The Ulster-Scots Musical Revival. Transforming Tradition in a Post-Conflict Environment

This paper describes the Ulster-Scots Musical Revival which started in the late 1990s, and argues that neither Hobsbawm & Ranger’s conception of “invented tradition” nor Rosenberg’s theorisation of folk revivals as appropriations of tradition are adequate to understand this ongoing musical and social movement. By comparing the Ulster-Scots revival with earlier “Irish traditional music” revivals, I will argue that the Ulster-Scots movement is significantly different both from Irish revivals and from the American folk revivals theorised in Rosenberg’s volume, in that it is not the appropriation of a working-class music by a middle-class constituency, but a deliberate transformation of tradition undertaken by members of the originating communities.