"At Hame Wi' Freedom" marks the tenth anniversary of Hamish
Henderson's death in 2002. It is the third book of a loose trilogy:
"Borne on the Carrying Stream" (Grace Note Publications, 2010),
followed by '"Tis Sixty Years Since" (Grace Note Publications,
2011) - all revolving around the life and legacy of Hamish
Henderson and the Scottish Folk Revival he did so much to inspire
and sustain.
At Hame wi' Freedom focuses on Hamish Henderson's involvement in
the revival, his association with Perthshire and the North-East,
the emergence of his poetic voice, and his political activism.
It also features Pino Mereu's poetic evocation of the Anzio
(Beachhead) Pipe Band and the 2011 Hamish Henderson Memorial
Lecture by Owen Dudley Edwards. Further contributions are from
Eberhard Bort, Maurice Fleming, Fred Freeman, George Gunn, Tom
Hubbard, Alison McMorland, Ewan McVicar, Hayden Murphy and Belle
Stewart.
Praise for At Hame Wi' Freedom
HAMISH Henderson, poet, folklorist and genial patriarch of the
Scottish folk revival, and Pink Floyd, iconoclasts of English
psychedelia, might seem to offer little in common.
Yet in "At Hame Wi' Freedom," the third of a trilogy of essay
collections celebrating Henderson's work, Pino Mereu's poem
sequence Anzio Pipe Band is dedicated not only to Henderson's
memory, but to that of Eric Waters, father of Pink Floyd founder
member Roger Waters. Waters Snr, like Mereu's father, died during
the Battle of Anzio in 1944.
At Anzio, Henderson formed a morale-boosting pipe band which
entered Rome with the triumphant Allied forces. Mereu's poem in
Italian, influenced by Henderson's Elegies For "The Dead In
Cyrenaica" as well as by Pink Floyd's Final Cut, is accompanied by
a Scots translation from Tom Hubbard.
Such unlikely connections come as no surprise in a book, edited
by Eberhard Bort, containing some wonderfully circuitous
discourses. None more so than Owen Dudley Edwards's lecture,
ostensibly titled "Sectarian Songs," which before getting to grips
with "The Ould Orange Flute," recounts how Henderson persuaded the
future PM Gordon Brown of the importance of Antonio Gramsci, the
Italian revolutionary writer.
Ten years on from Henderson's death, these essays reflect the
sometimes bewildering variousness of the man, remembered with
affection by poet Hayden Murphy, while accordionist Jim Bainbridge
recalls a never-to-be forgotten visit to an early Blairgowrie
festival. Alison McMorland's essay on the Fetterangus Stewarts taps
into Henderson's championing of the Travellers as
tradition-bearers, while George Gunn and Fred Freeman deal with his
fluidity of language and the place of poets in general.
Maurice Fleming, born in the same road in Blairgowrie as
Henderson, gives an insightful picture of the Perthshire which
shaped the man and where, on the slopes of Ben Gulabin, overlooking
his Glenshee birthplace, his ashes were scattered. Jim Gilchrist,
"The Scotsman" >
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