Plaids & Bandanas

• What drew Highlanders to the cowboy life?
• What problems did the Scots have to overcome to set up a new life?
• What did Scots do at the Battle of the Little Bighorn?
• What differences did the Scots find in the culture of the west?
• How did life in the Highlands prepare them for the life as a cowboy?
• How did the music develop and who else influenced the development of the old songs?

From droving to driving, reivers to rustlers, heilan kye to long horns, Plaids and Bandanas explores the links between the two cattle cultures in music, song and dance, and folklore. The vast number of Scots who emigrated to North America has been well documented, whether through forcible eviction during the clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries or voluntarily in the hope of a better life. With them they took their culture, their language, their music and their skills. Cattle droving in Scotland was an established profession from the 16th century, and many such migrants took cowboy jobs in the American West.
The medium of music paints a vivid picture of their social and personal lives and the exchange was not all one way. The music crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic creating strong links between the old culture and the new. Lonely men in strange surroundings found comfort in songs that reminded them of home.

Rob Gibson, himself a musician, knows the power of song. It has a unique ability to evoke and capture emotion and a sense of time and place. Rob has researched the roots of the songs and the routes of the drovers, and established clear and coherent links between the Wild West and the no-less-wild Highlands.