250th Birthday of Scottish Song Collector Alexander Campbell

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALEXANDER CAMPBELL!

born 22.2.1764 

Karen has written and talked and blogged about Alexander Campbell so much over the past

eight or nine years that we hardly need to go over his biography again.  However, it would be shabby not to mention his 250th birthday on Saturday 22nd February.  His was a fascinating life. He dabbled in many things, and didn't achieve particular greatness, but he left a pile of published writings and Scottish music.  

You can read about Campbell at length in Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song Collecting from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Era.  (There's a copy in the Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.)  You'll also find further writing on Karen's Academia.edu pages.

Some of his songs from Albyn's Anthology have been arranged for sax ensemble, and Karen has recordings by a Cambridge saxophone ensemble called Saxual Healing:-

• Alexander Campbell Saxophone Quartet and Hebridean Suite on SoundCloud 

Finally, Jo Currie's book, Mull: the Island and its People, contains a big chunk from Campbell's Hebridean song-collecting diary (the time he spent on Mull, specifically) - warmly recommended.  It's not in the Whittaker Library, but could be obtained for registered readers if anyone was interested.