Music and ‘Sunset Song’
I’ve had a first edition of ‘Sunset Song’ sent to me. It won’t make my fortune as it’s not the first edition of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 masterpiece, but of the school edition published by Longman as part of the Heritage in Literature series in 1971. It was edited by John T Low (1913-1982) who was my tutor at Moray House between 1970 and 1971. His enthusiasm and the BBC’s six part serialisation which began in April 1971 meant that my classmates and I learned a great deal about a novel which most of us hadn’t encountered during our English degrees at Edinburgh University.
The current showing of a remastered version of the BBC’s ‘Sunset Song’, shortly to be followed by ‘Cloud Howe’ and ‘Grey Granite’, brings back memories of my first reading of a work to which I’ve regularly returned and which remained part of my working life as a teacher. The BBC, promoting the series, is keen to state that their popularity was responsible for the revival of interest in the author. Vivien Heilbron, who played Chris Guthrie, remembers meeting a school party on a train when one of the teachers thanked her for making it possible for her to teach the novel. Certainly the TV version dealt straightforwardly with a number of subjects still taboo in many Scottish classrooms – incest, domestic violence, anti-religious sentiments and pacificism, as well as the sympathetic portrayal of Ewan’s desertion.
My first copy of the text was the three volume hardback I was given for my 22nd birthday in 1971, an edition which soon had a new dust-jacket with Vivien Heilbron on the cover. This suggests that there were no cheap versions of the novel, and that John Low’s blue-bound cloth edition was just as important in the novel’s increased use in schools as the TV series. (Within the decade Canongate had published a paperback of ‘A Scots Quair’ in a single volume, as well as a scholarly edition of ‘Sunset Song’, and Pan brought out lurid -covered paperbacks of the individual novels, so the general public had a choice of texts.) In my first teaching post, Burns’ ‘Tam O’ Shanter’ and ‘To a Mouse’ and Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’ were taught for O Grade as well as– to my horror - Buchan’s ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’. But the 1970s saw a expansion in the range of Scottish texts available in schools. John Low’s friend, Charles King, the Head of English at Firrhill High, where I did teaching practice, edited ‘Twelve Modern Scottish Poets’ also in 1971, inspiring many a lesson on Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig, Robert Garioch and George Mackay Brown.
Bill Craig’s adaptation of ‘Sunset Song’ is remarkably faithful to the book. He had six episodes to fill so the superficiality of the 2016 film and some of the stage versions was avoided, and you’d probably have to re-read the text to spot the omissions (Chris’s friendship with Chae Strachan’s daughter Marget the most obvious example). The first colour broadcast made by BBC Scotland, (like most people I watched it in black and white then) it’s beautifully filmed, with pains being taken with authentic indoor lighting as well as the furniture and other props. Bird-song and the whirr of farm machinery contribute to the outdoor soundscape. The accents, perhaps surprisingly, are varied, a number of the cast retaining their central belt accents. But Chae Strachan and Long Rob have the best throw-away lines, and Victor Carin and Derek Anders relish every word of the Doric-tinged script. It was directed, unusually for the period, by a woman, Moira Armstrong, whose interview with Vivien Heilbron can found on the i-player.
As ever, watching the series and re-reading the novels, I wonder why no-one has written an opera based on any of them. Like ‘Peter Grimes’, though with more jokes, they’re about intense personal relationships and conflicts, set in a believable community who can speak both comically and frighteningly with one voice. Musically, Grassic Gibbon refers to the religious music of the Kirk (satirised by the rebelling weavers in ‘Cloud Howe’) wartime music hall songs, and most of all, folksongs including those which Robert Burns spent much of his short life collecting. (The critic David Murison has suggested that Long Rob is intended to personify Robert Burns.) The title music by Scottish composer Thomas Wilson (1927-2001) and the incidental music by Herbert Chappell (1934-2019) evoke folk music idioms in their orchestration for string and woodwind ensemble but don’t directly quote from the music mentioned in the novel.
Rob Duncan sings as he ploughs, ‘Ladies of Spain’, ‘There was a young maiden’ and ‘The Lass that made the bed to me’. The first two are sea-shanties – though I’ve not been able to find the tune of the second. A version of the ubiquitous folk theme, of which ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’ is a well-known example, Burns’ ‘The Lass that Made the bed to me’ with its fine words, and ambiguous ending can easily be found online, along with a reading by Tom Fleming. However the tune, which must have been seductive as well as catchy, has eluded my searches. Rob sings it at Chris’s wedding, and although the Kinraddie wifies don’t feel it’s quite the thing, Chris enjoys the song.
I kissed her ower and ower again
And aye she wist na what to say
I laid her between me and the wa’
The lassie thought na long till day.
Its tale of the consequences of a casual bedding foreshadows Chris and Rob’s affair towards the end of the novel.
Chris and Ewan’s Hogmanay wedding in December 1913 is significant symbolically, marking the last days of an established, if sometimes fragile, way of life. The makeshift barn scene is splendidly realised on TV, with the dancing, beginning with ‘Strip the Willow’ – still very much what the large cast of extras would have learned at schools and weddings in the 50s and 60s - beautifully accompanied by fiddle and melodeon. A selection of folk songs is sung in which John Low notes “ realism jostles with pathos” but Chris’s song is the one which resonates through the whole novel: ‘The Flowers of the Forest.’ She sings it in response to another sad song ‘Auld Robin Grey’, Mistress Mutch’s party piece. ‘ Auld Robin Gray’ was written by Lady Anne Lindsay in 1772 and ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ by Jean Elliot around 1755 – the choice of two women authors in this key scene is surely a deliberate one by Gibbon.
I’ve heard them lilting at our ewe-milking
Lassie a’ lilting before dawn o’ day
Now they are moaning on ilka green loaning
The flowers of the forest are a’ wede away.
The song is first mentioned early in the novel when Chris wrote an essay about it at school. ”Always she wanted to cry for the sadness of it, the lasses that never married but sat and stared down to the English border where their lads lay happed in blood and earth.” Later in the novel when Chae visits Ewan, the night before he’s shot as a deserter, they talk about the wedding. “Mind that? And the singing there was, Chae. What was it that Chris sang then?” And neither could remember it.” Finally during the unveiling of the Standing Stones War Memorial, the pipe tune (reproduced with all its grace-notes in the text) is played by Ewan Tavendale’s best man, the Highlander McIvor. The song acts as a leitmotif not just for Chris, but also for Scotland, seen as a whole country – Chris is clear that The ‘Flowers of the Forest’ is a song about ‘southern’ (Borders) women, and the pipe tune, predating the lyrics, also links the highlands, Ewan’s birthplace to his adopted home in the Mearns. In the introduction to their 1993 recording of the song, Mairi Cambell and Dave Francis note:
‘[Jean Elliot’s] lyric grieves for the 12,000 Scots who died in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden, a battle prompted more by obligations to continental alliances than traditional enmity with England. For a small country like Scotland the cultural and economic consequences of such a loss were incalculable. The emotions described in the song are universal, and resonate throughout our own century.’
The songs, with all their echoes of the past and the present are there to be adapted and sampled, but I’m not sure if ‘Sunset Song’ is a suitable basis for an opera -the rush of events in the last few pages would be hard to cope with. Is the less familiar ‘Cloud Howe’ a more promising subject? It has some high drama and a great scene when the demonstrators at the war memorial drown out the hymn with ‘The Red Flag’. And a tragic ending. Chris, of course, is a mezzo.
