ABSTRACT
Then he would go, he probably would get drunk, on the sixpence, or as drunk as he could, then he would go to the farm where he’d been hired. It might be a hundred miles away. And he’d land there. And he’d live in a bothy. A bothy was a kind of a ranch house, apart from the main building, yes. And it might be situated above the byre, that is, the cows would be downstairs and the upstairs part would be where the bothymen lived, the ploughmen lived. And, in the winter, of course, there wasn’t a great deal, there’d be long periods when they didn’t have much to do, it was in the summer period that they’d be busy. And in the spring there’d be sowing and furrowing and harrowing and all the rest of it. And then, right up until the harvest, but after the harvest there would be a slack period. And this was when they would make songs, and they would sing songs. And they’d accompany
them. There were always chests, long boxes filled with corn, that went right along the walls, that were used for seats: you could open the top of them, they would be filled with corn which they would then feed to their horses, you know, they filled the horses’ bags with them. And they sat and they banged their heels against them, so the songs became known as ‘cornkisters’, as well as ‘bothy songs’. The most common name for them is cornkister, because a ‘kist’ is the Scots word for ‘chest’. So, ‘the songs that were made on the corn chest’. And there were hundreds of these songs, brilliant songs, many of them, absolutely superb songs, many of them protesting against the farmer; the farmer is always the villain in these songs.
