2-3pm, Saturday 5 March
Professor Gary West shares and discusses a unique corpus of personal tales and memories of the Great War, as collected over many decades by the great Scottish traditional singer Jock Duncan.
The lecture takes in readings of the first hand testimonies collected by Jock Duncan (pictured), the well-known bothy ballad singer from the North East, and is interspersed with story and song to create a very moving talk.
Since the 1950s, Jock Duncan, now in his 90s, collected and transcribed hundreds of interviews from First World War veterans. No-one knew he was doing this – not even his family. What is so striking is that these stories are so personal - so matter-of-fact - and rich in Scots dialect.
Professor Gary West holds a Chair of Scottish Ethnology at Edinburgh University’s Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies. He is also a singer and piper.
