Melbourne Scottish Fiddle Club -
'A Long Way From Home - Tune Book'
Book from Australia - VIC $A15.00 (plus packing & postage)
a long way from home: the CD - the companion CD of this songbook
Welcome to our companion tune book to our third CD A Long Way From Home, our CD that explores the deep Scottish roots of our Australian culture. Our project A Long Way From Home celebrates our direct links with Scottish traditional music here in Oz.
After ten years of great fun and friendship with the Melbourne Scottish Fiddle Club (MSFC), after two CDs and countless gigs, playing tunes chosen because we liked them, 1 thought it would be interesting to have the club explore the Australian Scottish connection in a bit more depth. At least 1 in 6 Australians claims to have a Scottish descendant, so once we started looking for connections, there were many more leads than we had time to follow.
What has been achieved, with the help of lots of creative people, is this CD project that we are very proud of. Just about all the tracks on the album include some link between Scotland and Australia either through their subject, author, title or the provenance of the tunes.
The CD features some of the finest artists of Scottish music in Australia including Scottish fiddle superstar, Chris Duncan 2000 ARIA winner for best folk recording; the champion Hawthorn City Pipe Band; award winning Scottish born songwriter and singer Alex Legg who cut his teeth in the Scottish folk clubs on the ballads & fishing songs of his native North-east Scotland; and Jenny Thomas whose playing encompasses many traditions.
We have delved into the songbooks of Georgiana McCrae, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Gordon, and Port Phillip pioneering contemporary (in the 1840s) of my own great-great-grandfather, to find the wonderful Burns song From the Friends and Land I Love.
Of all our researches, perhaps the most rewarding was into the life and work of John Anderson, the Shetland fiddle maker and emigrant, many of whose fiddles appear on the "Shetland Set".
John Anderson was from the Shetland Islands, between Scotland and Norway, a place where fiddle music and fiddlers are so much part of life they say if you throw a stone over a wall you'll hit a fiddle player. Although he moved to Australia in 1912 to follow a Shetland girl, worked all his life for the railways, and lived in Elstemwick, John's love of Shetland fiddle music and fiddles was always with them.
He made his first Australian violin in 1917 and the last in 1960. John Anderson died in Melbourne in 1973 at the age of 91.
Many of John's fiddles appear on this CD, and the club feels privileged to have helped awaken them from their long sleep, and cast some light on the life and times of an adventurous Scottish Australian.
We hope you will enjoy this new approach, especially the many descendants of Scots in Australia, and to all those who have a love of things Scottish — and who doesn't?
Judy Turner, Director Melbourne Scottish Fiddle Club
A small sample:
