“The Tannahill Weavers are to Scotland as the Chieftains are to Ireland”

Doors 6:45, show 7:30

The Tannahill Weavers FROM SCOTLAND In the late 18th and early 19th century Scotland was in a turmoil of change. Highlanders were being driven from their lands and into the burgeoning Lowland factory systems. This brought two distinct cultures together, the mystic Celtic culture of the North and the old Anglo/Scots culture of the Lowlands. They were married by the double-barreled shotgun of necessity and the Industrial Revolution. But this forced union brought forth a cultural heritage which, thanks to people like Robert Burns and Robert Tannahill, outlasted the worst of the Industrial Revolution.

It married the mystic beauty of the Celtic music to the coarse, brawling, but vitally human music, poetry, and ballads of the Lowlands. It is precisely this strangely moving yet lustily stirring quality that the Tannahill Weavers have captured in their arrangements of Scotland’s traditional music and songs. Their material is traditional, but as good musicians should, they have transformed it and brought it into the modern world, vitally alive and kicking. A show not to miss!