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= William Mathieson = William Mathieson (21st Nov 1879 - 2 Aug 1958) known as "Willie" was a Scottish singer, poet, folk song collector and farm worker. He spoke North-East Scots, or Doric, a regional variety of the Scots language.

Early Life
He born in Overton of Dudwick, Ellon, in a stone cottage with a slated roof, though the family soon moved, when Mathieson was one, to a croft at Muir o Bank, Whitestone Hill, Dudwick, just down the road. This was a simpler clay-built house, with an earthen floor, a timmer lum, and a thatched roof retained against the winds off the North Sea with ropes. When this house was lost in a fire, the neighbours all came to help replace it, cutting sods and rushes for a new roof – the North-East tradition of neepering, looking after your neighbours when they need it.

Mathieson cited his time in the cradle as the beginning of his lifelong fascination with song.

Education
Mathieson left school at eleven years old, to begin work with Sandy Massie, Feltachie, Ellon, filling and digging drains for agricultural improvement. The Education Act of 1872 had required education to age 13, but if you could show proficiency in “the three Rs” (reading, writing, and arithmetic), you could leave earlier. Mathieson collected his own songs in ledger notebooks from the age of seven.

Working Life
Mathieson worked at various farms all over the North-East corner of Scotland. The living conditions were difficult, as those employed lived in unheated rooms in stables and barns. He has been reported as being a drainer and a ploughman.

Mathieson was at Dunlugas Estate outside Turriff when James Madison Carpenter met him, and in King Edward when Hamish Henderson recorded him twenty years later. In all his life, Mathieson never travelled outside the North-East of Scotland (or indeed south of Stonehaven or west of Forres), until 1952, when he went with Henderson to Edinburgh to supervise the copying of his notebooks.

Mathieson kept his notebooks in his kist, the small wooden chest in which farm servants stored their few possessions as they moved from farm to farm.

Repertoire
In the course of decades of his itinerant farm work on short-term contracts, Mathieson acquired a broad and diverse repertoire of traditional material, from highly localised occupational songs of farm life – “bothy ballads” or bothy songs, so called because of their association with the farm servants’ accomodation – to extensive versions of international ballads. He also had an ear for other kinds of tradition, so his notebooks include interesting notes on calendar customs, pro-verbs and epigrams or aphorisms, along with stories and jokes of varying lengths.The material comes from a wide variety of sources: relatives, including his own wife, friends, other farm workers met in a lifetime of moves from farm to farm, print sources, and some correspondence, and includes some Irish material from itinerant workers. This latter point should come as no surprise, as “local” North-East tradition is quite diverse and far reaching in its makeup. Indeed, when schoolmaster Gavin Greig set out to collect folk songs in the North-East in 1904, he found that around one third of the repertoire of “local” songs was, in fact, Irish in origin.Mathieson was a dedicated and diligent collector, sometimes acquiring a song in a single meeting, following up with correspondence, or travelling some way to hear and procure a song for his collection.

His record keeping was methodical and precise, with typical entries like this one, which finishes off the last leaf of the 1926–30 volume, "This book was finished on 18.8.30 and I commenced to write this book on the 6/2/26 close on 5 years. Written by me Mr William Mathieson, Denhead Cotts, Dunlugas, Turriff, Aberdeenshire".

International Interest
Mathieson’s songs first came to the attention of outsider scholars in 1930, when American collector James Madison Carpenter was travelling throughout North-East Scotland in his open-topped Austin 7 car, he collected more than a hundred and fifty songs from Willie. At the time, Mathieson was working as a cattleman on the Dunlugas Estate, near Turriff, Aberdeenshire, where Carpenter visited him at his then home, Denhead of Dunlugas. Carpenter would record a stanza or two of each song on a cylinder recorder, to make note of the tune, and then take down the words, couplet by couplet, on his portable typewriter. He would then revise and correct the text in consultation with the contributor. The full collection is now available online; see Carpenter Collection.

In 1951, Hamish Henderson, in the company of American collector, Alan Lomax, recorded some material from Mathieson, later released on the latter’s World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series for Columbia Records (Lomax 1998). The following year, Mathieson became the first “traditional singer”, in Henderson’s phrase, to record for the School of Scottish Studies (Henderson 1992: 25). Hamish spent days with Mathieson, camped out at the Commercial Hotel in Turriff, filling twenty-three 7-inch reel-to-reel tapes with songs as they worked their way through Mathieson’s manuscript notebooks song by song to document their tunes and backgrounds, while also meeting some of Mathieson’s friends, such as Lordie Hay. These tapes contain a wealth of contextual detail about Mathieson’s life, his relationship with song, and about the songs themselves and their history, information which builds an anecdotal narrative around the facts and names contained in the manuscripts. Henderson also collected around 450 songs for the nascent School of Scottish Studies from Mathieson.

Mathieson accompanied by Hamish Henderson met the actor, writer and folk music singer Burl Ives in Edinburgh, he purchased songs from William Mathieson.

Death
William Mathieson died on the 2nd of August 1958 aged 78 at Chalmer's Hospital in Banff. He died of cardiac failure.

Legacy
Mathieson collected his own material in ledger notebooks from the age of seven, eventually filling more than half a dozen of them and amassing around 650 songs.

Copies of Mathieson’s handwritten notebooks are held at the Archive of the School of Scottish Studies, Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh. The original volumes are still in the possession of his family.

Some recordings of Willie Mathieson singing and in conversation are available at The Well of Hope website.

His Music is still being released to global audiences 61 years after his passing.

Discography
The Bonnie Rantin' Laddie - The Alan Lomax Collection: Classic Ballads of Britain and Ireland, Vol. 2; Alan Lomax; World; 2000

Noo I'm a Young Man Cut Down in My Prime - The Unfortunate Rake; Various Artists; Singer/Songwriter; 1960

The King's Daughter - Folk Songs of England Ireland & Scotland 1; Alan Lomax; Rounder Select; 2000