When the Scots-Irish said often the old Wagon Road in America for their only 17 homers. They took their music with them. What that did to their musical legacy? The hero of our story, a drummer Mark Wilson once decide to find it out.

“I’ve been lucky enough for over the last 20 years to tour and travel the world playing with drums and percussion. It has been my dream since childhood. Of course, a folk music group cannot be compared with the popularity of pop artists. I have never been so popular that crowds of fans chased me and I had to disable LinkedIn profile and block social networks to protect my privacy. But it was the music that I love, the music that I was born to play.”

“During that time I have become aware of and I’ve been told of an influence that the Ulster Scots or Scots-Irish have had on the music of the Southeastern states in the US. So I’ve decided to come over that journey.”

The journey is starting in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is the largest city in the state of Pennsylvania with 1.5 million people. However back in the early 1700s the population was only a couple of thousand. When the scots-irish sealed off the Delaware River in search of a new life the earlier waves arrived and further north in New York and Boston but weren’t particularly welcomed by the Puritan landowners. But in the Quaker land owners of this area they find friends. They brought with them their values, their traditions, their culture and their music wouldn’t left out behind.

You think of all the boots that arrived here and the Scots-Irish getting off in the banks of this river a suitcase in one hand an old beat-up fiddle and the other or a box with an accordion in it or maybe just the songs and their hearts, their songs and their wares and their music of the old land that they brought here to this new country with new hope. Just like us looking for recruiting agencies, writing services like this one https://lpws.pro/ in the search of a new job, new opportunities, new hope for a better life.

And, of course, the Scots-Irish continued to come over the centuries and is hardly surprising, but eventually the bagpipes came with them. Let her come to be first of all a pipe fund in Philadelphia and secondly with the name Ulster Scottish.

folk band playing music

The Ulster Scottish pipe band origins

“Well, my grandfather came from the town of bunny.” – David Hall, Pipe Major says. – “Moved in Ireland back in 1921 and in 1922 he and some of his mates started the band and it was originally called the Ulster pipe band. And through the years it became the Philadelphia Ulster pipe band and then the Ulster Scottish pipe band. My grandfather was one of the pipe majors and my father was the pipe major from 1960 till 2002 and then I took the band over.”

“We do wear the austere tartan; there was a drum major, his name was John Neal, who was a drum major in Ontario, and we saw the uniform and he was wearing a full kit with a long plate. And back then I thought it was great and nice on the feather bonnet, so in 1993 we switched over to the holster tartan the first time.”

The first time I saw the band was last year in the middle of August and there was a championship in Glasgow, but here the bonds they’ve been telling to travel back to Scotland. Next year they compete at the world championship, we will be going back to the world championships and we have been upgraded to three or four for that year. And I also hear the poster connections not being lost or not. When you’re going back to Scotland you’re hoping to come and compete at the all-star Championships the week before the words.

So the music really will have gone full circle coming from Scotland to Ireland over here to Philadelphia and you guys know taking it back to both Scotland and Ulster again. There are people who moved here from Ulster, we’ll arrest those people when they got here. It was said of him that they were never happy until they had moved at least twice. So they moved southwards from Philadelphia, down into Virginia and that’s where my journeys going to take me.

I’ve started my journeys in Philadelphia, I’m night traveling southwards during the Shenandoah Valley. I’m actually going along the great Philadelphia Wagon Road and started as the path made by the native Iroquois. That  was their war path southwards to trade and to faith with the people of the Carolinas in Virginia. This is the path that the Scots-Irish used as they moved southwards from Pennsylvania and Philadelphia.

So long the shrewdest scroll up lots of farms, barns a few villages and the spread of the Scots-Irish south let’s continue. Winchester, Virginia, is a very important settlement in the movement of the Scots-Irish through this area.  And actually it was the place that our family, Samuel and Mary Glass, moved to from just near my home in Bainbridge in 1730. And their grandson Colonel William Glass mirror to the rank of colonel in the American military but, of course, there’s also a musical connection here with Winchester as well.