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Bruce Scott  (Liverpool)

    Singing in the Liverpool Irish Centre        Bruce (second from the right) with a demolition team

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(photos courtesy of Bruce Scott)

      Bruce Scott was born in 1941 in Everton, Liverpool, an ‘FBI’ or foreign-born Irish: his maternal grandparents were Dublin Catholics and on his father’s side the family were Derry Protestants. The oldest of six children,  Bruce recalls hearing his mother’s mother singing Irish ballads and Percy French songs and other family members singing too: “I suppose the first song I ever got was Kevin Barry. I must have been a bit political when I was a kid - that was off my mother, she always sang it. I would have been about twelve maybe. In those days people would have dos in their houses and I’d be listening in. They used to have what they called ‘Jars Out’ after the pub, because the pubs shut at ten then, so they’d bring some drink back from the pub and the kids stayed up. There was no records or anything like that, it was always singing.”

      From there on he learned songs from local Irish workers like Kerryman Noel Scanlon and mixed with visiting travellers like the Dorans. He travelled Ireland extensively in the early 1960s with Barry Halpin and came back with many songs that are rarely heard in Ireland today. More recently he took to writing his own songs and in 2004 he won the All Ireland Newly Composed Ballad competition with 'My Colleen By the Shore'

Bruce Scott  can be heard on: VT149CD