 Blair
was born and brought up in Skye. On his mother's side he has strong
connections with North Uist while his father's people had moved to Skye
from the Border country around 150 years ago.
Blair was inspired to
buy an accordion after hearing the playing of the late, lamented Niall
Cheòis of Lewis. In 1973, having quickly mastered the instrument he teamed
up with Calum and Rory MacDonald, fellow Skyemen with North Uist
connections. Together they formed the Run Rig Dance Band, later to become
Run Rig, with whom he played for several years.
His first solo
album, Celtology, came out in 1984. Subsequent CDs - Beneath the Beret, A
Summer in Skye, Angels from the Ashes and Stay Strong are all remarkable
not only because of their quality but also because the material featured
is Blair's own. These CDs are now classics and speak eloquently of Blair's
huge musical talents.
Blair Douglas doesn't do self-promotion very
well. In a television documentary about his life and music, Am Bràighe's
Am Bayou, to be broadcast tonight, prominent colleagues cite Douglas's
1996 opus A Summer in Skye as the finest Scottish traditional music album
of all time and suggest that he should be selling millions, rather than
thousands, of CDs.
For Douglas, however, who'll likely be hiding behind
the settee as the programme goes out, success should be judged, not by
sales figures, but by whether his music touches people. On that basis
alone, then, Douglas is a successful musician.
Officers from the
New York Police Department were so moved by the title track of Douglas's
most recent album, Angels from the Ashes, written in the aftermath of
9/11, that they invited him to visit Ground Zero, normally the exclusive
domain of emergency service workers and the victims' families.
There's a personal side to Angels too. In 1997, a fire gutted Douglas's
home in Braes, on the Isle of Skye, destroying all his musical instruments
and music collection and forcing the musician and his family to start all
over again. It's only too typical of this quiet, thoughtful man that he
should transpose the feelings raised by his own adversity and dedicate the
music they partly inspired to others with the Gaelic soulfulness that's
long been his hallmark.
"People have often mentioned this Gaelic
soulfulness, and I'm pleased that that's what they hear in my music," says
the composer and keyboardist. "But although my parents both had the
Gaelic, I'm not really a native speaker. In fact, when it came to doing
the programme, which is nearly all in Gaelic with English subtitles, I was
surprised that I was able to answer all the questions in Gaelic. I did it
at school and as part of my degree at university, so it must have gone in
and stayed in because I spoke more Gaelic on that programme than I think
I've ever spoken before."
Creating Gaelic soul music is a rather
grander concept than Douglas's original reasons for starting to play. A
founder member of three of Gaeldom's foremost bands, Runrig, Mac-Talla and
Cliar, Douglas was born on Skye but moved at the age of 15 to Cumbernauld
when his father, a teacher, took up a new post in Glasgow. One evening not
long after the move, Douglas's mother, Ina, who was well known for her
involvement in Gaelic choirs, took him along to a Highland gathering.
"Maybe it was because I was away from the islands that I felt a pull,
I don't know, but I heard two guys playing the accordion that night, John
Carmichael and Neil Macleod, and I immediately thought, I want to get one
of those," he says.
"Looking back, it was probably an odd choice
for a 15-year-old boy in the late 1960s. I mean, the accordion just wasn't
cool at the time. It's a bit less unfashionable now, but back then,
jeez-o. Will Starr, who was a wonderful player, although he was often
regarded as a figure of fun for his trademark kick, was one of my heroes.
But I was listening to rock music, too, Jimi Hendrix, The Band, who I
still can't see past. And so out of all that came... me."
With two
friends from down the road, the MacDonald brothers Calum and Rory, he
formed a band. They played Chuck Berry numbers – Douglas's colleague from
Cliar, singer Arthur Cormack remembers seeing Douglas playing Johnny B
Goode on a guitar and not being exactly overwhelmed – and they raided
Fairport Convention's albums particularly for folk-rock material. Later,
when they acquired a singer, Donnie Munro, they included Fleetwood Mac and
Steely Dan songs, although they didn't have to worry about Gaelic
translations for Green Manalishi or Pretzel Logic just yet.
"It
wasn't until the Play Gaelic album and Calum and Rory started writing in
Gaelic that we started doing Gaelic songs and began to think of ourselves
as a concert band," says Douglas, who remains the best of friends with his
former bandmates and looks back on his involvement in Runrig with pride.
"Our reason for playing before that was to make people dance. It was
the only way to get work. But it was valuable in helping us to learn the
tricks of the trade because I discovered early on that if you took your
timing from the best dancers on the floor, you were away, and it's still
something I think about when I'm playing. I try to instil it into the kids
at the traditional music centre of excellence in Plockton too, because if
you play tunes in the dance metre intended, it gives the music a lift that
you don't get playing at 200 miles an hour."
Somewhere back in the
early days, dance music with a different accent began to catch Douglas's
attention. As Am Bràighe's Am Bayou's title suggests – it translates as
From Braes to the Bayou – and scenes of him playing with the house band at
Fred's Bar in Mamou, Louisiana, confirm, Cajun music is a real passion for
Douglas. Having Cajun specialist Dirk Powell and Christine Balfa, daughter
of Cajun fiddling legend Dewey, guest on the Angels from the Ashes album
was a thrill. But actually visiting Louisiana and being among the Cajun
people have left an enormous impression on Douglas.
"I was always
aware of Cajun through Richard Thompson, I think, because he often had a
kind of Cajun feel to his albums, but the real moment of discovery came
when I was at university in Glasgow and found an album in Listen Records
with a photo on the front of this black guy playing an accordion. I
thought, What's this? It was Clifton Chenier, the king of Cajun music, and
I took it home and was blown away."
Douglas regards Cajun as a
Celtic music; hence the attraction. The Cajun people were originally
French Canadians. But in the middle of the eighteenth century they were
forced to leave their homelands in Acadia – which comprised the lands in
and around present-day Nova Scotia and was also home to Irish and Scots
settlers – and having drifted southwards, they eventually found refuge
thousands of miles away in southern Louisiana.
"I hear a lot of
Scottish and Irish influences in that music, but the Cajuns and the Gaels
also have a lot in common as people," he says. "They're both small
cultures living in the shadow of a much bigger culture and language, and
the Cajuns were in danger of seeing their language dying out too.
"There was also a Cajun equivalent of puirt-a-beul, or mouth music, which
I found amazing. The thing that struck me most about the Cajuns, though,
is that they put their music at the centre of their struggle for survival
and although they're derided by Americans, they see their music as
valuable as any other. I'd like to see the campaign to preserve the Gaelic
language doing that too." |
|
