The fresh new folk sounds reinvigorating Scotland's music scene

Dubh’s band features vocals, harp, bass guitar and drum kit, but she plays with all kinds of groups from an electronic folk flautist to jazz bands to flamenco ensembles.

“It works so well, it fits into any situation, and I love showing people that … I really like exploring what possibilities there are for the instrument,” she says.

Folk has been a huge part of Scottish music since the Folk Revival in the 1960s. “It was a ­fantastic ­decade to be a young person … the culture was ­changing,” says John Barrow, who was a student in Edinburgh at the time. Barrow and his drinking ­buddies at Sandy Bell’s bar went on to found Edinburgh’s longest-running folk club and a trad music record label and to run numerous folk festivals.

Activis, poet, songwriter and makar of all kinds Hamish Henderson was ­arguably the father of the Scottish Folk Revival. His self-written eulogy predicted that: “Tomorrow, songs / Will flow free again, and new voices / Be borne on the carrying stream.”

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The “carrying stream” has since ­become shorthand for the evolution of Scottish folk tradition, which connects musicians and songwriters with a ­common thread while evolving with each new generation.

Archie Fisher (MBE), whose prolific music career spans from the early 1960s to the present day – including almost three decades presenting BBC Radio Scotland’s ­Travelling Folk – has seen the evolution of this stream in Scotland.

Fisher says that while folk has steadily become more varied and more popular over the decades, there is currently an “emerging wave of new young singers and musicians … not only carrying with them a core of traditional material but enriching it with new compositions on traditional instruments”.

“There’s this really cool new trad era coming in at the minute and I’m so here for it,” agrees Dubh, whose experimentation with the harp is a perfect example of the new trends in Scottish folk.

“I discovered [harp] in the traditional music scene at home,” adds Dubh, who grew up in Ballycastle on the north coast of Ireland. Dubh’s first live ­performances were on her doorstep at the age of five. Keen to be involved in the busking and street performances of the town fair, Dubh and her sister established their front yard stage with a hat in front of them and their two tin whistles. The ­sisters’ main audience member was their pet dog, and their earnings were about 20 pence. “It’s come a long way since then!” she laughs.

Dara Dubh

Dubh later took up the fiddle, but at age 11, the harp in the corner of her music ­teacher’s living room caught her eye. ­After trying it out once, she was hooked.

Although it’s a notoriously expensive ­instrument, Dubh’s father found a harp on Ebay for £400.

“It was terrible!” laughs Dara, “It came with this big crack up the inside so every time I would tune it all the strings would untune … none of the levers on it worked on it or anything … but to me it was just ‘ah, I’ve got a harp, this is amazing!’”

Dubh started playing harp at weddings when she was 15, but it was only after school that she thought of turning her musical hobby into a career. Thanks to the ever-present link between Irish and Scottish folk traditions, Dubh was keen to study music in Scotland as somewhere with a similar music tradition, but enough distance to provide a fresh mindset.

Training in Edinburgh widened Dubh’s musical experience far outside of the Irish folk tunes and pop covers she had been playing as a teenager. But it would still take a lot of trial and error, and (sometimes feigned) confidence to convince other performers that her harp could do more than quiet classical tunes.

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Dubh describes arriving at funk and jazz jam nights: “People would say, ‘I don’t ­really know how that’s going to fit in here’ … and I didn’t even really know at that point either, but I just said, ‘Look, you ­worry about your thing I’ll worry about my thing.’”

Fast forward a few years and Dubh has released three singles, plays a regular gig as part of an electric guitar-harp duo, and her harp-vocals-bass-drumkit band has a summer full of headline shows and ­festival appearances across Scotland.

“I still love playing trad music, it’ll ­always have a wee piece of me … but I have so many influences on how I play now and I absolutely love that,” she says.

While the current wave of trad music seems to be defined by the blending of genres and of different national traditions, many in the industry see this as a continuation of what folk has always been.

“This is the story of folk music, stuff from Indian folk ends up in gypsy music, Appalachian tunes came from Scotland,” says Jane-Ann Purdy, who organises ­Edinburgh’s annual Tradfest.

Archie Fisher performs at A Concert for Bert Jansch at the Celtic Connections Festival 

Edinburgh Tradfest’s programme this year featured a huge variety of arrangements, from the more “standard” fiddle groups to a trio reworking Shetland folk tunes with saxophone, organ pedal and drum.

“We like to push out the ­boundaries as much as possible,” says Purdy. “­Whatever people are doing with it is fine, that’s what’s always happened with folk music.”

At Sandy Bell’s – where its nightly music sessions remain a pillar of Scottish folk – the staff are proud to have musicians of various ages and nationalities. A staff member and regular performer remembers the first time she walked into the bar: “I was expecting a bunch of old men playing fiddles … but instead I got these three raggedy boys in their early twenties – a Latvian, a boy from Falkirk and a Canadian kid, and they’re all just jamming in there doing a lot of ­Appalachian Deep South folk tunes.”

Fisher believes that this variety in folk is both a consequence and a cause of the genre’s increasing popularity over the decades; more listeners lead to more ­performers, and new performers bring a new style which attracts a wider ­audience; and the cycle continues.

But Fisher, along with folk organisers all over, agrees that the sheer volume of new artists entering the trad music scene is down to education.

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In 2015, the Royal Conservatoire – formerly the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) – launched the UK’s only BMus in Traditional ­Music. The National Centre for Excellence in Traditional Music was established in Plockton on the West Coast in 2000. For three decades now, the Fèis movement has been providing tuition and festivals in Gaelic language and music.

Across the water, Dubh credits her love for music to the tuition and ­festivals ­offered by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí ­Éireann (society of the musicians of ­Ireland), which is very similar to the Fèis ­movement.

However, while the folk music ­industry in general is enjoying the fruit of these centres of excellence for traditional ­music, other aspects of the folk scene are struggling to keep up with the pace of change.

Edinburgh’s oldest folk club – founded in 1973 – is struggling to find a younger audience. The 40-year-old Star Folk Club in Glasgow closed its doors last year. Barrow, who is still working to keep the Edinburgh Folk Club going, says that the number of folk clubs across Scotland has dwindled drastically.

While high-quality training for folk ­music is obviously progress, folk club members fear that the role which clubs used to play as the training ground for young musicians is now redundant. And with no young performers coming to try out their music, there’s no young ­audience either.

On the other hand, the laid-back, unpretentious pub sessions at institutions like Sandy Bell’s have not lost their charm, even 50 years after Barrow and his friends drank there.

“You just can’t beat the craic of a ­session, at a wee pub like Sandy Bell’s or The Royal Oak, where everyone’s just blasting out tunes – it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Ireland or Scotland ... there’s a real heart to it” says Dubh.

So, in 2024, Henderson’s ­carrying stream prophecy reigns true; the ­instruments, tunes and even some of the places that made folk music boom in the 1960s still stand strong. The ­acceptance of trad music into high-end musical ­education has opened the folk tradition up to a huge influx of new artists bringing a new mix of genres and cultures.

Looking downstream, Fisher reckons we only have more to look forward to.

“There is still a strong … host of ­fundamental traditional Scottish ­singers with a wealth of material available to them – and all of these streams can and will flow forward together.”