For there's no gods and there's precious few heroes
But there's plenty on the dole in the land o the leal
And it's time now to sweep the future clear
Of the lies of a past that we know was never real

This lyric comes from Brian McNeill’s 1996 album No Gods. Few people have done as much to revive interest in Scottish music as Brian McNeill. As a cofounder of The Battlefield Band in 1969, McNeill tore down barriers confining Celtic music; as a solo artist he’s akin to the troubadours of old who passed on legends and tunes in music. For nearly eight years he was Head of Scottish Music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD), where he helped mold the incredible young talent that’s about to burst upon the folk circuit. He’s also penned two novels — with a third in its final stages — is a sought-after producer, and is the creator of two audio-visual shows about Scottish immigrants.

You can find McNeill’s music in record shops, hear it on the radio and on film soundtracks, and buy it on the Internet. Just don’t look for it in anything sponsored by the Scottish Tourist Board; as the lyric above suggests, McNeill is what scholars call a revisionist, one who casts doubt on orthodox accounts. His is a history of Scotland filled with more rogues than heroes, and more tragedy than romance.

As both a music lover and a professional historian, let me add my voice to those who believe that your own historical education would be better served by listening to Brian McNeill than recycling the fairy tale past that North Americans of Scottish descent are prone to do.

I chatted with McNeill about music and history as he passed through Hartford, Connecticut, in September. McNeill began his explorations of Scottish history in earnest for his 1993 album The Back O’ the North Wind, a project devoted to tales of Scots who emigrated to North America. One of the icons he toppled on that album was Andrew Carnegie. The song “Steel Man” references not just the commodity that made Carnegie rich, but also the hard and inflexible character than inured him to the sufferings of his workers. But McNeill is no polemicist; songs dealing with historical figures are carefully researched. He already suspected that Carnegie’s misdeeds outweighed his philanthropy, but he hit the Carnegie archives before he rendered his judgment that “Carnegie was a real bastard.”

McNeill’s newest album — which took him seven years to complete because of work demands at the RSAMD — is titled The Baltic tae Byzantium. It explores Scottish immigration to Continental Europe and is meant as a sequel to The Back O’ the North Wind. Those who think his take on Carnegie is tough will be shocked by his rough treatment of John Knox, Mary Queen of Scots, and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Granted John Knox seldom makes anyone’s fantasy dinner party guest list, but on “A Far North Land” McNeill confines Knox to a hell worse than the one about which he preached. If there was anyone Knox hated worse than Satan, it was Mary, Queen of Scots; he even travelled to Geneva to ask John Calvin if there was Scriptural justification for removing Mary. The dour Knox might have been reduced to tears to find himself paired with Mary in verse. Their mutual hatred of one another notwithstanding, McNeill sees Knox and Mary as bookends, “the Lord and Lady of Misrule.”

Knox’s Calvinist intolerance is well documented, but what McNeill calls “Scotland’s mawkish view of its own history” often renders Mary as a tragic figure. “Arrogance is cold religion’s daughter,” insists McNeill. “Mary spent most of her life plotting to get the throne of England. She certainly murdered at least one husband and would have done anything to get her son on the English throne.” Both Knox and Mary “did their social and religious experimenting with the people of Scotland and they didn’t give a damn about the common people.” As he puts it in the song, “both betrayed the future of a far north land.”

As for Charles Edward Stuart, McNeill asserts, “If I go my grave having done nothing in this life but correct some of the nonsense about Bonnie Prince Charlie I’ll die a happy man.” He began deromanticizing Charlie on Back O’ the North Wind. His song “Strong Women Rule Us All with Their Tears” takes us beyond defeat at Culloden, and tells of how Flora MacDonald endured imprisonment, ostracism, and coerced exile for helping Charlie escape to France, with nary a word of thanks from Stuart or any effort to aid her. McNeill also notes that Charles “stole the treasury of the campaign” before he fled.

“How the Foreign Winds Do Blaw” on the new album further darkens Stuart’s character. Its focus is on Clementina Walkinshaw, his common law wife, a sad, lovelorn figure who followed Stuart all over Europe, although he engaged in numerous affairs and beat her during fits of alcohol and jealousy-induced rage. McNeill notes that Charles “was lionized for a time, but he came to realize the French weren’t going to bankroll him for another attempt at the English throne. He started taking tantrums and behaving so badly that he was deported from France. Charles was essentially persona non grata all over Europe. People tolerated him for a short while and then they were done with him. He used to beat the bejesus out of Walkinshaw.” After seven years of abuse Walkinshaw finally took Charlotte, their love child, and left Charles to his cups.

McNeill’s assessment of Stuart is blunt: “Some modern apologists for Charles say he was this charismatic young leader, but he took up a cause that not even his own father wished him to pursue. He told the chiefs of Scotland that the French were ready to help and on the basis of that some of the chiefs followed him. But his story wasn’t true, and a lot of people had to be threatened before they followed him.” In later life Charles “was the classic spoiled royal brat who couldn’t get it out of his head that he really wasn’t a king. He drank to the point of alcoholic insanity. If he had been a modern character he would have been certified.”

McNeill deflates a few other characters as well, including Mary’s third husband, the Earl of Bothwell, who possibily gained that status through rape; and Stuart henchman Thomas Dalyell, a figure with the dubious distinction of introducing thumbscrews to Scotland and a figure so feared he was rumoured to converse with the devil. The latter rumour, notes McNeill, almost certainly came from the fact that Dalyell often spoke the Russian he had learned in exile — a tongue that would have seemed demonic to insular Scottish villagers.

McNeill doesn’t quite believe his “precious few heroes” line from “No Gods,” however. He has plenty on his two immigration albums, but they’re common folks, not royals, clerics, or generals. Those who watched the Ken Burns series on National Parks in the United States have been introduced to one of McNeill’s heroes: John Muir. Back O’ the North Wind contains a song majestic enough to honour both naturalist and nature itself, “Muir and the Master Builder.” It’s a deeply spiritual song, but one that recommends leaving Calvinism aside to worship at “the altar of a better God by far/In the vale of the redwood cathedral.”

On The Baltic tae Byzantium, both plebian and personal heroes emerge. In “The Holland Trade,” for example, McNeill tells the nearly unknown story of the Dutch town of Verre. From the 16^th century on, there were so many Scottish émigrés there that “the Scots had their own colony, their own legal system, and their own embassy” inside the town. McNeill’s own family provides historical fodder as well. “Bring the Lassie Home” is about his parents. McNeill is half Austrian and, though he grew up in Falkirk, his first language was German. That’s because his Scottish father, whom McNeill describes as “a rough baker’s apprentice,” met his future bride during the waning days of World War II; she was “a middle-class interpreter for the Allied troops.” McNeill also relates to the new album’s title track, an on-the-wings-of-time collage of Scottish immigrants and soldiers away from home. Both of his grandfathers were in World War I, but one as a sailor in the Hapsburg navy and the other as a drummer boy for a Scottish regiment. McNeill tells an old story. “Two armies fought to a standstill in Bulgaria and the two commanders came together for a parlay. The first said to the other, ‘So Willie how are your folks in Edinburgh?’ and he replied, ‘Not so bad. Is your son still in Aberdeen?’”

It’s one of those stories that’s probably apocryphal in its specifics, but is dead true in essence. For McNeill Scotland’s ultimate tragic history lies in the sons and daughters who are Scotland’s biggest export. The story of Ewan Gillies, which McNeill tells on Back O’ the North Wind, is all too typical. In the 1850s Gillies fled the poverty of St. Kilda, the remotest of the Outer Hebrides (and abandoned in the 1930s). Gillies made a fortune in the California gold rush, but he was an unsettled exile for all his remaining days.

McNeill compares a lot of Scottish immigration to that of Mexicans crossing into the United States today. “Hardship was part of it. It’s the classic Scottish syndrome. You have to go because the place is too small, but once you leave you keep thinking about going back.” Maybe in the end that is what feeds the romantic history that McNeill has brought musical weapons to bear in trying to combat. Like many CelticLife readers, I am of Scottish descent and the fact that are more of us in North America than there are in all of Scotland says volumes about Scottish history. We can be excused for longings to return to the ancestral womb, but Brian McNeill leaves us with no excuse to perpetuate myths.