Summary: Listen to folk-inspired ballads, featuring male folk-singers & wandering minstrels on this New Sounds. There are surreal songs from a haunting record, “Hirta Songs,” by Alistair Roberts and poet Robin Robertson, with texts inspired by the history, landscape and people of the remote Scottish archipelago of St. Kilda (about 100 miles off the coast of Scotland.) The record is named after the largest of these islands, where the main employment was fowling the great quantities of sea birds. (Sheep-herding, crofting and fishing were ways of life as well.) The eerie songs we’ll hear are both based on Celtic melodies; "A Fall of Sleet," is based on the tune 'The Battle of Inverlochy.' while the other, "Exodus," concerns the 1930 voluntary evacuation of the islands and is based on two tunes.
