Sung by Charlie Allan £11 PP free world-wide.
24 songs, including most of the major North-east of Scotland bothy ballads, recorded by Charlie Allan. They are the best of the tracks in the audio cassettes available here with a couple of re-recordings.
Includes 28 pages of sleeve notes on Charlie, the 19 musicians, and complete words of all 24 songs.
Charlie writes; One of the joys of being me is the number of real musicians I have been allowed to play with and the number of virtuosos who have agreed to join me on this, hopefully the best of my recorded singing.
I’m not going to mention them all in detail but I’d just like you to note, in reverse alphabetical order;
Richard Thomson while on one of his American fan club’s tours was staying at Towie Barclay castle when we were recording The Auld Folks on the Wa. Richard jumped in to do a superb job on the mandolin, being by far the lead instrument on the recording.
His buddy from the old Fairport Convention days, Dave Swarbrick, features on seven tracks, mostly on the fiddle But his piece de resistence is the wonderful fiddle orchestra in Lonely in the Bothy. It is called the Smiddyburn Strings but it is just Dave recorded over and over to sound like twenty fiddles – though where you’d get twenty of that quality I don’t know.
I was really honoured by Kenny Slavin a classical musician who accompanied much of my first audio tape of ballads. Please listen to his extravagant Stefan Grapelli accompaniment to Macfarlane o’ the Sprotts and the beautiful playing on Drumdelgie. The last note of that piece is as fine as you’ll hear and far more than you expect on a collection of bothy ballads.
Graham Mitchell and his band have held up the good name of the north-east’s folk music for thirty years (so far). He features, including doing many of the lead-ins, on eight tracks. All eight were recorded in one evening session on his way home from work. You’ll easily recognise Graham. His is the only box on the CD.
