Joe Rae

Joe Rae: was born in Lanarkshire in 1937, between Davel and Strathaven, where the road goes by Bow Butts.  His father, David Rae, was a ploughman at Rylandside Farm.  Soon, though, the family moved into Ayrshire, to a farm at Sornhill.  He attended Barr Primary School in Galston, where he remembers an old lady who used to sit by the school gate smoking a cutty pipe, her head covered with a black shawl.  Later he was at a one-room school close to Mairch Hoose (so-called because it was the boundary, or mairch, for three parishes), when his family moved yet again, seeking employment at another farm.

In 1947 Joe’s family moved to Mauchline, where Joe spent the next six months at school before finally completing his schooling at Cummock Academy.  Joe spent much of his youth with his maternal grandfather, John Rogerson, who worked as a shepherd at Blackside, just above Thorn.  He worked at “the oot-bye places aifter ma grannie died” and it was from John that Joe first heard many of the songs, ballads and stories that he performs today.  John started his working life when he was only ten, at “the Glen heid o’ Glentrool - a Galloway sheep ferm that had mair stanes than grass. Round here there is a place Auchencloich, that’s Gaelic for the field o’ stanes, an I reckon that the ferm must have been like that.  An the ferm wis sae big that it was measured in square miles - not in acres!"

By the time Joe left school he had quite a sizeable repertoire of songs and stories that he had learnt from his parents and from his grandfather.  He was fifteen when he started to work as an apprentice joiner, working under a country joiner outside Mauchline.  Much of the work involved repairs to horse-drawn carts and Joe soon became proficient at making cartwheels.  Six years later Joe began working in a builder’s office in Glasgow.  Shortly afterwards he married and moved to the small village of Sorn, about three miles east of Mauchline.  Sorn seems to have been a wonderful place for singers.  Joe’s next-door neighbour was a retired shepherd, Edward ‘Ned’ Robertson, who must have been born some time c.1885.  Apparently Ned liked to sing long ballads, one being an emigration ballad called Campbell’s Farewell tae New Cummock which Joe, much to his regret, never managed to learn.  “I loed tae hear Ned sing that one, but somehow I could never get it mysel.” Joe did, however, manage to learn The Bonny Hind, The Laird o’ Roslyn’s Doughter, Katharine Johnston and William and Lady Marjorie from Ned’s singing.  Another singer was Robert Thompson, a farm worker who was known locally as Hardy Bobbie.

Joe and his wife lived in Sorn for four years before moving to their present home in Cauldhame near Beith.  Joe now owns his own joiners shop, a few miles away in Kilmacolm, which he runs with the help of his sons; although a failed knee operation some months ago has left Joe unable to work and in considerable pain.

Some years ago Joe read about the Kinross Folk Festival in his local paper.  Prior to this he had been unaware of the folk revival in Scotland.  He went to Kinross, “to see what it was like”, and whilst there met Sheila Douglas, who later visited him to record material for her books The Sang’s the Thing (1992) and Come Gie’s A Sang (1995).  Sheila also encouraged Joe to join the Traditional Music & Song Association of Scotland (TMSA) and also to visit other Festivals, such as Newcastleton, and he has been invited to perform at the Scottish International Storytelling Festival, held annually in Edinburgh’s Netherbow Centre.

Joe recalls that for much of his early life there was no radio at home, so that when relatives, neighbours and friends gathered for a party, all the entertainment had to be home-made.

Part of the booklet notes, written by Mike Yates, to the Musical Traditions Records CDs Joe Rae: The Broom Blooms Bonny (MTCD313)