Working in Harmony; Putting a Poet's Words to Music Hasn't Happened Often Enough in Scotland - Until Now. Chris Dolan Reflects On a Rare Musical Foray Into Scottish Verse

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Last weekend I added my voice, between sips of bitter, to a lusty chorus. "Growing up on the lower Clyde/Argyll was greener on the other side." Sung solo, sweet and soft, it's one man's fond memory of his father. Over a table full of pints, declaimed loud in fraternal concert, it takes on a rousing, spiritual (in the black American sense) quality. "We watched the last Cunarder gli-ide/ down to the sea." An anthem for a lost world of shipbuilding, working- class pride, dashed hopes.

Saturday's chorus was made up of men and women who wouldn't have known, from the clues in the song, that we're singing here about Greenock. But there's not much you can tell Lancashire folk about disappearing worlds. "My father's eyes were boiler-suit blue/he took pride in what he'd learned to do . . ." The pub band, Moorland Folk's previous number had been: "The cotton mills are closing down all over Lancashire." Only two people - the band's singer and a Darwin poetry buff - knew the name Donny O'Rourke, who wrote the lyric. A music fan had heard of Ceolbeg, legendary Scottish band from whose number Dave Whyte, Down to the Sea's composer, sprang.

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Working in Harmony; Putting a Poet's Words to Music Hasn't Happened Often Enough in Scotland - Until Now. Chris Dolan Reflects On a Rare Musical Foray Into Scottish Verse

This was no jersey-clad, traddy-folk, real-ale pub. The audience would have been more au fait, I guess, with Justin Timberlake or Johnny Cash numbers than Fairport or the Chieftans. Down to the Sea is just a great song: local, universal, intimate and open. "Those are gho...

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