Two quotes from Dick Gaughan, an extraordinary scottish songwriter:

“I have this problem with the use of this word ‘traditional’,” he says, speaking from a St Louis tour stop. “I grew up in a family of traditional singers and musicians, and to me those are just songs. This idea of dividing things into ‘This is traditional and this is not traditional,’ I don’t understand those concepts. I know what other people mean by them, but I don’t accept them myself. There are songs I sing now that I’ve been singing since I was a kid, and I didn’t make any real distinction between them and rock and roll. I mean, I was aware that I hadn’t heard them on the radio, but they were just songs that nobody else sang; they were just our songs, you know?”

“To me, the politics and the music are inseperable,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense to me that any human beings could be singing about what they see, what they experience and what affects their lives and ignore politics - to me that’s ludicrous. Scottish and Irish traditional music always had a large part of itself which would now be regarded as political. Folk music is dangerous stuff.” Gaughan laughs, then catches himself. “In its own way it is dangerous,” he says firmly. “It’s subversive to admit that ordinary working class people have actually got a culture and artistic merit. This flies against the vested interests of those who would have us believe that the poor are poor because they are stupid.”

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