West Lothian's Telling Tongues project

One of the classes involved in West Lothian's Telling Tongues project recording their song

In West Lothian a project called Telling Tongues, funded by the Scottish Arts Council's Music Education and Outreach Fund, has taken the skills of writing and performing traditional Scots songs and brought them alive in four local primary schools.

The 'Telling Tongues' project was organised to try to establish events and learning opportunities for pupils around the broad theme of 'culture'. The main aim of 'Telling Tongues' was to teach young people about traditional music and the Scots language. Four West Lothian schools, Greenrigg, Torphichen, Woodmuir and Westfield, took up the challenge of working with the author and Scots language specialist and teacher Matthew Fitt, and traditional singers and songwriters Alistair Hulett and Gill Bowman.

Matthew Fitt visited each school first to do an afternoon workshop to get the pupils thinking about Scots and get them comfortable using Scots both verbally and in written form. He started off by showing them how many Scots words were in everyday use by talking about the different parts of the body(heid, ee, lug, neb, oxter, hurdies etc) He then got the whole class involved with a sort of Scots 'Simon Says'. As an icebreaker, it was excellent and soon even the quieter students were offering answers and opinions. In each school he worked with a class of P6/P7 pupils and by the end of the afternoon he had them writing a short song using as many Scots words as they could cope with.

Over five sessions during the following four weeks, each school worked with either Alastair Hulett or Gill Bowman, two singer/songwriters with experience at working on collaborative projects with school pupils.

The pupils were encouraged to write their own stories using Scots words from their own dialect. The songs were to be based either on the young people's environment and current experiences or were taken from historical events. In West Lothian, like most areas, there are a wide variety of historical events which could have been used. The students were encouraged to do some research on some of the events such as the The Winchburgh Murders, the shale industry, the silver mines, Torphichen Preceptory, James 'Paraffin Young' etc. The aim of this was to give the pupils an understanding of their own local history and heritage and knowledge of events which have shaped where they live today.

The singers explained how Scots songs were used to tell stories and how they were adapted in different parts of the country. The students were shown how the songs were built up to rhyme and the singers helped them to put the stories to music using some common tunes. Each session finished with a very popular sing-song. The singers cajoled the students into opening up and adding bits to the story as it built up.

After a fair bit of rehearsal the schools were invited to perform some of their songs at the opening event of the Singers Gathering, an annual celebration of Scots song, held at Howden Theatre in Livingston in front of an audience of parents, teachers and invited guests. The pupils also visited Craigsfarm Recording Studio in Livingston to record their efforts on to a CD.

Each pupil received a copy of the CD at the end of the project.

'Telling Tongues' was part of the Cultural Coordinators programme funded by the Scottish Arts Council.

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