Glengrant is one of many tunes
composed by James Scott Skinner for the
great Scottish Whiskies. Glen Grant is
a distillery founded in 1840 in Rothes,
Speyside, that produces single malt
Scotch whisky. Previously owned by
Chivas Brothers Ltd, best known for
their Chivas Regal blended scotch
whisky, Glen Grant was purchased by the
Italian company Campari Group in
December 2005. It is the biggest selling
single malt Scotch whisky in Italy.
The musical
marriage between the violin and the
bagpipe has been a long and fruitful
one, and no fiddler contributed more to
the piping repertoire than James Scott
Skinner .
He was born in Banchory, a village 20
miles from Aberdeen, on August 5, 1843.
His father William had been a full-time
gardener and part-time fiddler, but when
he lost three fingers on his left hand
in a gun accident, he gave up gardening,
switched his bowing to the left hand and
became a full-time fiddler and dance
master. He died when James was only 18
months, so his influence on him was
indirect and passed on mostly through
his family.
Alexander (Sandy), the eldest of James’s
five brothers, taught James violin and
cello when he was 6. By the time he was
8 he was playing the cello for pay in
local shows with violinist Peter Milne.
At age 12 he
joined “Dr. Mark’s Little Men,” a boys’
group that performed throughout the
British Isles and played for Queen
Victoria at Buckingham Palace. He
continued to study violin from respected
masters, including French violinist
Charles Rougier, and later dancing
master William Scott, for whom it is
thought he changed his middle name to
‘Scott’ and became known thereafter as
Scott Skinner.
In 1862 he won first prize in the Sword
Dance at the Ireland Highland Dance
Competition, garnering particular
attention by being able to dance to his
own fiddling. After this he turned to
country dance teaching. In 1863 he won a
strathspey and reel competition in
Inverness for fiddling.
By 1868, at 25, he was teaching dancing
to more than 100 children at the palace
at Balmoral, taught violin privately and
performed both classical and traditional
music, including his own growing number
of compositions.
He married Jean Stewart in 1871, with
whom he had two children. Jean would
later suffer from severe mental illness,
be admitted to an asylum in 1885 and die
there in 1899, supported by Skinner when
he himself wasn’t broke. The year Jean
died he married Gertrude Mary Park, who
would subsequently “resign” from the
post and leave him in 1909 to move to
Rhodesia. These events only hint at what
has been described more than once as the
‘mess’ that was Scott Skinner’s personal
life. Despite his ability to command
high prices as a performer, the cost of
his ambitious publications frequently
pushed him to or close to bankruptcy. He
lived much of his life in hotels, or
with friends, and it was only in 1922 at
the age of 79 that he was able to buy a
home in Aberdeen and settle into
domesticity with his housekeeper, Lily
Richards.
By 1893 he had
published half a dozen books of music,
and that year he departed for a
performing tour in the United States
with piping and dancing master William
MacLennan, cousin of piper G. S.
McLennan. The tour collapsed when
MacLennan died suddenly of meningitis in
Montreal – one of piping’s great tragic
losses – and the performers were left to
fend for themselves and find their own
ways home.
The influence of this tour on Skinner
was life-changing. On his return, he
decided to give up dance teaching for
good, perform and publish full time, and
adopt Highland dress for all of his
stage performances. In his autobiography
My Life and Adventures, he
would say of this time:
When I returned from America I made
up my mind on two points. Firstly, I
decided to have done with dancing. As a
solo violinist I decided to stand or
fall. Secondly, I decided to make the
kilt my platform dress…. With the
exception of myself, there was no
Scottish violinist of any eminence at
this time…. Success happily crowned my
endeavours, and, with its realisation, I
bitterly resented the many years I had
wasted as a country dancing master.
Such statements were not untypical of
the man who declared himself “The
Strathspey King.” Yet, as poorly as he
managed his life, so did his music soar.
By 1909 he had published 10 books of
music and instruction as well as a
number of sets of sheet music. In 1899
he had begun to record his music on wax
cylinders – one of the first Scottish
artists to be recorded. This aspect of
his career would continue until 1922 and
spread his fame worldwide.
As a professional
performer we was popular but isolated –
classical performers even in Scotland
despised Scottish fiddlers, and few if
any others like him could survive on
their music alone. Following his own
personal motto “Talent does what it can,
genius does what it must,” he poured his
earnings back into publishing and
frequently courted poverty. By the 1920s
his output of compositions approached
700 tunes; these were an expression of
technique and emotion his personality
never equalled. “The Bonny Lass of Bon
Accord” remains one of the great
compositions for Scottish fiddle.
He embraced
bagpipe music, and with tunes such as
“The Laird of Drumblair,” “The Cameron
Highlanders,” “The Left-Handed Fiddler,”
“Stirling Castle,” “The Piper’s Weird,”
and “Hector the Hero,” he became the
most popular fiddler in piping. His
piping friends included no less than the
great G. S. McLennan, who wrote “The
Strathspey King” – one of the best
two-parted strathspeys in the idiom –
after him.
When Skinner died
in Aberdeen on March 17, 1927, the
Aberdeen Police Pipe Band led the
funeral cortege, 40,000 people lined the
streets, and G. S. McLennan played at
the graveside.
His musical legacy
remains for fiddlers and pipers alike,
with many a piper playing classic pipe
tunes tunes they have no idea were
written by one of the greatest Scottish
fiddlers.