Bagpipes!

20 June, 2013
Texas

BAGPIPES!!! 

Aye, the pipes! The first time I heard the skirl of a bagpipe band I was five years old. From then on it was to be a lifelong thing. I even saw The Black Watch from Scotland, wi' a hundred pipers and drums come marching through the streets of bonnie New Orleans!! 

Through the years I built up a small collection of bagpipe music from all over: Scotland, Ireland, Brittany in France, Greece, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, and even Hungary. Roman Emperor Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned, was said to have been an accomplished BAGPIPE player. 

Didn't know that? It's true: bagpipes are widespread. Wherever the Celtic tribes went they brought along their GAIDAS or GAITAS. And thanks to the British, bagpipes are also legacy instruments in Pakistan, Palestine, Australia, Canada, etc. Each culture has its own type of bagpipe, music, and style of playing. Scotland even had a strange way of singing, called dowdling, which is a way of vocally imitating the bagpipe sound during a repressive time when playing bagpipes was illegal. 

Hoots, mon, the pipes are for everyone, not just for the Scots！