"Freedom Come-All-Ye" is a Scots-language song written by Hamish Henderson in 1960. One of Henderson's most important songs, it presents a non-romantic, revisionist view of the role of the Scots in the world at the time it was written. It describes a wind of change blowing through Scotland and the world at large, sweeping away exploitation and imperialism. It renounces the tradition of the Scottish soldier both as imperial cannon-fodder and colonial oppressor and ends with a vision of a future global society which is multiracial and just.
The song's tune is an adaptation of the First World War pipe march "The Bloody Fields of Flanders", composed by John McLellan DCM (Dunoon), which Henderson first heard played on the Anzio beachhead. He wrote the lyrics after discussions with Ken Goldstein, an American researcher at the School of Scottish Studies, who had enjoyed Henderson's rendition of the tune. It was subsequently adopted by Glasgow Peace Marcher CND demonstrators and the anti-Polaris campaign. A product of the Scottish folk revival, and originally a 1960s protest song, it is still popular in Scotland and overseas. Henderson described it as "expressing my hopes for Scotland, and for the survival of humanity on this beleaguered planet."
It is viewed by many as Scotland's 'alternative' national anthem (although there is no 'official' Scottish anthem). However, Henderson never wanted it to become as he felt that part of its strength lies in the fact that it is an alternative, an "International Anthem".
Read more about Freedom Come-All-Ye: Lyrics
Famous quotes containing the word freedom:
“The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)