Eerie, haunting, beautiful: Scottish Psalm Singing

[beloitpiper]

http://www.gaelicpsalmsinging.com/au...Kilmarnock.mp3

Scottish Gaelic Psalm singing, which eventually evolved into Black-American Gospel music. Yes, that's right, Gospel didn't come from Africa. It was taught to the slaves from Scottish settlers from the Hebrides. In fact, some slaves only knew Gaelic, connecting with the Scots because of their shared, outlawed culture.

This music is so gorgeous. It sends shivers down my spine. Here's the site to order a CD.

[BoldHighlander]

Wonderful! Thanks for posting!

[Gryphon noir]

Interesting! I listen to a lot of early music, liturgical music, and other obscure things, but I have never encountered the likes of this! I suppose this type of singing would have died out in most parts of North America when Scots Gaelic was forgotten. Eerie, and strangely beautiful.....

[Coemgen]

Sounds pretty good. But then, as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, I hear Psalms (well, hymns of all sorts - kathismata, akathists, troparia, apolytika, stichera, aposticha, kontakia, et cetera et cetera) chanted in foreign languages all the time, so it doesn't make as much of an impact on me.

[beowulf67]

Simply beautiful.

[James MacMillan]

That sent chills up my back.........thanks!


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[gilmore]

... It was taught to the slaves from Scottish settlers from the Hebrides. In fact, some slaves only knew Gaelic, connecting with the Scots because of their shared, outlawed culture.

....[/URL]

Well, no. The connection was that the slave owners spoke only or mostly Gaelic, at least in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia.

[Phil]

Well, no. The connection was that the slave owners spoke only or mostly Gaelic, at least in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia.

You might think so but it is more than likely that the Scots were slaves themselves. See this link from a thread I posted recently - http://www.dunbarmartyrs.com/

Scottish slave owners would have come from the moneyed classes, the likes of the Stirlings who still have large landed estates. Gaelic speakers would generally have been at the other end of the social scale. Robert Burns planned to go to the West Indies himself in search of his fortune at one point but that fell through when he put Highland Mary in the family way. Some think he might have had a bit of slave owning in mind - quite a thought for the man who wrote "The man's a man for a that".

[gilmore]

You might think so but it is more than likely that the Scots were slaves themselves. See this link from a thread I posted recently - http://www.dunbarmartyrs.com/

....

It's not that I think so, it's that I have read so in quite a few histories of the colonial American south.

While it may be more desireable and politically correct these days to think of Scots as slaves than as slave owners, this just wasn't usually the case here at all.

While some Scots were indeed transported here as convicts (and by far most who came here were not), they could eventually become liberated, buy land and own slaves themselves. Africans could not. However they came here, Gaelic-speaking Scots tended to be deeply religious and felt it their Christian duty to teach their ways to their Gaelic speaking African slaves, stripping them of their culture and their religion in order to civilize and convert them, saving them from the fires of Calvinist hell in the afterlife.

[beloitpiper]

It's not that I think so, it's that I have read so in quite a few histories of the colonial American south.

While it may be more desireable and politically correct these days to think of Scots as slaves than as slave owners, this just wasn't usually the case here at all.

While some Scots were indeed transported here as convicts (and by far most who came here were not), they could eventually become liberated, buy land and own slaves themselves. Africans could not. However they came here, Gaelic-speaking Scots tended to be deeply religious and felt it their Christian duty to teach their ways to their Gaelic speaking African slaves, stripping them of their culture and their religion in order to civilize and convert them, saving them from the fires of Calvinist hell in the afterlife.

Of course there were Scottish plantation owners, but the Scottish plantation owners would've spoken English. Only the poor (i.e. slaves or sharecroppers) would've spoken Gaelic as their primary language.