‘Some Scraps of Donside Verse’: Charles Murray and the Greig-Duncan Folksong Collection

Abstract

On July 19, 1916, Charles Murray wrote to the Reverend James Bruce Duncan from the Public Works Department, Union Buildings, Pretoria. His four page letter, accompanied by eight pages of songs and verses, was forwarded by Peter Murray the poet's father a month or so later (with a note that the enclosed lyrics and rhymes were accurate to the best of his, Peter Murray's, recollection). This Charles Murray's contribution to the Greig-Duncan folksong collection is preserved among the GreigDuncan papers in the Department of Special Collections and Archives in the library of the University of Aberdeen (AU MS 790 1/3/2-11). Murray's letter gives a context for the songs, song-fragments and scraps of verse which were enclosed the whole written in Murray's small, tidy hand on foolscap pages from a 1902 desk diary. The letter itself is punctuated with examples of other vernacular material anecdotes, jokes, catches, comic epitaphs, nursery verses, together with recollections of people and places belonging to his early years on Donside thirty years before. Taken as a whole, Murray's material is a reminder of how hospitable popular tradition is, how readily it absorbs all kinds of material, creating an eclectic, constantly evolving, 'impure' corpus of a kind which is quite different from the still-influential notion of the folk tradition as something homogeneous, home-grown and intrinsically conservative. Murray describes his main material as 'some scraps of Donside verse', originally written out many years before to send to Duncan's collaborator, Gavin Greig, but never despatched. The stimulus to carrying out the long delayed intention was a letter from Duncan, accompanying Greig's 'Folk Song book', together with a 'kindly notice' of the latter; these Murray was 'interested to see and liked very much.' The 'Folk Song book' was Greig's recently published Folk Song of the North-East (Peterhead, 1914), in which his contributions on that subject to the Buchan Observer between 1907 and 1911 were brought together. Greig had died in the year Folk Song of the North-East appeared, and Duncan was not to live for much longer, dying in September 1917 before he could complete his editorial work on the great collection which he and Greig had assembled. As his letter shows, Murray was very much aware of how he had been shaped as a man and as a poet by the culture of the rural North-East, and his interest in the work of Greig and Duncan was long-established and enthusiastic, although to his regret he never met the former. In a letter of December 16, 1914 (in AU MS U 614) to Alexander Mackie, first editor of the Aberdeen University Review, Murray mentions hearing from Greig's wife that 'her husband left me a copy of his collection of folk songs which he had printed in the local papers from time to time', adding 'I am sorry he is gone, I looked forward to meeting him one day'. With Duncan he was more fortunate, recollecting in his 1916 letter that 'On one holiday is it 4 or 10 years ago I heard you lecture on Folk Songs in the Alford hall'. Duncan's lecture made one direct, though small, contribution to Murray's work: it was, Murray says 'through