BORNE ON THE CARRYING STREAM: THE LEGACY OF HAMISH HENDERSON: EDITED BY EBERHARD BORT
Jim Gilchrist, The Scotsman
Grace Note Publications, 319pp, £12.99 RATHER like the motley appropriation of Robert Burns at this time of year, different people have different handles on Hamish Henderson, as poet, Second World War intelligence officer, folklorist, political internationalist, father of the Scottish folk revival or genial lord of misrule in the extracurricular studies forum of Sandy Bell's Bar.
Moreover, as editor Eberhard Bort states in his introduction to this judicious collection of 18 essays, there has been a certain divide between those who knew Henderson personally and have their own reminiscences with which to complement the written and recorded legacy of his wayward spirit, and the many who don't and have perhaps felt excluded from the "Hamish phenomenon".
This is an effort to redress the balance, a compendious "Henderson primer", if you like, with diverse strands of the big man's work taken up by singers and song-collectors, poets and academics. Several of these essays are in fact Hamish Henderson Lectures from Edinburgh Folk Club's Carrying Stream Festival held annually in memory of Henderson since he died in 2002.
Some argue that Henderson's greatest poetry, such as the intensely humane war poetry of his "Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica" are too often overlooked in anthologies of Scottish poetry. But Henderson himself was never in any hurry to have his muse committed to print, as Joy Hendry points out: "For Hamish, in the 1970s and early 1980s, his commitment to the oral tradition was so firm that he would not allow his poetry to be published. His faith that his work would survive was implacable and total."
Others, such as academic, author and poet Tom Hubbard, emphasise the fact that while others might perceive a (very Scottish) dichotomy between the "high art" of Henderson's poetry and his stravaiging through the realms of folk song, the man himself acknowledged no such "cultural apartheid".
"The collector-folklorist should never, in the heat of the chase, forget his humanist role," wrote Henderson, quoted by folklorist and singer Margaret Bennett, who points out that, just as what we call folklore "sits at the crossroads of the arts, humanities and social sciences", Henderson was the quintessential folklorist, who didn't just collect the lore of the folk, but threw himself into social issues.
Henderson's poetry and politics, and his view that the folk revival was an example of "Gramsci in action", referring to the persecuted Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, whose writings he translated, are extensively explored by his biographer, Timothy Neat, Tessa Ransford, Mario Relich and Corey Gibson.
Singer and folklorist Steve Byrne brings things bang up to date, looking at how the recently launched Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches online archive of folk song and story is not only an ultimate extension of the work of Henderson and his song- collecting peers, but also offers a truer picture of a vast resource which, far from being a "holy grail" of oral tradition, can throw up Harry Lauder or even Jimmy Rodgers numbers, learned from radio or gramophone, as well as pearls of Scots balladry. Such items, Byrne suggests, merely reflect "the proud mongrel hybrid Scotland" in which Henderson himself revelled, in the spirit of "a true Weltenbürger - literally 'a citizen of many worlds' ".
