The result of over thirty years’ oral fieldwork among the last of the Gaels in Cape Breton, as well as an exhaustive synthesis of Scottish archival sources, this book shows that traditional community bagpiping in the Old and New World Gaidhealtachdan was, and for a long time remained, the same. John Gibson explores the distortions introduced by the tendency to interpret the written record from the perspective of modern, post-eighteenth-century bagpiping. |