Besom Jimmy Homesick Blues - A Lost Lost Angus Hawker and Songsmith

What connects Bob Dylan and the Ancient City, Brechin?

The correct answer is, of course, nothing. Nothing, directly that is. Despite having once owned Aultmore House near Nethy Bridge, the bard was not known to have slipped across the country for the sake of sitting on a dreich day in venerable Glebe Park watching Brechin City. Blowin' in the Wind indeed (apologies!) 

So, no direct connection. But there is a very tangental one, if you'd care to follow me. 

In the late19th century Brechin was home to a characted named Besom Jimmy, whose birth name was James Henderson, whose only known gift to posterity was a song called Come A' Ye Tramps and Hawkers. Jimmy was evidently a hawker himself, though I don't know whether he was as well-travelled as the protagonist of his ballad boasts. In fact, I know nothing more about him (though any facts would be gratefully received). 

Jimmy is all but forgotten, but his song achieved an amorphous afterlife which is typical of the kind of popularity which folk songs sometimes achieved, being spread much more far and widely than most other types of popular music in the 20th century, entirely through repitition from one performer to another. 

We can trace the song being sung in the trenches of World War One by a fellowGordon Highlander (possibly George Robertson Stewart), who passed it on to his comrade Jimmy MacBeath of Portsoy. This Jimmy was a character who earned his living on farms and going around the markets on north-east Scotland, singing for agricultural workers. The American folk collector Alan Lomax encountered Jimmy at Elgin and took him to Turriff to record him. Lomax described him as a 'sporty little character, with the gravel voice and urbane assurance that would make him right at home in skid-row anywhere in the world: as sharp as a tack, dapper, tweed suit, quick blue eyes, as fast on his feet as a boxer'. An EP of his reportoire including our song was released in 1960, although Lomax recorded him singing Come A' Ye Tramps and Hawkers in 1951.

Another version of the song had been recorded in 1956 in Dundee. The singer this time was Davie Stewart, a traveller and musician from Buchan, who lived in Dundee for a while in the 1950s. He too was an ex-Gordon Highlander and a friend of Jimmy MacBeath. Among the folk luminaries who have also recorded the song are Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor, the Dubliners (with Luke Kelly singing), and Bert Jansch.

 The ealy Dylan, a folk polymath, absorbed elements of the Scots song via the influence of Canadian folk singer Bonnie Dobson (according to the book The Formative Dylan by Todd Harvey).

Bonnie Dobson

   Dobson's version of the late-Victorian New Brunswick ballad Peter Amberley incorporated elements of Come A' Ye Tramps and Hawkers and was the basis of Dylan's 1962 composition The Ballad of Donald White. Despite this Scottish-sounding name, Bob's song was about a fellow American. The thread of tradition had wound a circuitous path to reach him, and who's to say whether the celebrated Nobel laureate has ever heard of Besom Jimmy of Brechin?