An era in traditional music has ended with the passing of the peerless Elizabeth Stewart: pianist, singer, dealer, storyteller and raconteur, craftswoman, as well, of course, as the many other roles she played in life. She will be deeply missed by all who value Scottish tradition and Traveller culture, as she was an abundantly talented force of nature whose deeply felt renditions of traditional songs will stand the test of time.
Elizabeth Campbell Stewart was born on 13 May 1939, in Fetterangus, Aberdeenshire. Her mother, Jean Stewart, was a musician and bandleader who played multiple instruments, broadcast for the BBC, and was especially known for her accordion skills. Her father, Donald Stewart, was a soldier and later a labourer. Stewart’s distinctive voice and her immense repertoire of ballads, songs, stories, riddles, and pipe music were an important part of her Traveller heritage, of which she was very proud.
In 1954, Hamish Henderson came calling at the family home, looking for Elizabeth’s aunt Lucy, and began documenting the family’s rich musical lore. The family’s reputation spread and, in 1959, Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and Charles Parker visited, working on the Radio Ballads, their pioneering prize-winning documentaries interweaving oral history interviews with MacColl-penned songs. They heard Elizabeth playing a jazzy, up-tempo version of ‘The Hill o Bennachie’ on the piano, a tune and treatment MacColl used for his now well-known ‘traditional’ song, ‘Come Aa Ye Fisher Lassies’. Elizabeth and her sister Jane made the long train journey down to Birmingham to record the song, their Buchan dialect, familial harmonies, and natural talent lending effortless authenticity.
Elizabeth had developed this style in the dance halls of her youth, playing first with her mother’s Jean Stewart Band and then with her own. By speeding up the tempos, underpinned by her fluid and powerful boogie-woogie or bluesy piano backing, the old classic ballads were reborn for quick-steps, foxtrots, and more, given a new life and audience while she revelled in her connection to deep family roots and regional traditions. Her musical interests were insatiable and she skilfully tackled genres from The Beatles to Chopin.
Before long, many others made their way to the family home in Fetterangus including American folklorists Kenneth S. Goldstein and Charles Joyner, along with artist and folk-song enthusiast Howard Glasser. Singers, too, came, seeking access to the family’s wonderful cultural legacy (see ). Sometimes this was a little overwhelming, with Elizabeth remarking that Goldstein ‘practically bade wi us’.
Figure 1. Elizabeth with Rhoda, Rochelle, and Kenneth S. Goldstein at their home in Philadelphia, 1972 (courtesy of the Rochelle and Kenneth S. Goldstein Collection).
Goldstein released an album of Lucy Stewart singing Child ballads in 1961, now available on Smithsonian Folkways. But Lucy did not perform outside the home and it was left to Elizabeth to further the family’s musical heritage, in her own dance band, on singing tours in the UK and the USA, in recordings, and in her deeply personal memoir. In all these ways, she showed her intense pride in the traditional songs of tragedy, love, and the supernatural, music from the piping and fiddle traditions, and her own compositions in both genres.
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, she played tirelessly throughout the North-East of Scotland, carrying on her mother Jean Stewart’s legacy, filling dance halls and hotel function rooms with her inimitable piano style, inspired in equal measure by old family musical traditions and the styles of popular Trinidadian boogie-woogie pianist, Winifred Atwell.
I first met Elizabeth at the Edinburgh Folk Festival in 1988. Standing in the lobby afterwards, she took my hand, looked me in the eye, and sang to me, into me, it seemed. No one, and I mean no one, could put a song across like Elizabeth Stewart—the emotional truth taking centre stage, enhanced by her sensitive approach to timing and musical decoration. Sometimes she did it so well that she herself could not go on, overcome by the unfolding tragedy and by the constellation of family, history, love, and emotional life that informed her songs.
Driving around the North-East corner of Scotland and beyond, I absorbed much more than her wonderful songs and stories; I experienced her absolute conviction regarding the value of her culture and identity. We drove a lot together in those days, visiting the Abbey at Old Deer, Aden, and lord knows where else. We just drove, sometimes to look at some historical site or traditional Traveller haunt, sometimes to tour the countryside, perhaps go by Aikey Brae, site of an old Traveller fair, or through Fetterangus to see the old houses and fields of her youth, and to the graveyard to pay tribute to her dear mother, Jean, and aunt Lucy, to sing a song for them. Or maybe we would drive through to Aberdeen for a university event, or up to Keith, or Kirriemuir, for the festivals (see ).
Figure 2. Singing at the Keith Folk Festival, 1992 (photograph by Ian MacKenzie, courtesy of the School of Scottish Studies Archives, University of Edinburgh).
Elizabeth was a hit at the 1997 Edinburgh International Festival alongside Jock Duncan and Tom Reid. What a night that was. She sang the ‘Plooman Laddies’, of course, one of Lucy’s songs popular in the folk revival, and we dueted on ‘The Jolly Beggar’, with her harmonizing on the chorus. It was Peggy Seeger who suggested to her that harmonizing on just parts of a verse could be very effective, as indeed it was. Later I recorded that duet and sent it to Kenny Goldstein, who was delighted to hear it all those years after he had been recording with the family (1959–60) and to think of a young protégé (me) together with Elizabeth whom he had first known some thirty-five years before. One afternoon, I recorded her singing it, up-tempo for the dance floor, at the New Deer Hall. Unstoppable joy.
In 1997, Elizabeth and I, together with folklorist and literary scholar Valentina Bold, went off to the USA. First stop, Memphis, where we went to Sun Records, home of Elvis’s first recording sessions, but also of pioneering recordings by Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and—goodness, gracious—Jerry Lee Lewis: bad boy and bad-boy piano player, right up Elizabeth’s street. She loved his sheer zest for life as he played, and she was thrilled to play ‘The Highland Wedding’ on the very piano he used (Lewis died the day of Elizabeth’s funeral, 28 October 2022). Next stop, Graceland. What an eye-opener. We were all complete converts, if we had not been before. Again, Elizabeth was in heaven.
Onwards then to Austin where Elizabeth was a singing, playing, storytelling, knitting, dealing polymath for our session at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting. She held court in the lobby between sessions, but even more importantly was reunited with Diane Goldstein, whom she had babysat when the family lived in Strichen—so good to see them together. We flew up to New Hampshire then, visiting my home. Elizabeth was not feeling too well and had gone to bed, but my cousins Rick and Elise brought up a portable keyboard and Elizabeth was out of bed in a trice, playing marches and strathspeys with Rick into the night.
Sometimes, Elizabeth, local fiddler Jessie Milne, and I would play at seniors’ homes, or in sheltered housing. Piano, fiddle, and bouzouki. Jigs, marches, reels, and songs. ‘The Cameron Highlanders’, with her inimitable lift, and her tour de force, ‘The Highland Wedding’ with her mother’s variations—the very best piano you will ever hear. Kenny Goldstein was always impressed with that piano playing. No one played with such vivacity and she brought the pipe tunes to life with her instinctive musicianship.
She leaves behind remarkable recordings, Atween You and Me (Hightop Imagery, 1992) and Binnorrie (Elphinstone Institute, 2004), archival recordings, and the memoir, Up Yon Wide and Lonely Glen: Travellers’ Songs, Stories and Tunes of the Fetterangus Stewarts, compiled and edited by Alison McMorland (University Press of Mississippi, 2012). Over and above her family’s fascinating story, the book is rich in musical traditions, presenting more than a hundred songs and tunes.
Natalie Chalmers, one of Elizabeth’s singing students, recently wrote me that it is, ‘a challenge to summarise Elizabeth succinctly, she was such a big personality!’:
I’ll always be grateful to Elizabeth for teaching me that you have to sing from the heart. I was never prouder than when another well-known Traveller once said I had the ‘conyach’. My lessons were often unconventional, as she would hand-write words for me for her and Lucy’s songs, while we listened to all my angsty teenager music—such was her interest in all styles of music.
Another fond memory was stripping her living room wallpaper, while we both sang our hearts out. She certainly knew how to get the best out of this moody teenager. I will never forget Elizabeth for giving me the gift of a life-long love for singing and will always do my best to keep her songs alive.
In her memoir, Elizabeth says:
The music, the songs, the cant an the dealin, an aa the Traveller ways, this is the legacy that has been passed on through Aul Betty, tae Lucy an my mither Jean, an then doon tae me. … As my mither used tae say tae me, ‘It’s easy carried aboot wi ye. It’s niver a burden’, an that’s sae true. However, I’ve carried on, an kept the family name an the family traditions aa my life. I’ve niver given up. (Up Yon Wide and Lonely Glen, 257–58)
Note
Sheila Douglas’s The Sang’s the Thing (University of Edinburgh, 1996) presents a lovely vignette of Stewart and her songs, and she features in several academic articles that I have written, among them: ‘Stories Beyond the Text: Scottish Travellers’ Contextual Narratives and “The Jolly Beggar”’ (Narrative Cultures 2, no. 2 [2015]), ‘The Stewarts of Fetterangus and Literate Oral Tradition’ (The Singer and the Scribe, edited by Philip E. Bennett and Richard Firth Green [Brill, 2004]), ‘The Making of Child 306’ (Bridging the Cultural Divide: Our Common Ballad Heritage, edited by Sigrid Rieuwerts and Helga Stein [Olms, 2000]), and ‘You Make Me Dizzy Miss Lizzie: Elizabeth Stewart’s Up-tempo Ballads’ (Northern Scotland 18 [1999]).
Thank you to Elizabeth’s daughter, Elizabeth Morewood, for her tireless, devoted care and for permission to quote from Up Yon Wide and Lonely Glen. Thanks, too, to Natalie Chalmers for her contribution.
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Notes on contributors
Thomas A. McKean
Thomas A. McKean is Director of the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, a home for hands-on training in Ethnology and Folklore and a wide range of community engagement projects aimed at building cultural self-esteem. His work focuses on creativity within tradition, the use of heritage in community projects, and knowing by doing, an exploration of enacted knowledge.