I’ve been thinking about Elvis, ever since I passed a house in Oban late at night last week during the Mod and heard the sound of Blue Suede Shoes drifting through the open window. Why, after all, should I have expected Calum Kennedy?

But let’s not diminish the great Calum’s stature, for when the wifie in Harris heard the news that “Kennedy has been shot in Dallas” she immediately responded “Calum bochd” (“poor Calum”).

I was too young to be directly affected by the first Atlantic drift: Bill Haley and His Comets and Chuck Berry. We had no electricity then, and whoever had a wireless (the old type, not wi-fi) needed to preserve the batteries for more important things such as the shipping forecast. Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey carried more weight than John, George, Paul and Ringo.

Electricity changed everything. Until then, the message always arrived with the messenger, as Marshall McLuhan put it. Suddenly, the message itself was here. So the older ones listened to Slim Whitman and Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline, while I admired my slightly senior peers who brylcreemed their hair, practised their lip curls, and moved their knees and hips like Elvis. Not that it did them much good in St Peter’s Hall on a Friday night: they should really have been listening to the great Everly Brothers, which would have earned much greater success with the lassies.

Some say there were no teenagers until post-war music created a space between childhood and adulthood. Though I’m not entirely convinced: surely music-hall and jive and jazz and all the rest had already made spaces for rebellion, right back to the drum-beats of ancient time. Within Gaelic culture, the folk songs of the people counteracted the panegyric verses of the official bards paid under the chiefs’ patronage.

Music, of course, is only a signifier of culture. What matters are the power bases that lie beneath. As monoglot Gaelic speakers growing up in a pre-electric universe, Elvis and everything he represented came like a thrilling bolt of lightning: we were all shook up. For the truth is that Gaelic kids have as much right to enjoy rock-and-roll and jazz and punk and metal or whatever, as anyone else. Wonderful as it is, we have not been genetically programmed to just learn all 633 lines of "Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain": Bo Diddley and Beethoven get our appreciation too.

The trick is to try and stay afloat in the tsunami of noise that comes at us from everywhere. How does a minority language and culture stay alive, vibrant and relevant, in the torrent? How do we make sure that the tinkling sound of the triangle is heard in the great orchestra? We give it space. The smallest note, the tiniest sound, makes the difference between average and great music. "That tiny brush-stroke just there made all the difference", as Picasso once said.

So we endeavour to encourage and promote our own indigenous music. That effort has to have a linguistic basis, for language too is music: every tongue has its own unique rhythmic qualities. We have, for example, the great "choral" communal elements connected with "Òrain Luaidh" (Waulking Songs); the grace-note traditions linked to piping and psalm-singing; and of course the long-standing bardic narratives. They need to be continually deconstructed and recalibrated for the 21st century.

Tradition must never bind innovation: we must not, as in old China, deform people by forcing them into shoes far too small for their feet.

I missed Elvis first time round. My day came a bit later, with the hippies and the "ceò" (haze) of the late 1960s. I even have to confess that I had loon pants: purple and lilac ones, if memory serves me well, which I bought in an incense-filled Eastern shop in Cockburn Street in Edinburgh. I have sinned worse.

Perhaps my serene Gaelic background saved me from heavy rock, although it’s true that some of the most fanatical metal heads today reside in Calum’s lovely Stornoway. Though I did once attend a cannabis-filled Deep Purple concert in the old Apollo in Glasgow. My head throbbed badly for days: and that was just from the music. I far preferred the singer-songwriters with their lyrical deftness and craft: let’s just honour the great Joni Mitchell.

Elvis Presley only ever set foot in Scotland once, when he alighted at Prestwick Airport in March 1960. There are many – mostly women – of around my age who still remember that great moment. But he had already landed everywhere smiling his beautiful smile, shaking his hips and giving us that jailhouse rock sneer. He never really left.