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Describe the atmosphere and live music at a local pub, restaurant, festival, church or temple, club night.... inspire other people to check it out!
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Musician: Sheila Stewart
Location: Scotland
Instruments: voice
Music: Scottish Ballads
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 ÌýÌýListen (02'13) to Sheila Stewart sing an untitled ballad
ÌýÌýListen (20'24) to a feature on Sheila Stewart, recorded by Verity Sharp for broadcast on World Routes on 25 October
'Ballads were always a part of my family's heritage - singing round the camp fires, just for their own pleasure'.
How I came to this music:
I was born in 1937, in a stable in Blairgowrie in Scotland. It wasn't the 25 December, it was berry-picking time in July - a good time of year for travellers. My family were tinkers, and earned their living from hawking, besom making and seasonal farm-work. They still went up the glens, and had a horse and cart and went hawking, but then they would go away and stay at farms, pulling the flax and cutting the corn.
Ballads were always a part of my family's heritage - singing round the camp fires, just for their own pleasure. Ballads that had to be preserved. Hamish Henderson from the School of Studies collected a ballad called The Twa Brothers, and the one he collected from my family went back to the 12th century.
My mother always sang to me - not for other people, but just for me. The first song I can remember is Twa Heeds are Better than One. But my mother learned me the songs, but never taught me how to sing them - that was my Uncle Donald, who said that if you cannot give courtesy to the ballad, don't sing it.
 From 1954, we were performing together as a family - my mother Belle, my father, my sister Cathie and me. We all had our own songs to sing, and we couldn't dip into each others' songs in public.
When my mother was alive, we always stood behind her on the stage, and the freedom I got when I decided to carry on after her death was unbelievable. I felt as if I was just born at that minute - I could do what I liked, I could speak to the audience, and I could be myself. It's an honour to be handed a culture that is dead - I'm the last in the line, but I will honour it with courtesy.
I sing the songs with a conyach, which means the emotion or feeling that you put into the ballads. Some songs, I don't hear myself singing them, but I hear my family singing them, and I connect to them as I sing.
Where I play:
I sing all over Scotland now, at festivals and big concerts. I don't do many folk clubs now, but I do concerts in America, and at Universities and Colleges.
The rest of my family has got the ballads, but they will never ever come out and perform them. I do a lot of lecturing on the oral culture of the travelling people. They'll never do that either, so when I die, that goes. Also, the language of the travellers, the cant, no-one speaks that any more. There's a whole way of life that will die when I go six feet under. My family won't keep it going because they've blended in with society, whereas I used to get beaten up in Blairgowrie.
A favourite song:
It's a ballad about years ago, when the servant girls went into service, and the lords used to court the servant girls, and usually got away with it. but this girl didn't let the lord win this time.
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