Sounds of Scotland

Abstract

In 1840 a well-known English tenor, making his first appearance in America, is booed until he sings a Scottish song; in the late 1840s the abolitionists sing two Scottish tunes with appropriate new words at nearly every meeting; a great European singer concludes her American tour in the 1850s with an old Scottish song sung a cappella; and virtually a whole multiethnic nation adopts a song in broad Scots dialect as one of its few commonly held musical rituals. These are all evidence for the subject of this article: the significance of the sounds of Scotland in nineteenth-century America. The Scots came to the United States in smaller numbers than many other national groups -for example, there were many more immigrants from England, Ireland, and the Scandinavian countries. This was true in the eighteenth century, when emigration from Scotland to the Carolinas and New York was at its highest level; and it became even truer in the nineteenth century: although a greater number of Scots crossed the ocean, their destination was more often Canada than the United States. Yet when we look at musical evidence from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the broadsides, sheet music, songsters, and musical theater pieces-Scottish tunes, titles, texts, and subjects are present in numbers all out of proportion to the Scottish population. Although less pronounced in the later nineteenth century, this Scottish strand continues through the early years of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the activity of publishing