ABSTRACT
Something has already been said about the efforts that were made to collect from oral tradition the native music of Scotland and Ireland, before it had been thought of for England, and incidental comment on the character of this Celtic folk-song has fallen from time to time by the way. But a good deal more needs to be said if anything like an adequate picture of what has been found in the British Isles is to be offered to an ethno-musicologist from Europe or America. In view of the previous history, which goes back well into the eighteenth century for the Celtic countries – the Isle of Man had almost nothing to show till the end of the nineteenth – it has been more urgent to concentrate on English folk music, but it is still necessary by way of context, as well as coherence and completeness, to attempt some account of the music of the Celtic fringe as also for non-Celtic Scotland, though more summarily since a scholarly account is now available in Mr Francis Collinson’s The Traditional and National Music of Scotland (1966). Traditional and national note, not folk, though the book certainly deals with Scottish folk-song, but compared with England, where regionalism exercises only a small influence, Scotland presents a tangled skein of traditions.
