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Sleeve Notes
Where is the ADAM McNAUGHTAN I used to know the tall, skinny, studious youth who liked school but whose earnestness was broken now and then by a quirk of mind that revealed to him comic aspects of serious situations? He is, in fact, still there, under a greying beard and two stones of additional flesh. Twenty years' teaching have made him less enthusiastic about school, and he has changed from a coarse rugby player to a Queen's Park supporter but there is still the odd combination of earnest amateur academic and quirky comic singer.
The songs on this tape, first issued in 1975, represented not only Glasgow's past but its contemporary scene. The past is most obviously recalled in traditional pieces like The Bonnie Wee Country Lass and A Wee Drappie O't; various medleys of playground and street songs reveal a continuing tradition, while my fondness for the urban Music Hall finds expression in Ludgin Wi Big Aggie and the fragments which I learned from my father. Of my own songs They're Pulling Down the Buildings and The Transportation Ballad are the earliest, written while I was a student and still resident of Dennistoun, in Glasgow's East End. The Jeely Piece Song, The Derry And Cumberland Boys, Old Annie Brown and The Glasgow That I Used to Know date from the later sixties. Dance Noo Laddie and Now That You're Gone come from my Scandinavian period, one from Norway, the other, transformed rather than translated, from Sweden. Taken altogether, they define fairly accurately the time and the space I inhabit.