ABSTRACT
James Hogg inherited a world where scottish song and its airs were expanding rapidly into the public realm, not only confirming their status in Scottish civil society but making a major contribution to the new British public sphere. This chapter examines Hogg’s distinct place in the world of scottish song within the public sphere. The eighteenth century is a remarkable period in the development of scottish song and its performance. The eroticization of military song guaranteed its cultural replication only on the basis of its political defeat. Music to be played on the fiddle was represented as the product of the ‘minstrel’ or the ‘bard’, a word associated with Celtic resistance to Saxon domination. The collections of scottish song in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently reach for the oblique, the modern and the sentimental in recasting a tradition which had once been vigorous into Ossianic mode.
