KJ's Strings Studio

🎵 She was living in a council house in Aberdeen. She had never been on a stage. She had never recorded an album. She did not consider herself a performer — she was a tradition-bearer, a carrier of songs learned from her mother and grandmother in the travelling and settled Scottish Traveller communities of the northeast. When the folklorist Hamish Henderson knocked on her door in 1953, Jeannie Robertson had no idea that what she carried was considered remarkable. She simply knew the songs.

What Henderson discovered in that Aberdeen kitchen was a voice and a repertoire that the scholarly world had been searching for without knowing it — a living connection to the great tradition of Scottish ballads documented and partially preserved in the eighteenth and nineteenth century collections of Percy and Child, but heard now not as historical artefacts but as a living, breathing, technically extraordinary performance tradition. Jeannie Robertson knew versions of the great Child Ballads — Lord Donald, The Twa Corbies, Edward, Johnie C**k — that were longer, more complex, and more musically sophisticated than any version previously recorded. And she sang them in a voice of such natural authority and emotional depth that it silenced rooms.

She was awarded an MBE in 1968 and was recognised in her lifetime as a Master of Traditional Arts — an honour that attempted to capture something that the word singer did not quite contain. She was not simply singing songs. She was the living repository of a tradition that had survived in the Scottish Traveller community precisely because that community had never abandoned the oral culture that the settled world had allowed to atrophy.

She gave the world back songs it had forgotten it had lost.

Her voice is on recordings in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. If you have never heard it, remedy that. There is nothing else quite like it in the world.

The clàrsach, the small Highland harp, was once the instrument of chiefs and storytellers — present at feasts, at funerals, at the ceremonies that marked the edges of a community's life. By the early modern period it had fallen from formal use, replaced in ceremonial prestige by the bagpipe, though it never vanished entirely from Highland domestic life. When the revival came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the people who took it up again were often working from incomplete knowledge — from old descriptions, from instruments that had not been played in generations, from tradition that had survived only partially.

String breakage on a clàrsach is not unusual and was not always immediately resolvable. Gut strings, the traditional material, were sensitive to temperature and humidity — conditions that Scotland supplied in abundance. In a remote area, a replacement might mean a journey or a wait. The practical response was not to stop. A player who knew the instrument well enough knew the intervals, knew the harmonic relationships, and could navigate around an absence. The music was not the same. But it continued.

There is something in that particular skill — the ability to play around what is missing — that sits at the centre of how traditional music survived in Scotland at all. The canon was never perfectly transmitted. There were interruptions: the post-Culloden suppressions, emigration, poverty, the long pressure of cultures that considered Highland music marginal. What came through came through imperfectly, in gaps and approximations, sustained by people who knew enough to keep going and were willing to work with what remained.

The missing string in a harp is not a metaphor that needs underlining. It is simply what happened. And the music continued anyway, finding its way around the absence, which is perhaps how it always worked.

'People often say that string players are the Olympians of the small muscles... But how many can say they gave the same amount of attention to the larger muscles of the body?'

Fleet fingers may be the ultimate goal for string players, but it's the larger muscle groups that form the foundations of solid technique, says cellist Davina Shum. Link in comments 🎻

📷 Getty