Sunday Herald - 28 March 2004
After Elvis … the Scottish roots of soul and gospel
By Torcuil Crichton
LIKE every epiphany the truth came down to Willie Ruff when he was looking the other way. The 72-year-old jazzman turned up at a church in his native Alabama hoping for one of their fine catfish dinners after the sermon when he came across the first clue that black gospel music has its roots in the Gaelic psalms of presbyterian Scotland.
He is now convinced the Gaelic style of precenting psalms – in which a lead singer recites a line for the congregation to repeat – was taken to the US by Scots emigrees and adapted into the call and response techniques used by gospel and soul singers such as Aretha Franklin and Al Green.
“The singing I heard in that church is what my people took from the Gaelic cultural traditions they collided with at the time of slavery,’’ said Ruff. ‘‘It has flavoured everything else that came out of the artistic soul of American blacks. This is the real roots stuff here.â€
His discovery is yet more evidence of the cultural debt America owes Scotland, coming just days after claims that Elvis Presley’s family roots can be traced to Peterhead.
Ruff certainly has the musical pedigree to suggest he knows what he’s talking about. He has been a jazz player for 50 years, performing with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Miles Davies. He is also a professor of music at Yale University.
He made his discovery by accident. “Word had spread around our neighbourhood that the best catfish dinner was sold every third Sunday at this black Congregational church in my native Alabama so I went along to pick up some dinner. I was early so I listened to the sermon while the dinner was being cooked,†said Ruff.
“All of a sudden there sprang up this lined-out hymn singing I’d grown up with as a Baptist. I asked: “How is it these black Presbyterians have stolen our baptist hymns?â€. They said: “Are you crazy? Everybody from the time of slavery had this style of singing.â€
After some research Ruff discovered that the form of psalm singing did not survive among US Presbyterians or in England. “People said if I wanted to hear white Presby terians sing this way I‘d have to go to Scotland and the Presbyterians in the Free Church. It was rumoured they sang this way in their native Gaelic.â€
After a chance meeting with a Hebridean piper, Ruff headed to Lewis, where he felt his music had come home. ‘‘This is the root of black musical expression in the US,†he said.
“All during the time that I played with Dizzy Gillespie he insisted we go to Scotland,†said Ruff. “Gillespie, with his profoundly Scottish name, said his great-grandparents talked about people in the Cape Fear region who spoke only Gaelic. Here was a place where black West Africans with their own language arrived in America and the first language they encountered was Gaelic.â€
Black Americans, he says, are delighted with his thesis even though it could have implications for the Afro-American view of American culture.
“This was not written into American history. We have connections wider than this little world but sometimes we have no idea about the people whose names and blood we share,†said Ruff.
“What is fabulously exciting is that black people who hear this story are called Cameron, Fraser, MacLean, Mitchell, and Armstrong. The same names as the passenger lists in the Carolina state archives of the Highlanders who came from the Hebrides into our world.’’
Since seeing the light in the southern states of America Ruff has crossed the Atlantic to the Hebrides twice in his quest to make connections between Presbyterian Gaels and black America’s musical inheritance.
He was invited to the recording of a 12-track CD of Gaelic psalm singing by a group of Congregationalists from the island of Lewis.
As the form of worship becomes rarer, interest in Gaelic psalm singing is growing quickly. A representative congregation of Lewis singers has just returned from Paris where their singing was the sensation of the annual Festival de’ Imaginaire at the Maison des Cultures du Monde – the Institute of World Cultures.
Ruff was impressed by what he heard. “I witnessed a two-day marathon recording of psalm singing,†he said. “I was there but I was also back in Alabama. The only difference was the Gaelic language.’’
Ruff will be at the Celtic Film Festival in Dundee on Thursday to talk about the links between the Gaelic psalms and black southern gospel.
http://www.elvicities.com/~presleyinthepres/2001_2004/2004/200403e.html
