Scottish Storyteller Digs Up Ancient Treasures

Come let us build the ship of the future

In an ancient pattern that journeys far.

Come let us set sail for the always island,

Through seas of leaving to the summer stars

*

When Robin Williamson first sang those visionary lines from his song “The Circle Is Unbroken,” it was 1968 and he was a member of the Incredible String Band, one of hippiedom’s favorite folk ensembles.

At the time, the Scottish singer and storyteller may not have anticipated just how ancient a pattern he would ultimately follow on his own musical journey.

Nowadays, when Williamson performs an oldie, he isn’t just reaching back a few decades to his ‘60s repertoire, or even a few centuries to the Celtic influences that were evident in the Incredible String Band’s diverse bag of styles.

Since the early 1980s, Williamson has been a collector and re-creator of tales from the bardic tradition of the British Isles--which means that his performances can include material handed down not through decades and centuries, but through millennia.

Williamson’s stories of witches and wizards and fantastic creatures hail from a store of myths that gave rise to the Arthurian legends, that came down to William Shakespeare as already-venerable plot lines suitable for plunder.

“My career has led in this direction--trying to take the earliest material and embody it and extend it,” Williamson, who plays Friday night at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, said over the phone recently from his apartment in Los Angeles.

“The bardic material (comes from) the early literature of Wales and Ireland,” he said. “It was written down in the Middle Ages by monks, but it was an oral literature dating back before Christ. It seems a shame to leave it on the page and in the domain of scholars. It’s meant to be a spoken thing, a performed thing.”

*

Williamson, 49, said he always has been interested in musical patterns from the past, starting with traditional folk songs of Scotland and Ireland.

“I always liked it since I was a young boy,” he said. “Bagpipes and accordion was just music that was always there, and (traditional folk) became a thing in the late ‘50s,” when the folk boom hit and “was going on in the States and Britain in a parallel way.”

In 1965, Williamson started the Incredible String Band with Mike Heron, who came from more of a rock ‘n’ roll background, and a third player, Clive Palmer. After a 1966 debut album, Williamson went to North Africa for six months and returned with the idea of incorporating all sorts of traditions into the ISB. (By that time, Palmer had left, and Williamson and Heron carried on until 1974 as the band’s key singers, songwriters and players.)

*

Through the ‘60s, the Incredible String Band drew on everything from Indian raga (with Williamson on sitar) to Middle Eastern music (with Williamson on oud) to Appalachian folk (with Williamson on fiddle) to Celtic music (with Williamson on harp and tin whistle), church hymns, and even a foray into Gilbert & Sullivan-style musical theatrics.

“In order to make interesting sounds you had to get a number of different instruments,” Williamson said. “I wanted to do an innocent kind of music--using stream-of-consciousness writing, and playing instruments without (really) being able to play them.” His purpose in this instrumental amateurism was to “break down the barrier between musician and audience. But in the beginning of the ‘70s, I became more interested in structure and form.”

The Incredible String Band moved more toward a highly amped folk-rock sound in the ‘70s, and in 1975, when it broke up, Williamson went in search of more traditional styles--first as leader of Robin Williamson & his Merry Band, then on his own.

The harp became his main instrument, and he began looking through archives for traditional songs to play.

“I did a lot of work in the National Library in Scotland,” where he found music manuscripts dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries. Though the music was written to be performed on lute or violin, Williamson transcribed it to the harp, which, his research indicated, was the instrument on which it originally was played. In 1986, he recorded the songs he had found on a two-volume album, “Legacy of the Scottish Harpers.”

“I think I’ve got most of what can be gathered that’s Scottish, but there are exciting things happening in Wales now” in terms of new discoveries of old, traditional airs.

When he isn’t touring, Williamson divides his at-home time between Los Angeles, where he first moved in 1975, and a house in the Welsh seaport of Cardiff.

*

Williams started bringing ancient bardic legends to life in the early 1980s, when he composed music for a dance-theater presentation of a cycle of Welsh legends, “The Mabinogi.” In concert, he interweaves folk songs (including some Incredible String Band nuggets) with narrative, accompanying himself on the harp while retelling ancient tales or newer ones he has written himself.

“A story is a bunch of words. Only when someone puts life into them do they acquire any real meaning,” Williamson said. To that end, he added, it helps if the storyteller has lived some stories of his or her own. “In order to have the right sort of voice, the right sort of heart, it takes time. . . . It only becomes interesting after you’ve done the time. There are songs I sang when I was 16 that I still sing, but they’re very different songs now.”

Williamson said that time hasn’t altered the idealism that is apparent in such songs as the ISB-vintage “The Circle Is Unbroken,” a yearning, prayerful and still all-too-relevant song that envisions humanity’s long, dark night of bloodshed giving way to a “bright morning” of peace.

“I do some very sad stories, without hope, but the general drift of what I do has to do with the fact that there is an ultimate destiny that is positive,” Williamson said. “Even if the world were completely without hope, I would endeavor to create hope out of nothing.”

*

In an era of booming amplification and saturation video, one wonders what hope Williamson has of finding listeners who will sit still for the unfolding of a tale told only with his strange, quavery voice, and the plucking of a harp.

“People a hundred years ago used to listen more closely than they do now,” he said. “There are accounts of people applauding individual lines of Shakespeare and individual gestures. It is a fact that (attention spans and concentration) have changed. Sensation is addictive, isn’t it? However, there is definitely a move in Britain and America toward radical innovations such as the six-string acoustic guitar.”

“I was lucky to be in on the outset of certain waves,” he continued. “The hippie thing, the flower-power year of ‘67, the traditional-style songwriting in the ‘70s, and the storytelling thing in the ‘80s.

“The ‘90s has quite a lot of elements of the ‘60s again--an interest in radical things like stand-up poetry and performing styles involving, for lack of a better word, an impassioned voice,” he said. “People are sick of the glitter and gloss, and want a bit of heart in it, a bit of blood on the tracks. I’m all in favor of that.”

* Robin Williamson plays Friday at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, 28062 Forbes Road, Laguna Niguel. $15. (714) 364-5270.