Picture a lush meadow part way up the side of Grandfather Mountain, high in the North Carolina Appalachians. Red, blue and green tents circle a field full of dancers and musicians. Flags of the blue and white Saltire cross, the red and gold rampant lion or a Highland clan crest flap in the crisp, thin air, and the drone of bagpipes echos through the hills.
The Music:
Ed Miller is an ex-pat Scot who's been living in Austin TX for several years now. He's a singer-guitarist and on the mellow side. His Scottish accent and humorous songs kept me interested when otherwise I might have wandered off. I talked to him for a while after one of his sets, and he seems like a nice fellow.
Full Moon Ensemble: Who knew that good things could come from Alabama? ;) This group is fronted by a female lead singer who's only 20 years old. She has a beautiful singing voice that meshes well with the fiddle, harp, keyboard and bodhran. They do some traditional Scottish and Irish tunes, plus a few original compositions. Highly recommended.
Guitar Express with Colin Grant Adams: very smooth, laid-back, bluesy/bluegrass/Hee-Haw sound. Not really my cup of tea.
Slainte Mhath: Pronounced SLAN-Cha VAH (not Slan-tee Ma-Hath as we Southerners would say). This young group from Nova Scotia stole the show with their high-energy sound and step-dancing musicians.
Clandestine: Texas band from Houston, they have an unusual combo: Both the lead singer and drummer are women, and they make beautiful music together. Lest you think they're a wimpy "girl band," let me say these babes ROCK, complete with bagpipes.
Celtic Soul: Sort of a weaker version of Slainte Mhath, a little more bland but still interesting. They're also a young group, and I think they'll grow into the music.
Seven Nations: This band was on the cutting edge of the American Celtic-rock fuzion, first proving that the bagpipe could be used in place of a lead guitar. To use an Emeril Lagasse phrase, they took traditional Celtic music and "kicked it up a notch." They've done a lot for bringing the younger generation into Scottish-American culture and to Highland Games across the country. However, their newer music is much more rock and much less Celtic.
The Crowd:
The crowd is a mix of Scottish-Americans, historical re-enactors, those who WANT to be Scottish and the simply curious, plus a few geniune Scots for good measure.
Men dressed letter-perfectly in kilt, hose, ghillies, flashes, skean dhu, sporran, dress shirt and glengarry cap mingle with re-enactors in sweeping great kilts, fur moccasins tied to their feet, giant claymores strapped to their backs.
Wandering among these are the maybe-have-a-wee-tiny-bit-of-Scots-somewhere, who put on peacock-like displays of plaids in ribbons, sashes, pins, skirts, pants, shorts and socks, committing all manner of crimes against fashion and good taste, not to mention the rules for properly wearing kilts.
So I started thinking about what real Scots must think about all these crazy Americans dressing up in tartan patterns that were invented whole cloth by an industrious pair of German tailors...
I've done a little research into my family names (all three of 'em) to see if there are any connections, however faint, to one or more of the Scottish highland clans. The most I can do is point to a surname from my family tree that's listed as belonging to such-and-such a clan, with no real proof that the ancestor in question was actually Scottish.
It's really just a giant game of "Let's Pretend" for grown-ups: You pick a family name, match it to a clan and there's your play group. You spend the bucks to buy the costume/uniform (kilt and assorted clan crests, badges, pins, sporran, flashes, hose, etc), pay your membership to the Clan society, and you're in the "game." You even get quarterly newsletters from your Clan in order to play along at home.
If you're a McDonald, you play "Let's pretend to loathe those traitorous Campbells"; if you're a Campbell, you play "Let's look down our noses at those naive McDonalds," and if you're a Bruce, Stewart or Wallace, you can lord it over EVERYONE.
Required skills: being able to quote everything Robert Burns ever wrote and learning to appreciate sheep, lonely heaths and glens, and the subtleties of single malt whiskeys. That last one affects the first with negative modifiers, of course. ;)
Based on some very flimsy circumstantial evidence, I've decided to be a Campbell; the so-called ancient Campbell tartan is a subdued, faded blue and green pattern that I can live with, not at all like the "loud McLeod" black and yellow bumblebee kilts.
Besides, the Campbells were scoundrels, and I like scoundrels. Think of it as playing pirates in drag -- heavy, wool drag done in colorful plaids, that is. With claymores instead of scimitars. And no boats. And cattle, not gold. OK, OK, so it's not like pirates at all!
I'm actually proud of what little Scottish ancestry I may have, and I love the Scottish-Americans and their attempts to be more Scots than the Scots. Just don't ask me to eat haggis. Here in the South we call it "chitlins," and I don't eat those, either.