Scots Songs by Davie Robertson

My album "Star o the Bar" on the Greentrax label got quite a lot of good write-ups, but didn’t set much heather on fire in the sales department. Songs in Scots dialect, sung in a traditional style, with minimal instrumental accompaniment, are not the stuff of which platinum discs are made. That being so, and given the current state of the record business and the economy in general, I can pretty much guarantee that I will never again have the opportunity of releasing a commercially produced and marketed CD.

All the same, I’m immodest enough to think that there might be some kind of audience out there for my songs, and that it would be a pity if my efforts were never heard beyond the confines of a couple of folk clubs in East Lothian.

I have therefore decided to publish my songs on the internet. These can be downloaded free of charge. Feel free to sing them if you feel so inclined, but if you sing them in front of an audience, you might do me the kindness of mentioning my name. The songs are all registered with PRS/MCPS, so you will be liable for royalties if you record them for public release or broadcast them on radio or television.

If you are looking for sophisticated productions featuring stunning guitar work, fussy accompaniments, jazz rhythms, "crossover", "synthesis", or any of the other stuff currently all the go in the fields of "Celtic music" and "folk, roots, and acoustic", then bale out now. What you have here are twenty original songs, sung unaccompanied in Scots dialect, in a very traditional style - the naked song, sung by a bare-knuckle singer, for the handful of folk who still like that sort of thing.