By Erik Devaney
During the 19th-century, song-smiths in southern Appalachia, who had absorbed African rhythms from local slave populations, began fusing these rhythms with elements of celtic folk music, thus forming the basis of the country music genre.
The influence of Celtic folk music in the South began before the start of the American Revolution. As early as 1717, waves of Scots-Irish immigrants were pouring into North America. By 1790, 3 million of these immigrants called America home. The Scots-Irish, also known as Scotch-Irish or Ulster-Scots, were Presbyterian Scots who had previously settled in Ulster as a result of Britain’s plan for a Protestant plantation in Ireland.
Separate waves of Scottish immigration to North America occurred starting in 1725 as a result of the Highland Clearances, while Irish Catholics would not arrive on the scene in great numbers until 1847: a result of the so called ‘famine‘. Despite their ideological differences, these Scottish and Irish immigrants shared a Celtic musical tradition, which employed many of the same techniques for playing, composing and arranging music. These techniques had a profound influence on that ‘country sound’ we are familiar with today.
Like their Celtic musician forefathers, country musicians often employ vocal harmonies in the choruses, or repeated portions, of songs. This strategy helps stress the importance and increase the forcefulness of the choruses while also separating them sound-wise from the verses. Check out the use of vocal harmonies in the choruses of Okie from Muskogee by Merle Haggard and compare it to the use of harmonies in the choruses of the Celtic song, Mairi’s Wedding, as performed by The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem.
If you find that some country or Celtic songs have hypnotic qualities to them, mesmerizing you as you listen, this phenomenon could be the result of a drone. A drone is a note or chord that sounds continuously throughout most, if not all, of a song, providing an underlying, trance-like accompaniment for the song’s melody. Musicians can create drones vocally or with virtually any pitch-controlled instrument. Country musicians, such as fiddlers and slide-guitarists, adopted droning from Scottish and Irish settlers, who were accustomed to producing drones with fiddles as well as bagpipes.
Listen for the drone in Fiddlin’ John Carson’s song, He Rambled, and compare it to the drone in the Scottish march, The Campbells Are Coming.
The Sob Story
Singing sorrowfully about the heartbreaks we suffer in life may not have been a distinctively Irish or Scottish creation, but Irish and Scottish immigrants certainly brought a tradition of sob stories with them when they showed up on the shores of Amerikay. Subject matter included longing for love (see Black Is The Colour), losing children (see The Wife of Usher’s Well) and leaving behind a troubled home only to encounter new troubles abroad (see By The Hush).
The Drinking Song
“Here’s to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”


African slaves brought the tradition of building banjos with them when they were transported to the New World; a tradition that required stretching strings across animal-skin drums.
However, when musically-inclined inhabitants of the Appalachians got their hands on banjos, they used them to play the fiddle tunes that they had learned from the Scottish and Irish.
The plot thickens: in the 19th century, banjos crossed the Atlantic, for a second time, and musicians in Ireland and Scotland began incorporating the African/American instruments into traditional Celtic music. The The Dubliners are a great example of a Celtic folk band that adopted the banjo.
Further Reading:
Ceolas: Celtic Music Instruments
Thanks For The Music: The Fiddle in Country Music
BluegrassBanjo.org: History of the Banjo
Who Are The Scotch Irish?
In even Western Canada, there are folk-rock bands with a bagpipe! And fiddle!
In eastern Ontario between Picton and Gananoque, and also in some places in southwestern Ontario, the Scottish spirit is strong! Highland clearances or not! Add to that the Irish Protestants and later, Irish Catholics…
Cape Breton even has a Gaelic College with a piping school and fiddle corps. Gaelic hanging on…but likely on its last legs father-to-son…for daily use, anyway! Put away like family silver, barely used!
And of course Quebec inherited not only the Irish and Scottish but also the Breton songs! Acadia too!
There is also a town in Alberta called Breton.
For those interested in this, I can thoroughly recommend the work of David Wilkie and his band, Cowboy Celtic, who won the cowboy album of the year in Nashville some years ago. The follow-up album was The Drover Road, which followed the links between the drove roads of Scotland and the cowboy trails in North America.
I was pleased to see on that album they included The Baron of Brackley, which they learned from myself. It tells of a cattle raid in Deeside in 1666
Thank you for posting. Very informative and I had always suspected as much.
“So called ‘famine'”?
Really?
the people did die but I would call it a act of war rather than the so called potato famine.
One million dead. One million displaced. Try Genocide
[…] Something had to influence it though. What are the roots of country and folk music? Go across the Atlantic to Africa and the British Isles. Like rock and roll, country isn’t a lily-white genre. Many of the first country musicians were black and took influences from West Africa and made something new. In Ireland, there is a big country music following – I’d regularly hear county music on Radio Kerry, so it’s no surprise that traditional folk music of Ireland and Scotland inspired country music. […]
[…] How the Irish and Scots influenced American folk music, which in turn influenced rock & roll […]
I would argue this article doesn’t go far enough in outlining the influence of Scottish music on popular American forms. It’s certainly not limited to country music. Gospel music, for instance, was absolutely brought to America from Scotland (see the work of prof. Willie Ruff in unraveling this). Furthermore, if you listen to traditional Scottish singers it becomes clear that the style of ornamentation has directly influenced the ornamentation used by African American soul, R&B and pop singers. I would also argue that Scottish music has influenced American music more than Irish music has.
I think you may well be right. Would you like to expand on this article and write a follow up piece? We’d be very happy to publish it.
PTB,
It is refreshing to hear someone else mention this musical history on a reply. I have been doing my best to politely share this info on the internet. I can even hear many traditional rhythms from Scotland, England and Ireland that are prevalent in American popular music. Scots snap, or lumbar rhythm, shuffles with backbeats etc. Also scales like the mixolydian that by no coincidence show up again in the 1960s British Invasion. It wasn’t that long ago online and especially in books I bought in 90s, that one would at least get a balanced over view on the combination of European and African music contributions. That is beginning to disappear even with country music. If you haven’t all ready check out Phillip Taggs work on the subject.
All the best
Thank you
JSP
[…] How the Irish and Scots influenced American folk music, which in turn influenced rock & roll […]
[…] How the Irish and Scots influenced American folk music, which in turn influenced rock & roll […]
[…] How the Irish and Scots influenced American folk music, which in turn influenced rock & roll […]
[…] Devaney, Erik, “How the Irish and the Scots Infleunced American Music,” London Celtic Punks, posted Feb. 28, 2016, accessed Mar. 13, 2021, https://londoncelticpunks.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/how-the-irish-and-the-scots-influenced-american-m…. […]