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Memoirs of a Highland Railwayman, feat. Jimmy Gray at 92 (spoken word, field recording & music)

from an t​-​Each​-​Iarainn [The Iron Horse] by Hamish Napier

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This it the biggest thing on the collection. It’ an 8-minute music-and-spoken-word piece, featuring highlights of my interviews with a 92 year old steam train driver, Jimmy Gray woven with a suite of music The Railwayman suite, that I wrote especially for him back in 2018 on The Railway.

A few times I sat around his fireside in Aviemore and he’d tell me all about his amazing life.
The music itself is a theme and variations - so it starts as an initial tune which is transformed into different dance tunes. It opens with the The Railwayman air, hits 2/4 march The March of the Bairns as he starts work, a strathspey called The Fireman as he’s promoted, and reel called The Driver, where he reaches the most heroic job of all.
Sound engineer Andrea Gobbi and I had a lot of fun producing the track together in the studio - binding words and music together.

I played it to my father, the other day, and he was a chief engineer on huge deep-sea tankers in the late 70s and early 80s. He says he really connected with what Jimmy says at the end of the track, he knows what it’s like as an retired engineer, to look back in astonishment of all those years where he and only a few other fellow-engineers were responsible for firing and driving enormously powerful machines across great distances in all hours and weathers.
My Dad says he remembers a chap called Jimmy Gunn from wick, a steam engine driver. These guys were like heroes in their local street , - he let my dad and his pals up onto the steam engine footplate when they were boys.
As a fireman or driver you had to be disciplined, hardy, dependable, good in a crisis, and having a sense of humour was important.

These are just some highlights of Jimmy Gray’s full story - but I hope it captures your imagination like it did mine.
This is real history - this is what it was like. If you’re a young man growing up in Scotland - that’s you. You’re Jimmy. You’re there. That’s the power of stories.

This track finishes with a field recording of a different steam engine - the Ivatt Class II engine of the Strathspey Steam railway passing though Aviemore. The jackdaws chattering away at the end always make me think of Jimmy.

credits

from an t​-​Each​-​Iarainn [The Iron Horse], released December 14, 2023
Musicians

Hamish Napier - field recordings, wooden flutes, whistles, piano, keyboards, programming, percussion and poems

Patsy Reid - fiddle and viola
Ross Ainslie - border pipes
James Lindsay - double bass
Fraser Stone - drum kit
Ewan Robertson - acoustic guitar (from The Railway album)

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Hamish Napier Grantown On Spey, UK

Hamish is a multi-instrumentalist and composer from the Scottish Highlands.

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