Texas Scottish Festival 2006 (Arlington)
The 2006 Texas Scottish Festival will forever be known to me as simply “Arlington” since this is what we called it at St Thomas when I began going there in 1987. At time it was simply a highland games with bagpipe, drum, and dance competitions and held in the middle of a pretty but hot and muddy field with some huge standing stones to provide a few inches of shade depending on the time of day. 2006 was the festival’s 20th year according to the T-shirts I saw being worn by some of our audience and this year makes it my 19th and I think Jeremy’s 20th. We used to compete there as kids both individually and with our pipe bands but now we’re part of the great ranks of entertainers that fill the four or so stages at the “new”(probably only used 17 years) site of Maverick Stadium.
TSF is one of those festivals that doesn’t just provide entertainment for a weekend; for a lot of people it marks a milestone of the year where they see old friends and re-connnect with their family roots both Scottish and Texan. I say Texas roots because willingly walking around all day in a wool dress in a school football stadium in 100 degree heat and calling it fun is something I’ve only seen in Texas. It is actually incredibly fun and made more meaningful to me by the fact that some of the best purveyors of Scottish musical arts make it a point to be here every year even though the pay isn’t the best. Only the Celtic Classic in PA can rival the Texas Scottish Festival for Scottish singing, fiddling, and piping. Ed Miller. Brian McNeil, Alex Beaton are all three some of the best singers/songwriters you could find in or out of Scotland. For a piper like me the presence of recent gold medalist and former teacher Donald MacPhee makes the air feel more charged and getting to play the small and border pipes I made on stage with Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas made me feel like I just got an audience with the top players in the field. That’s the way of Arlington every year it seems. I always drive back to Houston with the feeling that something big just happened.
For people who go to Scarborough Faire, TSF marks a kind of after-party and most years the two festivals run consecutively. It was good to see so many people who worked Scarborough at TSF and I think that’s one of the best things about the festival in that there’s such a relaxed “hey we do this for fun too” kind of atmosphere. The new headliner “Enter the Haggis” had some really fun sets that I think Jeremy enjoyed a lot since he got to dance to his heart’s content while I was at the other end of the field jamming with the fiddlers on Saturday night. We both met up later to go back to the hotel and we were each telling the other “Man! You should have been there!”
Typical Arlington.