Natalie MacMaster fiddles in reel time Video on TED.com
Words to the song: Blue is a River
Blue remembers
Blue like a planet to a spaceman
Blue river of my tears
Like the heather on the hillside
As they drove us from the highlands
Like the iceflow from the Artic
Where we landed in Newfoundland
There's a colour to my sorrow
There's a name for all this sadness
Like the ocean in between us,
I am blue.
Blue is a river
Blue remembers
Blue water running clear
Blue like a planet to a spaceman
Blue river of my tears
So I came here to the city
Where the dream burns like a furness
And I dazzled in these dark streets
Like a diamond in a coalface
Till the cold wind from the islands
Blew a storm cloud across the new moon
Like the gunsmoke above the houses
In my home.
Blue is a river
Blue remembers
Blue water running clear
Blue like a planet to a spaceman
Blue river of my tears
Blue river of my tears.
The history about this song of the Scottish Highland is that during the potato famines of the late 18th and 19th centuries, out of the goodness of their hearts, many English landowners offered their Scottish peasant tenants free passage to the New World on hired cargo ships. No mention of course was made of the fact that this "offer" was commonly delivered by pressgangs, and that the real purpose behind the clearances was to convert the lands into fine sporting estates where the land owners and their London friends might shoot grouse and fish for trout.
Copied from the post by Chris Anderson
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