
TITLE: Webspinner
AUTHOR: John D. Niles
PUBLISHER: University Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781496841582
PODCAST EPISODE: None
REVIEWER: Erin Farley
Webspinner is a book which has been a long time in the making, and is all the better for it. Compiled from author John D. Niles’ transcripts of interviews he conducted with the legendary Scottish Traveller storyteller Duncan Williamson in the 1980s, this book contains a wealth of Williamson’s songs and stories, alongside both his own and Niles’ reflections on their place in the Scottish tradition and the process of passing on tradition itself. As well as song and story, the interviews include accounts of Williamson’s life story and family history, arranged in thematic chapters focussing on different aspects of Traveller culture and of Williamson’s life experiences. Each section of transcript is relatively short, but Niles’ sensitive approach to bringing them together, considered over decades of working with his subject and with his material, creates a multifaceted account of Duncan Williamson himself, and of how people live with traditions.
Duncan Williamson will be a familiar name to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the Scottish storytelling tradition. Williamson is one of the foundational tradition bearers of the contemporary storytelling scene, frequently remembered as both an absent friend and now, perhaps, approaching the status of semi-mythical figure himself. Williamson, often working with his (later ex-)wife Linda Williamson, produced many collections of his folk tales during his lifetime. The material included in Webspinner is substantially different from most of what has already been published - instead of longer standalone folk tales, the book draws together family stories, memories and anecdotes from Williamson’s own life, songs and ‘wee cracks.’ This focus on the local and personal is very welcome. Family stories and anecdotes are more enduring than we often assume, and form an essential part of the everyday fabric of tradition. We almost all have at least a few of these traditions, and they interact with longer folk tales and legends, becoming intertwined with them as a ‘story of where I learned this story.’ And from this focus on the details, the local and the smaller stories, Niles weaves together a larger-scale - at times almost cosmological - understanding of how narrative traditions exist within lives and worldviews.
The themes of recording, archiving and collecting tradition, and the relationship between voice and text in passing it on, are ever-present in any book based on oral history. In two Appendices to the text, Niles reflects firstly on the recording contexts for the interviews, and secondly on the process of transcribing and representing voice on the page. These make an interesting companion to Williamson’s own reflections on his gathering, learning and telling of stories which appear in the primary chapters of the book. Webspinner as a whole feels like a collaboration between interviewer and interviewee, rather than the result of a one-way gathering process. At several points in the transcripts, Williamson can be heard encouraging Niles to keep the tape running, so as not to miss anything yet to come. The book left me reflecting on the tape - and now digital - recorder as not an artificial performance context but another one among many, now integral to our networks of story and memory.
A related, though older, dynamic which is illuminated throughout this book is the interaction between oral tradition and print. I suspect that Steve Roud’s assertion in Folk Song in England that ‘there has not been a pure oral tradition for at least 500 years’ holds equally true for Scottish storytelling. Where a technology is available to pass on stories, people make use of it. At one point, Williamson is quoted as saying “I only have use for books when they’re my own.” This is, of course, still very much a use for a book. Hopefully, we are moving past the twin cultural ideas that, on one hand, any interaction with print or recording makes a tradition less traditional and that, on the other, a printed source is somehow inherently closer to truth and accuracy than an oral one due to its unchangingness. Both have been messily interacting for centuries.
The best example of this process in Webspinner is the piece from which the title itself is taken. Webspinner is not an ancient folk tale or ballad, but a recitation which was one of Williamson’s favourites at the time Niles recorded him. As Niles notes, recitations - often comic rhyming narratives performed at ceilidhs and singarounds - are easy to overlook in favour of bigger, more dramatic songs or stories, but they are a key thread of the Scottish performance tradition. Webspinner tells the story of the eponymous anti-hero, a spider introduced as ‘a miser old’, and his battle against Baron Bluebottle. Though Williamson’s version was very much his own, Webspinner is a nineteenth-century poem by Mary Howitt, learned when Williamson was at school in Furnace. Concluding the book through a meditation on this poem and its place in Williamson’s life, Niles demonstrates not just the varied sources of a tradition bearer’s repertoire but the collective meaning built up by seemingly ephemeral parts of our culture.
Webspinner also gives us an insight into Williamson’s craft of storytelling: not just the stories themselves, but the ways in which he learned, conceptualised and performed them. In the chapter ‘The How and Why of Storytelling,’ Williamson speaks about stories as existing “in boxes” in his mind between tellings, with almost no potential for confusion between them. Stories were distinct entities, and once learned in Duncan’s own way, rather than that of the teller he heard it from, they rarely changed. For Williamson, one of the ultimate purposes of storytelling was to learn from nature, people, and the world, and pass this on to others. In particular, telling stories to, and hearing them back from, children was the joy and purpose behind much of his work.
Williamson’s reflections on this process belie the still pervasive idea that tradition bearers ‘just happen’ - the act of learning and passing on tradition has always, and will always be, a purposeful work. In one recording, Williamson tells Niles’ young son Alan a spooky bedtime story, ‘The Skeletons and the Tinker,’ in which the hero helps lay the skeleton of a young man to rest and is well rewarded for his actions. The recording includes a post-story conversation with Alan, which although brief touches on the nature of truth and story, death and resurrection, and Grayskull from He-Man:
What do you think, Alan? Was it true?
[General laughter.] It wasn’t true??? How was it not true?
AN: Because, because—skeletons aren’t real.
Because skeletons don’t die; only human beings die. But skeletons can come
back again! You’ve never heard the story of the dancing skeleton? How about
Grayskull? He’s a skeleton. Grayskull’s a skeleton. You love Grayskull, don’t you?
AN: No. Grayskull’s only got a face like a skeleton.
Perhaps this is not, on the surface of it, the most in-depth discussion - but as well as evoking the joy of the storytelling experience, it is a welcome reminder of the importance of the post-story conversation to the meaning and interpretation of the story itself, and of the importance of telling and hearing stories in informal settings. In a contemporary context, we’re used to hearing about the therapeutic or educational potential of stories, but Williamson’s reflections remind us we are not the first generation to have known these ideas, even if not under these terms.
Williamson’s own deep understanding of voice and language as a performer is evident too, with one of my favourite details being his description of performing stories in different dialects of Scots, depending on the story itself or the audience to which he is telling it. Sometimes a Doric story only makes sense in Doric. As Williamson puts it, “I’m not tryin tae copy the folk. I’m jist tryin tae tell the story the way it was told tae me, Jack.” A few moments later in the same recording, Williamson describes how each time he tells a story, he is transported back to the first time he heard it: “I’m back where I begun. I just reverse myself an go back to where I heard it.” This line has stayed with me for at least two reasons. One is the cassette-metaphor of the storyteller being able to ‘reverse themselves,’ as if memory itself is a kind of tape. The other is its encapsulation of an idea which I keep returning to in both my research and my own storytelling practice, a concept which I first recall hearing about from the Orcadian tradition bearer Tom Muir - that each time we tell a story, we re-call into being, somewhere, on some level, every other teller and telling of it throughout time.
And so it continues. Williamson’s repertoire and legacy demonstrate that he was - is, in the way that this is eternal - a tradition bearer. The joy of Webspinner, for me, was that it demonstrates how.
AUTHOR: John D. Niles
PUBLISHER: University Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781496841582
PODCAST EPISODE: None
REVIEWER: Erin Farley
Webspinner is a book which has been a long time in the making, and is all the better for it. Compiled from author John D. Niles’ transcripts of interviews he conducted with the legendary Scottish Traveller storyteller Duncan Williamson in the 1980s, this book contains a wealth of Williamson’s songs and stories, alongside both his own and Niles’ reflections on their place in the Scottish tradition and the process of passing on tradition itself. As well as song and story, the interviews include accounts of Williamson’s life story and family history, arranged in thematic chapters focussing on different aspects of Traveller culture and of Williamson’s life experiences. Each section of transcript is relatively short, but Niles’ sensitive approach to bringing them together, considered over decades of working with his subject and with his material, creates a multifaceted account of Duncan Williamson himself, and of how people live with traditions.
Duncan Williamson will be a familiar name to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the Scottish storytelling tradition. Williamson is one of the foundational tradition bearers of the contemporary storytelling scene, frequently remembered as both an absent friend and now, perhaps, approaching the status of semi-mythical figure himself. Williamson, often working with his (later ex-)wife Linda Williamson, produced many collections of his folk tales during his lifetime. The material included in Webspinner is substantially different from most of what has already been published - instead of longer standalone folk tales, the book draws together family stories, memories and anecdotes from Williamson’s own life, songs and ‘wee cracks.’ This focus on the local and personal is very welcome. Family stories and anecdotes are more enduring than we often assume, and form an essential part of the everyday fabric of tradition. We almost all have at least a few of these traditions, and they interact with longer folk tales and legends, becoming intertwined with them as a ‘story of where I learned this story.’ And from this focus on the details, the local and the smaller stories, Niles weaves together a larger-scale - at times almost cosmological - understanding of how narrative traditions exist within lives and worldviews.
The themes of recording, archiving and collecting tradition, and the relationship between voice and text in passing it on, are ever-present in any book based on oral history. In two Appendices to the text, Niles reflects firstly on the recording contexts for the interviews, and secondly on the process of transcribing and representing voice on the page. These make an interesting companion to Williamson’s own reflections on his gathering, learning and telling of stories which appear in the primary chapters of the book. Webspinner as a whole feels like a collaboration between interviewer and interviewee, rather than the result of a one-way gathering process. At several points in the transcripts, Williamson can be heard encouraging Niles to keep the tape running, so as not to miss anything yet to come. The book left me reflecting on the tape - and now digital - recorder as not an artificial performance context but another one among many, now integral to our networks of story and memory.
A related, though older, dynamic which is illuminated throughout this book is the interaction between oral tradition and print. I suspect that Steve Roud’s assertion in Folk Song in England that ‘there has not been a pure oral tradition for at least 500 years’ holds equally true for Scottish storytelling. Where a technology is available to pass on stories, people make use of it. At one point, Williamson is quoted as saying “I only have use for books when they’re my own.” This is, of course, still very much a use for a book. Hopefully, we are moving past the twin cultural ideas that, on one hand, any interaction with print or recording makes a tradition less traditional and that, on the other, a printed source is somehow inherently closer to truth and accuracy than an oral one due to its unchangingness. Both have been messily interacting for centuries.
The best example of this process in Webspinner is the piece from which the title itself is taken. Webspinner is not an ancient folk tale or ballad, but a recitation which was one of Williamson’s favourites at the time Niles recorded him. As Niles notes, recitations - often comic rhyming narratives performed at ceilidhs and singarounds - are easy to overlook in favour of bigger, more dramatic songs or stories, but they are a key thread of the Scottish performance tradition. Webspinner tells the story of the eponymous anti-hero, a spider introduced as ‘a miser old’, and his battle against Baron Bluebottle. Though Williamson’s version was very much his own, Webspinner is a nineteenth-century poem by Mary Howitt, learned when Williamson was at school in Furnace. Concluding the book through a meditation on this poem and its place in Williamson’s life, Niles demonstrates not just the varied sources of a tradition bearer’s repertoire but the collective meaning built up by seemingly ephemeral parts of our culture.
Webspinner also gives us an insight into Williamson’s craft of storytelling: not just the stories themselves, but the ways in which he learned, conceptualised and performed them. In the chapter ‘The How and Why of Storytelling,’ Williamson speaks about stories as existing “in boxes” in his mind between tellings, with almost no potential for confusion between them. Stories were distinct entities, and once learned in Duncan’s own way, rather than that of the teller he heard it from, they rarely changed. For Williamson, one of the ultimate purposes of storytelling was to learn from nature, people, and the world, and pass this on to others. In particular, telling stories to, and hearing them back from, children was the joy and purpose behind much of his work.
Williamson’s reflections on this process belie the still pervasive idea that tradition bearers ‘just happen’ - the act of learning and passing on tradition has always, and will always be, a purposeful work. In one recording, Williamson tells Niles’ young son Alan a spooky bedtime story, ‘The Skeletons and the Tinker,’ in which the hero helps lay the skeleton of a young man to rest and is well rewarded for his actions. The recording includes a post-story conversation with Alan, which although brief touches on the nature of truth and story, death and resurrection, and Grayskull from He-Man:
What do you think, Alan? Was it true?
[General laughter.] It wasn’t true??? How was it not true?
AN: Because, because—skeletons aren’t real.
Because skeletons don’t die; only human beings die. But skeletons can come
back again! You’ve never heard the story of the dancing skeleton? How about
Grayskull? He’s a skeleton. Grayskull’s a skeleton. You love Grayskull, don’t you?
AN: No. Grayskull’s only got a face like a skeleton.
Perhaps this is not, on the surface of it, the most in-depth discussion - but as well as evoking the joy of the storytelling experience, it is a welcome reminder of the importance of the post-story conversation to the meaning and interpretation of the story itself, and of the importance of telling and hearing stories in informal settings. In a contemporary context, we’re used to hearing about the therapeutic or educational potential of stories, but Williamson’s reflections remind us we are not the first generation to have known these ideas, even if not under these terms.
Williamson’s own deep understanding of voice and language as a performer is evident too, with one of my favourite details being his description of performing stories in different dialects of Scots, depending on the story itself or the audience to which he is telling it. Sometimes a Doric story only makes sense in Doric. As Williamson puts it, “I’m not tryin tae copy the folk. I’m jist tryin tae tell the story the way it was told tae me, Jack.” A few moments later in the same recording, Williamson describes how each time he tells a story, he is transported back to the first time he heard it: “I’m back where I begun. I just reverse myself an go back to where I heard it.” This line has stayed with me for at least two reasons. One is the cassette-metaphor of the storyteller being able to ‘reverse themselves,’ as if memory itself is a kind of tape. The other is its encapsulation of an idea which I keep returning to in both my research and my own storytelling practice, a concept which I first recall hearing about from the Orcadian tradition bearer Tom Muir - that each time we tell a story, we re-call into being, somewhere, on some level, every other teller and telling of it throughout time.
And so it continues. Williamson’s repertoire and legacy demonstrate that he was - is, in the way that this is eternal - a tradition bearer. The joy of Webspinner, for me, was that it demonstrates how.