Hello, I’m Willie, and these are my songs.

They are songs of an immigrant, often nostalgic for a homeland left behind, while celebrating also a new home in Canada, with a few life-songs thrown in. 

There’s a good chance you’ll spot embellishment, embroidery and use of alternative idiom among them as I try to keep things interesting. Anyway, some songs are recently composed, others go back more than fifty years, and now, whatever their merit, I feel I should leave them for posterity and whoever might wish to sing and play them. 

I’m not daft enough to suppose there are any great hits in these pages, but since one or two have survived the years in and around my native Highland village, I am emboldened here to offer a few more. 

The song tempos are not written in stone; stick with the melodies but feel free to play around on rhythm, as long as lyrics are not compromised. 

That’s about it then folks; songs are for singing and sharing, expressing as they do, emotions and experiences common to us all on life’s journey. 

As Scottish tradition so wisely reminds us, “We’re a’ Jock Tamsons’s bairns”. 

Thank you and I do hope you enjoy “Songs of a Ross-shire Son”. 

Willie