Webspinner
Webspinner
Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller
Born in 1928 in a tent on the shore of Loch Fyne, Argyll, Duncan Williamson (d. 2007) eventually came to be recognized as one of the foremost storytellers in Scotland and the world. Webspinner: Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller is based on more than a hundred hours of tape-recorded interviews undertaken with him in the 1980s. Williamson tells of his birth and upbringing in the west of Scotland, his family background as one of Scotland’s seminomadic travelling people, his varied work experiences after setting out from home at about age fifteen, and the challenges he later faced while raising a family of his own, living on the road for half the year.
The recordings on which the book is based were made by John D. Niles, who was then an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Niles has transcribed selections from his field tapes with scrupulous accuracy, arranging them alongside commentary, photos, and other scholarly aids, making this priceless self-portrait of a brilliant storyteller available to the public. The result is a delight to read. It is also a mine of information concerning a vanished way of life and the place of singing and storytelling in Traveller culture. In chapters that feature many colorful anecdotes and that mirror the spontaneity of oral delivery, readers learn much about how Williamson and other members of his persecuted minority had the resourcefulness to make a living on the outskirts of society, owning very little in the way of material goods but sustained by a rich oral heritage.
Niles’s transcriptions capture Duncan’s voice well and offer insights into the Travellers, Duncan’s worldview, and his talent as a storyteller and singer.
Williamson’s repertoire and legacy demonstrate that he was - is, in the way that this is eternal - a tradition bearer. The joy of Webspinner, for me, was that it demonstrates how.
Well thought-out and uniquely assembled, John D. Niles’s work highlights underexplored facets of Williamson’s life and artistry, giving rich and invaluable context to the wonderful stories and songs for which Williamson is best known.
Duncan Williamson, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest storytellers, has been the focus of innumerable biographies, collections, studies, and homages, but Webspinner combines and transcends them all. It is arguably the best in all four categories.
John D. Niles is author of Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature and a number of other books relating to early medieval literature and the theory and practice of oral narrative. Before his retirement in 2011, he taught at Brandeis University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was the Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities.
