An excellent reclamation of far-scattered folk songs.
On his second album, Edinburgh’s Sam Shackleton continues to display his love of and mastery of American folk music while infusing it with an unmistakable Scottish presence. His debut album “Causeway Recordings” found inspiration in the likes of Woody Guthrie and Scottish musicians such as Alex Campbell and Shackleton maintains this fusion on “Scottish Cowboy Ballads and Early American Folk Songs”, a collection of 16 songs which, in part, hones in on the cowboy tradition, partly sparked by Shackleton’s early years spent watching cowboy movies. He admits, “It’s pretty hard to find anything cooler than Dean Martin singing ‘My Rifle, My Pony and Me’ in “Rio Bravo”. However, that’s just a throwaway line in an interview, and it disguises the scholarship and in-depth knowledge which Shackleton brings to these songs.
Shackleton’s introduction to music was via his parents, and he and his father would busk and sing folk songs when he was a teenager. He went on to gain a Masters in Scottish Studies, with a special interest in Scots-American emigration and musical traditions and ethnomusicology, and it’s this which fuels the album. He states that many of the songs that were sung during the folk revival in North America had a very close and deep connection to the mass emigration of people from Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales during the 18th and 19th centuries and beyond. This is evident in songs such as ‘Pretty Saro’, of which he says, “this was a song sung commonly in England but was lost to time, only to be rediscovered being sung in the mountains of Appalachia by early song collectors.”
While Shackleton delivers grand versions of ‘Get Along Little Dogies’, ‘The Jolly Cowboy’, ‘Lone Star Trail’, ‘Roving Cowboys’, and ‘Chisholm Trail’, it’s when he adds a particular Scottish touch to his version of ‘I Ride An Auld Paint‘ where he truly excels. Aside from cowboys, many of the songs are plucked from the diaspora of folk songs which crossed the Atlantic, and Shackleton sings and plays all of them in a hearty manner with his guitar, banjo and harmonica and couthy Scottish voice (all home-recorded), quite excellent. There’s a plucky and strident delivery of ‘O’ Death’, and his version of ‘Old Rosin The Bow’ recalls the glory days of The Clancy Brothers and The Dubliners. Throughout the album, there’s a sense of sitting in a dank and smoky Edinburgh cellar in the 60s, listening to roving American musicians sitting side by side with the likes of Hamish Imlach.
