I’ve had a grand afternoon teaching Scots Song for SC&T Youth in an Aberdeen City School. The team are off doing their fourth week of “Taster Sessions” in another school, so I was asked to visit and teach some Scots songs to a group of P7s who are having a bit of an activities week while others are off on their residential trip. P7s you say? So I chose a couple of supernatural ballads that are great for engaging an older age group.

You know it’s been a good session on murder/supernatural ballads when you move on to “Twa Corbies” with a class and you ask them “What would you do if there was a deid knight behind a dyke?”

And the answer is “Make a fiddle out of his corpse?”

They learned well.

(The image is Twa Corbies by Jessie M King, 1902)