NEFA Field Recordings: The Banff and Buchan Collection

The Banff and Buchan Collection features songs, music and oral histories relating to farming and fishing recorded by folklorist Tom McKean while he was Traditional Music Resident in the Banff and Buchan district of North East Aberdeenshire. The collection holds around than a hundred hours of recorded material, with transcriptions and biographical notes; it is the foundation collection of the North East Folklore Archive, held in a carefully restored historic building at Aden Country Park in Mintlaw, Aberdeenshire.

Map of Banff and Buchan District This collection offers indexes, summaries and full transcriptions of interviews, along with images and audio samples of some of the contributors.
See About the Collection for more detail on origin, content and methodology.

Permissions: We have made every effort to contact contributors for permissions for their material to appear in the transcriptions section. Please contact us immediately if you have any questions or contacts we should know about, particularly for contributors no longer with us, or indeed if you have any suggested clarifications or corrections to add to the transcriptions. (Public performances are considered as such; should you have any concerns do not hesitate to contact us.)

The work for this site was funded by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Many thanks to Gavin Sutherland of NEFA and Hazel Weeks of Aberdeenshire Council for their help, and especially to Nicki Duncan, Brenda McKay, Lynda McGuigan and Alison Sharman for transcription work.

The material on this website is drawn from audio recordings of North East Scottish traditional culture; information is presented here in the following forms:

summaries of interviews;
transcriptions of selected items;
basic biographical information on selected contributors (see individual tape summaries, or
the Audio Samples Index featuring examples from selected contributors.

Tape summaries are presented on individual web pages, rather than as a database for ease of use and maintenance. Original recordings are available for public consultation at the North East Folklore Archive (click on building icon above). More information is available below:

Origin and Purpose
Scope and Content
Methodology
Permissions and Thanks
The Collector

Origin and Purpose

The Banff and Buchan Collection and the North East Folklore Archive itself are both results of the former Banff and Buchan District Council's first Traditional Music Residency. Arts Development Officer Iain Macaulay, together with Leisure and Recreation Director Gill Carling, put together an arts and heritage programme to preserve and promote the oral traditions of the Banff and Buchan district of the North East of Scotland. The Archive is intended as a community resource, allowing access to fragile cultural traditions using the latest, flexible technologies.

Banff and Buchan has long been known for its song and music traditions, performers from this area having carved out world-wide reputations as masters of their art. The area's traditions have appeared in print and manuscript form over more than two centuries. For example, one-third of the A texts (the best available examples) of the traditional songs in Francis James Child's authoritative compendium, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, come from Aberdeenshire.

While much of this material exists in archives around the world, Macaulay and Carling wanted to see a regionally-sited resource for easy local use, a kind of repatriation of tradition. The North East Folklore Archive was set up as a framework within which this valuable resource would be housed and made accessible, both physically and electronically. Under a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the audio material has been digitised and made available in this form. The full digitised recordings are housed at the North East Folklore Archive, Aden Country Park, Mintlaw, Aberdeenshire.

Scope and Content of the Collection

Subjects covered in the Banff and Buchan Collection include: song and music traditions, farming and fishing life and work, crafts, along with songmaking and performance traditions. This website presents summaries of each item, transcriptions of each tape and a sample of audio clips and photographs.

Methodology

The interviews with outstanding local tradition bearers, and ranging from teenagers to nonagenarians, were conducted over a period of about two years, spanning 1993-1995. Material was recorded on cassette using a Walkman D6, with Sony ECM-957 condenser microphone. A few interviews and performances were recorded direct to DAT as equipment became available. All recordings have now been digitised to CD and given track numbers for ease consultation. (No noise reduction has been applied; they have been recorded 'raw.')

Transcriptions are designed to reflect the individuals' spoken Scots language, the Doric. As a result, there may be many alternate spellings of the same word. In addition, the transcriptions were done by many people over a long period of time during which my thinking on idiolect representation has changed to some extent. Should you notice any obvious errors, or be able to supply any missing words, please e-mail me and we will alter the file.

Permissions and Acknowledgements

We have made every effort to contact contributors for permissions for their material to appear in the transcriptions section. Please contact us immediately if you have any questions or contacts we should know about, particularly for contributors no longer with us, or indeed if you have any suggested clarifications or corrections to add to the transcriptions. (Public performances are considered as such; should you have any concerns do not hesitate to contact us.)

The Collector