A Scottish treasure trove
Angus Lawrie. Photo from the the Facebook page about Calum I. Maclean.
Have you heard of «Old Toasty»? Now you can finally listen to the formidable Jew’s player Angus Lawrie in the Scottish archives.
By Ånon Egeland
Translated by Lucy Moffatt
In future Munnharpa articles we will be showcasing Jew’s harp players and styles from near and far, generally through audio or video links. We are launching our first digital edition with a real treat: an introduction to the fantastic Scottish player, Angus Lawrie (1892–1971).
«Old Toasty», as he was known, spent his entire life in Oban on the west coast of Scotland.
After trying his hand at a variety of jobs – cabin boy, fishmonger and poulterer – he fought in the First World War, serving in the Dardanelles among other places. After being hospitalised in Malta, he was invalided out of the army and sent home. Following the war he spent more than 40 years working for the railway.
Although Angus Lawrie was an uncommonly good Jew’s harp player, the bagpipes were his true passion. He founded the Oban Pipe Band in 1922 and was its leader for many years. In 1925 he married Catherine Morrison with whom he had a daughter, Morag, and a son. The latter, Ronald Lawrie, was a prominent piper like his father and was well known as the pipe major of the Glasgow Police Pipe Band.
Treasures from the archive
If Angus Lawrie the Jew’s harp player is a well-kept secret who has not been given the place he deserves among the greats, that is largely because the recorded material he left behind was long difficult to access.
That has now changed: Luckily for us, these archival treasures are now publicly available on Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches, which brings together not just one but three archives of Scottish traditional music and folklore: School of Scottish Studies, The Canna Collection and BBC Radio nan Gael.
A search for Lawrie, Angus should take you straight to the good stuff.
Style icon for John Wright
Angus Lawrie’s repertoire consists exclusively of dance music – marches, jigs, strathspeys and reels. Most of the melodies are standards of the Scottish bagpipe repertoire. In this style, the striking hand plays a simple, steady rhythmic pattern determined by the dance type.
However, breathing plays a more advanced role: rapid alternations between in and out breaths imitate the bubbling ornamentation of the bagpipes.
This key component of Angus Lawrie’s Jew’s harp style served as an important model for another style icon of the Jew’s harp, John Wright (1939–2013), who visited Lawrie early on in his own career as a performer. He even took the use of this technique one step further than his teacher.
Like all traditional European Jew’s harp playing styles, the Scottish style is melodic. When melodies are played a single Jew’s harp (rather than on two or more at a time, as in Austria), it goes without saying that it is important to ensure that the notes are produced clearly.
Good Jew’s harp players can do this by creating a timbral distinction between the even and odd overtones. In the Norwegian style, that is done by closing the epiglottis on the odd overtones.
The mysterious technique
But Angus Lawrie seems to have achieved this in a different way. His playing style lacks the wah-wah-pedal quality you get when you open and close your epiglottis. Instead, his tongue seems to be in frequent contact with the palate, and this gives his playing an almost liquid quality in the phonological sense, as if he is pronouncing an L on certain notes as he plays.
I wouldn’t hazard any speculative explanations about this playing technique without having studied this thoroughly. But a conversation I had with John Wright sometime in the 1990s may shed some light on the matter. He told me about experiences he’d had while researching his book Les guimbardes du Musée de l’Homme (Paris 1978). Then cutting-edge technology was used to reveal acoustic peculiarities of the Jew’s harp, and they compared recordings Mikkel Kaavenes with those of Angus Lawrie, among others.
In the latter’s recordings, the fundamental showed up as a thick, distinct line at the bottom of the sonogram, but was indistinct or absent in the recordings of Mikkel Kaavenes – although, I note, only on the notes where there was no breathing, i.e. the closed notes. Whether this is actually true remains to be seen, as does the explanation: We must patiently await thearrival of a qualified enthusiast who feels driven to solve this fascinating acoustic mystery.
38 different melodies
14 tracks played by Angus Lawrie are available on Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches. Each track consists of several tunes played consecutively in sets, in the order typical in Scottish traditional music: march – stratspey – reel. Some tunes are repeated, but there are 38 different melodies in all, distributed as follows:
2/4 march: 4
6/8 march: 3
Strathspey: 11
Reel: 20
Here is the complete list:
July/August 1953
The Suitors of Cromarty (march); The Fair Dairymaid (strathspey); The Braes of Tullymet (strathspey); Unknown (reel); The Lads of Mull (reel); The Mason’s Apron (reel).
Dh’fhalbhainn Sgiobalta (6/8 march); Lochiel’s Welcome to Glasgow (6/8 march); Take Your Gun to the Hill (strathspey); The Rejected Suitor (reel).
The Lochaber Gathering (march); Tulloch Gorm (strathspey); The Wee Man from Glengarry (reel).
Renfrewshire Militia (march); Maggie Cameron (strathspey); The Reel of Tulloch; Over the Isles to America (reel).
Highland Lassie Going to the Fair; Locheil’s Away to France; Lady Madelina Sinclair; The Sheepwife.
Mrs Elspeth Campbell (march); MacLennan’s Overcoat (strathspey); The Rejected Suitor (reel).
The Lochaber Gathering (march); Braes of Tullymet (strathspey); Unknown (reel); The Lads from Mull (reel), Mason’s Apron (reel).
John MacDonald of Glencoe (2/4 march); The Shepherd’s Crook (strathspey); Locheil’s Away to France (reel).
Haughs of Cromdale (2/4 march); Dornoch Links (2/4 march); The Shepherd’s Crook (strathspey); Locheil’s Away to France (reel).
October 1958
Meg Merrilies (reel); The Flowers of Edinburgh (reel); The Soldier’s Joy (reel).
The 74 th ’s Farewell to Edinburgh (march); Monymusk (strathspey); Lord MacDonald’s Reel.
The Cold Winds of Wyvis (march); The Smith’s a Gallant Fireman (strathspey); Sandy King’s Breeches (strathspey); The Mason’s Apron (reel); The Reel of Tulloch.
Sleepy Maggie (reel).
Dornoch Links (march); Locheil’s Away to France (march); MacLennan’s Overcoat (strathspey); Sleepy Maggie (reel); The King’s Reel.
The few commercially available recordings of Angus Lawrie can be found on these two compilations of archive recordings:
Field Recordings of Gaelic Music and Song
Anyone interested in comparing Jew’sharp and bagpipe versions of the same melodies will find a useful tool at Pipetunes. Sound files containing most of the melodies played by Angus Lawrie are available.
Happy listening!
Sources:
Anonymous obituary in The Oban Times, no. 6, 079 (12 July, 1971, p. 10), published on the Facebook page about Calum I. Maclean (a Scottish folklorist, ethnologist and collector, 1915–1960) 16.07.2024. This page is linked to the University of Edinburgh’s Calum Maclean Project, an academic resource that provides access to more than 13,000 manuscripts, most of them from the Scottish-Gaelic tradition.
Geneviève Dournon-Tourelle, John Wright: Les Guimbardes du Musée de l’Homme (Paris 1978).