Ulster-Scots Song

This chapter explores the significance of Ulster-Scots song in the long eighteenth century. The period after the signing of the Good Friday / Belfast Agreement saw many statements about the existence or otherwise of an Ulster-Scots musical tradition. This chapter will draw upon the work of a number of songwriters in the eighteenth century as well as interventions by archivists, collectors, and critics in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to gather, preserve, and disseminate knowledge about Ulster-Scots song and musical traditions. It contends that significant interplay took place between Scottish and Irish song, balladry, and tunes in the long eighteenth century, and it traces in particular the impact of Scottish song within both the culture of various communities and the print industry in Ireland. In the early eighteenth century, poetry and song in the Scots language proved an important constituent of the Irish literary arena and acted as a means to focus not merely upon Scotland’s politics, history, and culture within Great Britain and Ireland, but also to examine the politics, history, culture, and religion of northerners in Ireland whose Scottishness began to take on an increased significance in their self-representation.