Terry Magill of the Darlriada Bar met with the fine folks from Inveralmond Brewery the other day to check the progress of the Dreg Songs Ale. The report was entirely positive – as far as anyone can remember  . . .

Brewer Bob Hogg provided this background about the brewery:

The Inveralmond Brewery produce quality, award winning beers from their brewery on the outskirts of the City of Perth.

Established in 1997, Inveralmond was the first brewery in the area for 33 years. And it is an ideal area for brewing beer: the magnificent surrounding countryside and history has been the inspiration for the original recipes which, coupled with the Head Brewer’s experience, create beers of exceptional quality. The pure water sourced from Loch Turret, renowned as the main ingredient of the many famed whiskies once produced there, is an essential factor in the Inveralmond range of beers.

Managing Director Fergus Clark, a graduate in brewing from Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, founded the brewery and is supported by Head Brewer Ken Duncan.

You can read more about Inveralmond on their fascinating blog: Mash Tun Musings, or find them on Facebook (I have!) or Twitter.

Check out this story in the Edinburgh Evening News. The story includes a lovely photo of Newhaven Harbour in 1900. I don’t know who put the bug in their ear, but thank you, whoever you are!

Pass the word high and low, Dreg songs are all the go. The first Press Release about the project can be seen right here:

Dreg Songs Press Release 1 May 2012.

Here is the harbor of one of the villages that was home to the Dreg Song as it appeared in the early 1960s. The harbors of the other Dreg Song communities, Fisherrow, Port Seton and Newhaven have seawalls much like you see here.

Gareth Jones from Port Seton’s Boatie Blest brought together some of his rowers and two older Port Seton gentlemen for a Skype chat about the dreg songs. Turns out that one of the older fellows got to hear his grandfather’s voice through the marvels of technology. From what I could tell (an ocean away) Tom seemed to take it in stride!

To the gathering someone brought an article from The Scotsman, Edinburgh’s newspaper, published in 1963 on the subject of the Dreg Songs. The article was written by Francis Collinson, the only folklorist up to now who devoted any energy to these  songs. I contacted the paper who kindy supplied me with a scan of the article which reminded me of parts of the tradition that I’d forgotten in my focus on the rowing.

Collinson, like some of the earlier writers who mention the songs, describes the power of the song to coax the oysters into the dredge, as if by magic. He writes “… it would appear as if the fishermen sang to the oysters to charm them into the net!”. Collinson also highlights improvisation as a hallmark of the songs. Then it hit me: I’ve been focused on the rowing songs (naturally enough for a someone who studies worksongs) but ignored another sort of dreg song: songs sung not to coordinate work, but for other purposes as in this quote:

…and we marvelled whether the oysters of Loch Hanza have the same ear for music as their brethren in the Firth of Forth, who require a continuous dredging-song to lull them to their doom, so that the wily fishers must perforce keep up an incessant monotonous chaunt, in which all their conversation mast be carried on. Various collectors of old ballads have from time to time gone out for a night with the dredgers, hoping to add new songs to their store, but all agree in saying that the same words never occur twice unchanged ; and so they only gain the bitter cold of a night in an open boat in one of the months ” with an R,” which you perceive excludes all the bonnie summer nights. One allusion to this graceful fancy is found in a charming ballad which begins : —

” The herring loves the merry moonlight,
The mackerel loves the wind,
But the oyster loves the dredging song,
For he comes of a gentle kind.”

(from In the Hebrides by C. F. Gordon Gumming, Chatto & Windus, Picadilly, 1883 pp. 2-3)

We now have three groups working on the rowing songs (thank you all!) but I think there’s more to the story. Come to think of it, there may be two or three of these somewhat mystical songs in the Carpenter Collection . . . There’s more to explore!

What a thrilling day – the Dreg Songs are on their way ‘home’!

The rowing clubs from Newhaven, Portobello and (s00n) Port Seton met with me (online) to learn what I’ve discovered about the Dreg Songs (if you were at Mystic last June or the American Folklore Society meeting in Bloomington last October, you know what I mean). They now have access to musical transcriptions, sound files and historic images all of which they will use to reconstruct these songs on the water. Meeting online was a bit ethereal (Minneapolis, Portobello, Newhaven, Kent and Angus) but the enthusiasm was solid. The energy around this project is wonderful. Thanks everyone!

Who’d have guessed that one of the villages with a dreg song tradition would be, today, the home of a folk music record label! Greentrax is a premier producer of folk music recordings in Scotland and is based right in Cockenzie where several versions of the dreg song were collected by Carpenter. While interest in our project does not imply any particular result, I’m delighted to include them as a supporter and to encourage anyone reading this blog to drop by their website: I can vouch personally that they produce exceptionally fine music!