SINGING SCOTCH ROUND THE WORLD.*
GLOBE-TROTTING, whether for pleasure or on what are euphemistically but inaccurately styled " professional tours," is so overdone, that but for special circumstances, which are something better than redeeming features, this volume would not merit being noticed at length. Its very existence, however, is a monument and a testimony to the reality of Scotch camaraderie, which seems to increase rather than diminish as the necessity for the assertion of Scotch nationality disappears. This camaraderie is so very intense as to confirm the popular belief in the North that Scotch folks must have intermarried to no inconsiderable extent with French in the days when their countries were more or less closely allied against England. It tells the experiences—we can hardly say adventures—of a Scotch family of the name of Kennedy, who between 1872 and 1886 gave a series of Scotch concerts pretty nearly all over the world. They sang three years in Australia and New Zealand,— "Then voyaging across the Pacific vid the Sandwich Islands, we performed a considerable tone in California. Journeying across the Transcontinental Railway, and singing a week among the Mormons, we began a Canadian campaign which lasted an autumn, winter, and spring. Then after a series of concerts in outlying Newfound- land, our faces were at length homeward turned across the Atlantic. In February of 1879, amid the excitement and anxiety attending the disastrous opening of the Zulu War, my father sailed for South Africa,—the tour comprising Cape Colony, the Diamond-Fields, and Natal. After returning to Scotland for only a brief ten days' rest, we set oat for a six months' tour of India, singing the songs of Scotland at Parsee Bombay and Maori Calcutta, amid the scenes of the great Mutiny, and as far north as the Punjaub."
Yet, wherever they went, they found appreciative Scotch audiences. Thus, the narrator of the family's travels in Canada says
"We sang in every town in Ontario. This entailed hard work. Daring the tour, there were six weeks in which we sleighed ' to thirty-six towns, singing every night. Sometimes we performed in villages that could scarcely have furnished an audience in themselves, bat were the centres of a thickly populated agricultural region—the farmers coming fifteen, twenty, and thirty miles in their sleighs. . . . . . . One evening an old Scotchman drove forty miles. He came into the side-room with dewy eyes, and grasped my father's hand warmly, saying,—' I dines care sae mockle for yer aanga—I just want to see a man that's seen Perth since I saw it !' The old farmers were very much affected by the songs, which, to them, conjured up bygone scenes and associations. Frequently they would break out, in their enthusiasm, into loud comments. One night, at the conclusion of When the kye comes hame,' a man slapped his knee, and loudly exclaimed, with a relishing smack of his lips, ' That's meat an' drink to me !'" The tours of the Kennedys were not only popular, but were so profitable that they were repeated. The head of the family died in harness. He was struck down in America by Canadian cholera at the age of sixty-one. Three of his children had perished in 1881 at the burning of the Theatre des Italiens at Nice, where they were pursuing their musical studies, and he never recovered from this blow.
The success of the Kennedys in singing round the world, while due mainly, of course, to the passion of Scotchmen abroad for their country and for Burns, is also to be ascribed in part to the fact that they were very different from ordinary " professional " companies. There was nothing of the character of raffishness or Bohemianism in David Kennedy, the. head of the family and initiator of its tours and concerts. On the contrary, he was a hard-working Scotchman, belonging to the humble rather than • David K,nacdp, the Scottish Singe, Rentiniacraces of his Life and 1Vork. By Marjory Kennedy. And, Singing Bound the World. By David Kennedy, ion. London and Paisley : Ale:sander Gardner. 1687. "lower" class in Scotland, who took to singing because he had a knack for it, but who might as readily, had circumstances
favoured, gone into the Church or into business. The life of
David Kennedy was not eventful, in the ordinary sense of that word. Born in Perth in 1825, he was brought up to the trade
of a house-painter, and for a time worked at it in his native town. But he came of a music-loving family, and in due course became a " precentor " (or leader of the psalmody), first in a
Perth Presbyterian church, and then in an Edinburgh one. Possessing a robust and flexible voice, and having taken great pains to educate it, he took naturally enough to the business— for such it was—of singer, in which he had been preceded by other Scotchmen, notably by John Wilson and John Templeton, the latter of whom died only the other year at Richmond. He experimented as a Scotch vocalist in Edinburgh and London with success, and abandoning business altogether, be made tours through the United Kingdom. Finally, his family grow- ing up, and taking to music with an enthusiasm equal to his own, he organised the journeys to various parts of the world to which we have already alluded. He appears to have been a warm.hearted and thoroughly domestic man, attached to his father—who did not at first believe in the possibility of his son's rivalling his favourite Wilson as a singer of Scotch songs— and to his wife and children. Of the smaller incidents in Kennedy's life, this, related by his daughter appears the most worthy of quotation :—
" Of all politicians the man be most esteemed was John Bright. He had been the hero of his younger days. One day he met him on the station at Grantown, on the Highland Railway. The old gentle- man was kindly helping my mother and sisters into a carriage, in the absence of a porter, when my father came up. 'Pardon me, but you are John Bright, if I mistake not.'—' That is my name,' lie said ; ' whom have I the pleasure of addressing ? '—'I am David Kennedy, the Scottish singer. I have sang" A man's a man for a' that " round the world.' At that moment the train moved off. They cordially shook hands and parted."
The earlier journeys taken by the Kennedy family, one of whom tells the story of them in this volume, necessarily cover familiar ground. But this portion of the book is written in a lively fashion, and is at least readable. One or two facts about Dunedin seem new to us :— " The hotel was a few steps from Princes Street, the principal thoroughfare, named after the beautiful boulevard of Edinburgh. Many of the names on the signs were Scotch. Scotch names bristle
in the Dunedin Directory The faces we saw bore the true Caledonian impress The streets of Dunedin are named after the streets of Edinburgh, but with confirmed topography to one acquainted with the modern Athens Dunedin has great vitality,—nothing lack-lustre and debilitated about it, but a marked full-bloodedness. It is a substantial middle-class town, a town of labour and commerce. As to the working classes, every man can clothe, feed, and educate his family, and have something to spare. Speaking roughly, there are no poor people in Otago,—there is none of that poverty verging on starvation which is so painful to see and hear of at home. Food is cheap, clothing is not dear."
Here, surely, is the passion of Scotchmen for Scotland carried into something like madness :-
" We found in South Africa, as in the other Colonies, that Enlist' and other nationalities highly appreciated Scottish song. Wo met with several instances of how enthusiastic Scottish feeling exists in the midst of colonial life, which, with its prosaic features and struggle after material wealth, is not always the beet conserver of national sentiment. The feeling is apt.to become eccentric, as was the ease with the Scotsman of King William's Town who had a portrait of Mary, Queen of Soots, hung in his bed-room, and who, every morning on rising, stretched his hands towards it, crying, ' Oh ! my murdered queen !' Once we overheard an enthusiast saying,' " My Ain Fireside," " Ye Banks an' Braes," "The Land o' the Leal,"—oh, a body could be fit to gang to heaven hearing thae songs Bung: And was ever love of country more strongly expressed than in the case of the Fort Beaufort Scotsman, who exclaimed, ' Gude save us! I'd raither gang lame an' be hanged than dee hero a natural death '? "
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