Gaelic Music of the Hebrides Waulking Songs

Gaelic Music of the Hebrides Waulking Songs

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Waulking songs (Scots Gaelic: Òrain Luaidh) are Scottish folk songs, traditionally sung in the Gaelic language by women while waulking cloth. This practice involved a group of people beating newly woven tweed rhythmically against a table or similar surface to soften it. Simple, beat-driven songs were used to accompany the work

In the Outer Hebrides, an archipelago off the west coast of Scotland, music has played a central role in entertainment and relieving the monotony of hard work. Daily chores—milking, reaping, spinning—were set to a rhythmic pattern and were often structured by call-and-response singing. Other genres on the album include "mouth music" for dancing, a lullaby, and piping

This music is old, and sung without harmony. Liner notes include a brief history of the islands and their culture as well as song lyrics in Gaelic and their English translation and explanation

Waulking songs are rhythmic songs that were made up to accompany the work and coordinate the beating. One person leads the group, like a shantyman on a ship, singing well-known verses or making up new ones on the fly. The rest then come in on the chorus while the leader takes a breath. A verse may be a single line or a couplet

The refrain often has no or few recognizable words among rhythmic nonsense syllables called vocables. The refrains are the most primitive part of the song and are the only relatively stable element in a very unstable body of texts, lines, and sections that were moved from one song to another during improvisation. Modern recordings and texts have tended to stabilize the words, but different collected and printed versions of the same song are often found

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