The North-East of Scotland is sometimes called "the cold shoulder of Scotland", with the cold winds coming off the surrounding North Sea. Cold and windy it may be, but it is also home to one of the most remarkable singing traditions in the world: the classic ballad tradition. In Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads fully two-thirds of the primar y texts come from Aberdeenshire. 1) The ballad in Scottish tradition is a song that tells a story, a compact narrative

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... cating history, experience, and happenstance along with the human emotional responses to them. The songs contain some of the most distilled and powerful poetic language to be found anywhere, in the service of dramatic, and sometimes horrifying plots. Before reflecting on the form and structure of the Scottish ballad, I want to focus on the people who sing. There has been extensive research on ballad texts, their background history, and the melodies to which they were sung, but comparatively little attention spent on who sings, why they sing, what it means to them, and how the songs function in their lives. The following may be considered a brief introduction to four prominent Scottish Traveller families, people for whom song is a part of daily life, a part of regular human communication, rather than for performance on a stage. On the way, we will encounter their society and consider their singing style. Families are the basic unit of folk song. Songs are sung in the home in everyday life. They are not just for a formal evening, but rather sung casually by the fireside on an evening, or perhaps with a small gathering of friends. But for the most part, the songs are sung as people go about their daily lives: cleaning, working, taking care of children. Songs have a deeply symbolic role in the lives of those raised with them. In singing songs, memories are evoked of where they were heard, who sang them and what it felt like at the time. Jane Turriff recalls, "My granfather, he used tae come in about an [he'd be] goin away tae his work an that: very, very happy singin, always singin"(Turriff 1996: 8) . She talked, too, of her father, his way of being, singing as he readied himself for work. This is not about the song, as such, but about the person and about memory. And it is not a performance, but a man living with a song under his breath(see McKean 2014 for more on Jane's father and the texture of song in singers' lives) . Before we meet our families, a word about Scottish Travellers, a semi-nomadic people considered native to Scotland with a pair of intertwined origin legends:(1)they are Scotland's oldest indigenous people, itinerant metalworkers(tinsmiths)and current families descend from those who no longer had employment after the breakdown of the clan system (Douglas 2006: 1, 5,