Joe Rae’s home stands a couple of miles to the east of Beith, at the foot of a brae where a clear spring provides a year-round water supply. Joe and his wife Jean, who is descended directly from Robert Burns, have lived there for over thirty years, although Joe is not originally from this part of Ayrshire.
Joe was born in Lanarkshire in 1937, between Davel and Strathaven, where the road goes by Bow Butts. His father, David Rae, was a ploughman at Rylandside Farm. Soon, though, the family moved into Ayrshire, to a farm at Sornhill. Joe learnt his first song - a single verse - when he was sitting in a tree with Davie Gibson, the gardener’s boy, in a walled-garden at Cessnock Castle. Joe spent much of his youth with his maternal grandfather, John Rogerson, who worked as a shepherd at Blackside, just above Thorn. He worked at “the oot-bye places aifter ma grannie died” and it was from John that Joe first heard many of the songs, ballads and stories that he performs today.
Joe, like many Scottish singers, sings complete songs. There are very few fragmented texts in his repertory. And almost all of his songs and ballads are sung slowly to strikingly beautiful tunes. There is, I feel, a connection between all these things and the fact that his songs and ballads came to him directly from farmworkers and shepherds, especially the latter. Many of the early Scottish Covenanters - those people who wished the Scottish Church to break away from the English King Charles I, a man who believed in the Divine Right of Kings, an authoritarian creed that claimed the monarch was God’s representative on earth and, therefore, his authority had divine sanction; a concept entirely counter to Protestant thought - were also shepherds, who had plenty of time to sit outdoors and read their Bible as they looked after their sheep. Both John Rogerson and Ned Robertson - not to mention that other great Scottish shepherd singer, Willie Scott - would have had ample time to sing their ballads over to themselves while walking the moors with their sheep. And, again like the Covenanters, these men were extremely literate, their ballad texts clearly connected to printed sources.
Many of Joe’s ballads and songs deal with the relationships between men and women - a perennial favourite with Burns, of course. So much so that when we hear him sing a song such as Paul Jones, which concerns a sea battle, we are at once struck by the dissonance of the piece, it being so unlike his other songs. But then, of course, the song Paul Jones is really a broadside ballad - a story set to music - and Joe clearly loves stories, whether they be sung or narrated. Interestingly, when Joe performs the ballad of Sir Patrick Spence (Child 58) he treats it as a spoken poem and not as a sung ballad; rather in the manner of the ballad Mary Hamilton (Child 173) which Jeannie Robertson always maintained had been recited like a poem by her ancestors....http://www.mustrad.org.uk
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