Thursday's instalment of Edinburgh Folk Club's Carrying Stream festival was directly concerned with the event's inspiration, the late Hamish Henderson, and managed to throw up yet another, perhaps unlikely-seeming link with the Scottish folk tradition's greatest champion: Pink Floyd.
Henderson served in Italy with Fletcher Waters, whose son, Roger, of the Floyd, is a fellow dedicatee of Henderson's in a poem that features in At Hame Wi' Freedom, the latest in a series of literary collections published in Henderson's honour.
The poet responsible, Pino Mereu's work, translated into rugged Scots here by Tom Hubbard, was one of many insights offered into Henderson on a night that visited many of his favourite places, songs and tunes, with the great Sutherland storyteller Essie Stewart offering the most graphic and detailed travelogue, including a classic act of deception in a dispute over land and a Gulliver-like cautionary tale, as she worked her soft-spoken charms.
If some of the singing veered towards the well-meaning and homely in nature, there were also outstanding contributions from the ageless Alison McMorland, whose singing of MacCrimmon's Lament, learned from Henderson's greatest discovery, Jeannie Robertson, was majestic, and Allan MacDonald, a late replacement for the indisposed Elizabeth Stewart.
MacDonald's soft, very personal Gaelic singing in tandem with his lyrical smallpipes playing is one of the quiet, under-rated joys of the Scottish traditional music scene.
HHH
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