, or Nova Scotia, where they were dumped and left to fend for themselves. And the Christian Church supported the landlords, because it had failed to convert the islanders from their heathen behaviour and said the Clearances were just retribution for their sins, drunkenness and evil ways.
Anyway. The anger I felt reading Brittanica led me to compose a song. I have no idea where my own Robertson ancestors stood in all this, but I decided to write it from the point of view of a Highlander. as soon as I had a rough version I sent it to Natalie, and asked if she would return to TED the following Ferbruary to perform it with me. To my great delight she agreed. You can check out the video here, and here are the song’s lyics:
BLUE IS A RIVER
Like the heather on the hillside as they drove us from the Highlands
Like the iceflow from the Arctic where we landed in Newfoundland
There’s a colour to my sorrow, there’s a name for all this sadness
Like the ocean in between us, I am blue
Blue is a river, blue remembered
Blue water running clear
Blue like a planet to a spaceman
Blue river of my tears
So I came here to the city
Where the dream burns like a furnace
And I dazzled in these dark streets like a diamond in a coal face
Then the cold wind from the islands
Blew a storm cloud across the new moon
Like the gunsmoke above the houses in my home.
Blue is a river, blue remembered
Blue water running clear
Blue like a planet to a spaceman
Blue river of my tears
Blue river of my tears
© Thomas Dolby 2002
Absolutely beautiful, sir. I got misty-eyed reading the above, and the Scottish in my blood is several hundred years diluted.
Thanks for sharing the link and the lyrics.
jR
From the first blush of your career, there has always been depth and integrity to balance your own knees-up efforts; fine further evidence here. Anyone with pop-thematic interest in the people and their struggles, also consider Billy Bragg’s (via Kipling) “A Pict Song” — sort of the other side of the (Roman) coin. Thank you, Thomas. I’m just starting up my own viol playing again, and shall go teacher-seeking with (amazing) Natalie in mind. Awesome inspiration for starting the week; slainte.
I think its strange that you can channell enough of that emotion in a correct enough way to have someone involved want to perform it with you! Most people can empathize to some degree with another persons plight, but not really understand it that well. I guess you were pretty well on the money with that imagery in her mind.
All I can write is “Wow!”
Thanks for filling us in, and correcting me (I’m the one who posted this link on the Forum) about this terrific song. As with many of your songs, this one sheds poetic light on darker historical truths. It would be terrific if this showed up on a future studio recording!
Beech
Thanks for this … but why no dancing from your good self?
What? Capitalists and religious zealots aren’t the secular humanists they’re made out to be? Stop the press! Kudos again to conscientious art. Need a Bodhran player? I’ll start practicing.
That’s quite cool, Heretics-R; I’ve been playing bodhran since 1990. (Together we could drive his audience way round the bend! Actually, I can think of a couple of tunes…)
ThomasDolby.com: Where Friends Meet Friends.
Hey, may I have that t-shirt now? Love ya!!!*
(*Actually true.)
Beautiful song Thomas. If you ever go to record it for an album and would like an accordion track, I gotcher back.
“Blue is a River” is so beautiful, and so heartwrenching…I’ve
heard it through once, and I know that the next time I listen to it, I’ll be bawling like a baby. Natalie’s playing is wonderful…and she channels the Scots’ fighting spirit at the end, as her spirited playing demonstrates how her ancestors were able to bring their music, their culture, and their history with them…inside their
heads. Their English landlords couldn’t take their spirit, or their
memories, away from them like they took their lands.
‘Free passage to the new world…’, indeed. More like, ‘Don’t let
the door hit ya on your way out.’ My paternal grandparents left
Scotland voluntarily, as far as I know…I wonder if they knew how
lucky they were. I have no living paternal relatives to ask about
it. I tried a little geneological research on the ‘Net a few years
ago, but I didn’t get very far. My family’s clan is either Cameron
or Scott, and that’s all I know {my surname is Laidlaw}. I don’t even know if the word ‘clan’ should have a capital ‘C’…I haven’t
a clue about my family history, I guess, because it was all
written down on marriage certificates and so on, which have
since been lost. My paternal grandfather died before I was born,
so I never had a chance to so much as meet him, never mind
hear him talk about our family history.
Contrast my own ancestors’ carelessness with the way the
exiled Scots hung onto their culture. I guess when people leave
their homelands voluntarily, as my paternal grandfather did, they probably have all of their paperwork with them, so they rely on that to tell the story…until it gets lost or crumbles with age. They rely on pieces of paper for an account of their history, instead of determinedly locking everything up in their memories the way the exiled Scots did. So now the Canadian Maritime Celts have this
rich, amazing culture…
History is so often lost when it gets glossed over with euphe-
misms that sound like they should be in a travel brochure…
so thank you, Thomas, for getting the real truth out there. It
needs to be told, even though it hurts like hell.
Yours in admiration for your emotional bravery,
Kara
Whoops…guess I forgot to mention that I’m Canadian, and that
I’ve taken the Maritime Celts’ culture for granted pretty much all
of my life…until today. I’ve heard the name “Natalie McMaster”
a lot over the years, but I’ve never heard her music until today.
If I had known how her ancestors were treated, I would have
appreciated the way they brought their culture with them.
Canadian textbooks have a lot of information missing from them, too. I had never heard of ‘the Highland Clearances’.
What was I taught in school, instead of useful information and
real history? Useless crap like how to estimate the height of a tree
by measuring its shadow.
I’ve listened to this several times and cannot express how hauntingly beautiful it is. Thank you for sharing the link and the story behind the song.
It is amazing how pumped up with emotion you described how you were to gin up this gem. I actually half expected a celtic anthem thumbing its nose at the priveledged few. Nice touch
The Pogues did a remake of a Ron Kavana Track called Young Ned of the Hill on their Peace and Love album. I basically hit at Cromwell’s fervent desire to rid Ireland of its heritage…….. And people…..
There is a great segment on just this tortured event chronicled in “How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It”, by Arthur Herman.
Just read it last year, and it’s a terrific book. When Mr. Herman outlines the discoveries & inventions which defined the 20th Century, it’s amazing how many times a Scot is involved.
Also a great outline of Scottish history, including the above mentioned forced-immigration.
.
I would appreciate this message getting to Thomas Dolby.
My Father was a good chum of your uncle, Stephen Spring Rice during WW2 (I was named in memory of him) . I have his christening tankard, sent to my Father by Stephen’s Mother and would be happy to return it, if it is of interest. I am also trying to find the name of his submarine.
you are a great composer.. a genius
I like the song and your lyrics are like a poem..
Moreover I appreciate your effort to give people the chance to know the truth about history or at least the chance to reflect how important is to deepen our knowledge before building our opinion on important issues.
For totalreturn:
I believe the following. Thomas Morgan Robertson is the son of Theodosia Cecil Spring Rice and Charles Martin Robertson. Theodosia had 1 brother, Steven Edward Spring-Rice, T/LT, RVNR. Steven Edward Spring-Rice was presumed lost on HMS P48 at the age of 23. P48 was not believed to have been on exercises. It is believed that P48 was attacking an Italian convoy, and was depth-charged on 25th December, 1942. It was finally listed as “overdue” on 5th January, 1943, which is the date officially given as Steven Edward Spring-Rice’s passing. There appear to be no other “uncles” on either the mother or father’s side of the family that correspond with WWII submarine losses.
As an East Coast Canadian and a Newfoundlander of Scottish descent (currently contractually bound on the far side of the world in New Zealand), happening upon this piece was a particularly resonant joy to my day. Add my voice to the chorus of those who would love to hear this as part of a larger studio work!
cheers, and stay well,
Tim