Hamish Henderson: A Biography. Volume 1 - The Making Of The Poet (1919-1953)

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As other members have said, Hamish Henderson grew up in Perthshire in poverty. In growing up in that part of our country, he inherited the rich oral tradition of which he made great use later on. Linda Fabiani and Cathy Peattie both referred to the importance that Hamish Henderson placed on recording forgotten people. The recordings of the Gypsy Travellers are a source of an oral and cultural tradition that would have been otherwise much neglected. As Robin Harper reminded us, Hamish Henderson did not preserve songs for posterity alone. He also developed folk societies to sing and keep those songs alive. He recorded and, in some cases, wrote songs that were taken up by the most prominent folk singers of his time. Mike Russell reminded us that he was also a notable poet and songwriter in his own right. The poem "Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica"—that was difficult to pronounce—was highly regarded and the song "The Freedom Come All Ye" has attained iconic status. Motions, Questions and Answers Search - Parliamentary Business: Scottish Parliament". Scottish.parliament.uk . Retrieved 26 July 2014.

a b Smith, Donald (14 November 2021). "How war and family shaped the poetry of Hamish Henderson". The National . Retrieved 14 November 2021. A full version of this essay can be found in "Ghosts Of The Early Morning Shift" in An Anthology or Radical Prose from Contemporary Scotland, ed. Jim Aitken (Culture Matters, 2021) Discussions around national identity and constitutional resettlement in Scotland, especially those surrounding the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014, have often invoked Henderson's legacy. Politicians and cultural commentators alike describe their admiration for his song 'Freedom Come-All-Ye' and lend their voices to those touting it as an alternative national anthem. As a radical democrat whose political beliefs were closely bound up in the study of folk culture and high literature, Henderson's work expresses a tension between romantic nationalism and socialist internationalism which has been reaffirmed in public life in Scotland since his death. [13] Henderson railed against the negative influence and controlling reductionism of Calvinism on Scottish society, decrying it a ‘dreadful life-destroying creed’. Calvinism, he believed, with its distrust of human capacity, capability, freedom and fulfillment, had undermined Scotland’s wholeness, culture, creativity and confidence. He felt too that both the elite and the servile middle classes had aligned themselves not with ‘the people’ but with the power, values and privileges of ‘Britishness’, of state and Empire. Henderson emerged as one of the few intellectuals in Scotland able and willing to take on Hugh MacDiarmid: their public confrontations, particularly about the literary value of the folk tradition, were seminal and, in retrospect, these two very different poets can be seen to stand as the twin piers of ‘revolutionary thought’ in modern Scotland, archetypal representatives of Apollonian and Dionysian energy. They were Robespierre and Danton: MacDiarmid the small, ascetic, atheistic Presbyterian, Henderson the Falstaffian, Episcopal libertarian. In those early days, Hamish Henderson's contribution to live Scottish folk music, which he tied into the political tradition of commentary on the human condition, was an inspiration to all writers. I think in particular of Matt McGinn and the lovely songs that he wrote about Glasgow. That tradition has continued to this day and I hope that it will continue into the future with writers of Scottish folk song.Gibson, Corey (2015). The voice of the people: Hamish Henderson and Scottish cultural politics. Edinburgh. ISBN 978-0-7486-9996-4. OCLC 919188115. Henderson believed that what applies to freedom also applies to poetry; the idea being that people are resourced, liberated and sustained by poetry. ‘Poetry’ here, however, goes beyond the literary form of self-expression; it speaks to a deeper understanding of creativity as ‘poeisis,’ the poetic act of constantly ‘making the world new’. For Henderson, it is a timeless and universal truth that both freedom and creative expression must be continually sought out and reaffirmed. Henderson’s metaphor of the ‘carrying stream’ of tradition is understood as a constant source available to and necessary for artists of all kinds to ‘remake and renew’, where each new generation has the potential to create new meaning in dialogue with what has come before. Hamish Henderson joined the breakaway Scottish Labour Party under Jim Sillars, which was when I first came across him, as I had the privilege of joining that party too. Like me, he was a member of the Scottish committee of 100, whose members refused to pay the poll tax. He was very much a man of the left. Nowadays, that would be called the hard left, because these things have become very untrendy in modern times.

Henderson was instrumental in bringing about the Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh in 1951, which placed traditionally performed Scottish folk music on the public stage for the first time as "A Night of Scottish Song". However, the People's Festival, of which it was part, was planned as a left-wing competitor to the Edinburgh Festival and was deeply controversial. At the event, Henderson performed The John Maclean March, to the tune of Scotland the Brave, which honoured the life and work John Maclean, a communist and Scottish nationalist hero.Like all cultural nationalists—in the best sense of the term—Hamish Henderson was also an internationalist. The two stances are indivisible. They both arise from a curiosity about and identification with the question of our humanity and our relationships with one another.

Born on the first Armistice Day 11 November 1919, to a single mother, Janet Henderson, a Queen's Nurse who had served in France, and was then working in the war hospital at Blair Castle. [1] A live culture is rooted but always in motion, open-ended, always unfinished, always in the process of becoming. In 2005, Rounder Records released a recording of the 1951 Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh as part of The Alan Lomax Collection. Henderson had collaborated with the preparations for the release.Though he was born in Blairgowrie, Perthshire, [3] Henderson spent his early years in nearby Glen Shee and eventually moved to England with his mother. He won a scholarship to Dulwich School in London; however, his mother died shortly before he was due to take up his place and he had to live in an orphanage while studying there. [ dubious – discuss] I greet you with humility. You are that rare man: a poet, and you must not forget that your songs and ballads are not trivialities; they are quite as important as your elegies." Raymond Ross, editor (2000) Collected Poems and Songs, Curly Snake Pub., Edinburgh, Scotland ISBN 978-1-90214-101-5 [15] I suspect that Hamish is still being talked about in Breton fishing villages. The reality is that he is still being talked about in Scotland, which is the important thing. He was a fixture in Edinburgh when I was a student of Scottish history and literature in the early 1970s. He had a reputation not just for extraordinary scholarship, but for his strong and constant advocacy, to which John McAllion referred, for those who could not speak for themselves or who could not be heard in the clamour of the capitalist 20 th century. Through both language and form, this strives for anonymity – to sink through the subconscious as part of a folk tradition, expressing an elemental conflict. At the same time the strength of the Scots diction, the cunning balance between formality and colloquial speech, and the cumulative structural design add up to a considerable poetic achievement, not unlike the ballad poetry of Goethe.

After the war, Henderson drew on his own wartime experiences, writing ‘Ballads of World War II’ and ‘Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica’, which won him the Somerset Award in 1949. He used the award to travel to Italy and translate the works of the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose works he had been introduced to by partisans in Italy during the war. After returning to Scotland be became assistant to the American folk song collector Alan Lomax, and spent a year travelling the North East for traditional songs, occasionally being offered his own compositions.The Freedom Come-All-Ye by Hamish Henderson". Scottish Poetry Library (in Inglis) . Retrieved 23 Januar 2022. From 1955 to 1987 he was on the staff of the University of Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies which he co-founded with Calum Maclean: there he contributed to the sound archives that are now available on-line. Henderson held several honorary degrees and after his retirement became an honorary fellow of the School of Scottish Studies. For many years he held court in Sandy Bell's Bar, the meeting place for local and visiting folk musicians. In April 1979, he was ' the prevailing spirit' at the first Edinburgh International Folk Festival conference ' The People's Past' both on ballads and in challenging traditional history telling. He also spoke at a Riddle's Court meeting which had hosted in the past, the Workers' Educational Association when he said that Calvinism was repressive in the Scottish psyche and that 'we had to divest ourselves of layers or preconception and misconception before we could come to grips with Scotland and its people.' [7] While at Downing, Hamish was actively involved in College life, rowing at 5 in the 4th Boat in his first term and rising to 3 in the 3rd Boat in the Lent Bumps, although he only appears to have rowed in his first year. This photograph, originally from the family collection, shows Henderson, seated far left, with other members of his crew.