A trove of previously unpublished Scottish ballads Sometime in the early
nineteenth century, most likely in the year 1818, the Reverend Robert
Scott, minister of the parish of Glenbuchat in Aberdeenshire, Scotland,
compiled a collection of traditional ballads that until now has not been
published. Most of the ballad collections produced during the Scottish
Romantic Revival were eventually anthologized in Francis James Child's
seminal English and Scottish Popular Ballads (five volumes, 1882-96).
Yet, the Glenbuchat manuscripts, containing sixty-eight ballads in four
folio volumes, were not included in Child's volumes. The complete work
only came to light in 1949 when it was donated to the Special
Collections of the Aberdeen University Library by a descendent of the
original compiler. Scott did not give the precise locations of where he
collected his ballads or name the performers, but the texts are unique
and appear to have been drawn from oral sources. As such, the ballads
reveal a great deal about the nature of traditional music at the time
they were collected. The Glenbuchat Ballads were originally prepared for
publication by David Buchan, one of the leading ballad scholars of the
twentieth century. Upon Buchan's death, his former student James Moreira
took up and completed his work and wrote the detailed introductory essay
and annotations in this volume. David Buchan (1939-1994) was a leading
international ballad scholar. James Moreira, director of the Maine
Folklife Center, has published widely on the ballads of Canada, Norway,
and the United Kingdom.
