THE STORY OF DICK GAUGHAN

Dick Gaughan was a towering figure in folk music – a singer of rare quality, a peerless guitar stylist, a charismatic performer and a champion of compassion and social justice. He was a light in the darkness for decades. His performances brought together music of blistering righteousness with sharp wit and implausible cheeriness in the introductions. His 1981 Topic album Handful of Earth is widely regarded as an all-time classic and has never been out of print (a remastered vinyl edition due in 2025). He was a man of the people – a tsunami of positive energy and optimism. His career began in the late 60s folk clubs of Edinburgh and ended with a stroke in 2016.

This is all past tense – but Dick Gaughan is alive and well, up to a point. He can no longer play guitar and is visually impaired, but his optimism remains. He lives ‘off the grid’ in terms of internet presence and together with a set of circumstances that had resulted in very little activity around his back catalogue before 2025, there was a danger of the memory of Dick Gaughan – and the music of Dick Gaughan – fading from view.

Happily, a Kickstarter campaign orchestrated by a group of fans and music/media professionals in March 2025 raised £84,000 (after platform fees), allowing a substantial sum to be given to the artist for living costs and the rest to be used in creating the multi-licensor 7CD+DVD box set R/evolution: 1969–83 along with three associated releases. Further releases are planned. In the wake of the campaign, Dick gave some media interviews, including towards a Guardian feature by Jude Rogers and a Dick Gaughan special on BBC Radio Scotland’s Travelling Folk. In July 2025, a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign began at Dick’s behest to raise legal fees towards retrieving the rights to a number of his long out of print albums.The potted biography below was written by Dick Gaughan himself for his own website in the 1990s/2000s. It has been only very slightly edited.

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Well, firstly, and most importantly, Dick Gaughan is a Scot, from Leith on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth. Leith, once a separate port, has been part of Edinburgh since the 1920s but has retained a distinct identity.

Born Richard Peter, the eldest of three children, in 1948. By a sheer accident of timing, this event took place in Rottonrow Maternity Hospital in Glasgow while his father was temporarily working as an engine driver at Colville’s Steelworks and so Gaughan spent the first year and a half of his life in Rutherglen, a period of which he swears he has no recollection at all, not even of being knocked down by a bus. This must have had a profound effect, however, because immediately after this he went to Leith to his paternal grandparents with whom he lived until his own parents returned to Leith some months later and he has never been back to Rutherglen since!

His mother, Frances MacDonald, was a Highland Scot, originally from Bohenie in Lochaber, whose first language was Gaelic. She was a singer in both Gaelic and English and won a silver medal at one of the Gaelic Mods as a child in the 30s while at school in Arisaig.

His father, Dick, was born in Leith of an Irish father, an Irish speaker and fiddle player, from Doohoma in Mayo. Gaughan’s grandmother, Bridget Madden, born in Glasgow of Irish parents from Killala, played button accordion and was also a singer, in English only. Gaughan was brought up immersed in the musical traditions and culture of the Gaels, both Scots and Irish, which naturally, therefore, provide the foundation for everything he does.

He has been a professional musician and singer since January 1970. Has been playing guitar since the age of 7 and made his first solo album in 1971. Working mainly in the areas now known as “Folk” or “Celtic” music, he has recorded quite extensively since then in many countries and in various combinations. Has also worked extensively as a session musician in a wide variety of musical styles.

During this time he has also been fairly active as a record producer, midi programmer, composer – composing the music for films for the BBC, Scottish Arts Council and independent producers – actor and theatre music director, having been in both roles with the celebrated 7:84 (Scotland) Theatre Company in the early 80s, songwriter whose songs have been recorded by, among others, Billy Bragg, Mary Black and Capercaillie, and also served for several years as a reviewer/columnist with Folk Review magazine in the late 70s. Instigated the setting up of the association Perform in the early 80s and was its Chair for 2 years.

Dick was an early member of the band Boys of the Lough and is on their first album and was with the now-legendary Scottish Folk-Rock (what a lousy label that is!) band, Five Hand Reel, making three albums with them. In the 90s he founded and produced the short-lived but quite extraordinary ensemble Clan Alba.

Having very eclectic tastes, he also plays everything from free jazz and rock to country music and has studied orchestration to develop his compositional and midi programming skills. He plays most fretted stringed instruments but his natural instrument, and perhaps what he is happiest doing, is acoustic guitar. His greatest musical love is for the ancient traditional Scots ballads. Also known as The Muckle Sangs (the big songs), these are the big story songs which form a substantial part of Scotland’s living wealth of traditional song.

Over the years, Gaughan has recorded and performed many of these “Muckle Sangs”, The great Scots Ballads are mostly of very great antiquity with some of the themes and motifs being traceable back thousands of years. Full of mystical and supernatural references. they are very dramatic and powerful and Gaughan has always insisted that the greatest singer of ballads he ever was privileged to hear and learn from was the late Jeannie Robertson. Gaughan has also been quite passionately obsessed by computers since 1984 and took a programming course at Edinburgh’s Telford College during 1984, while recovering from voice problems. Dick has been designing and building websites since the birth of the Internet, experience which he puts into his web design company, Gaelweb. Believes passionately in the principle that all sites should be designed so as to be fully accessible to all readers regardless of platform or software. 

Dick lists his greatest influences as Karl Marx, Groucho Marx, Flann O’Brien, Bert Jansch, Betty Frieden, John Lennon, Vladimir Illych Lenin, Hugh MacDiarmid, Davey Graham, Doc Watson, Hank Williams, Jeannie Robertson, Ewan MacColl, Somerled, Bertolt Brecht, his mother (Gaughan’s mother, not Brecht’s), his father (likewise), Calgacus, Dolina MacLennan, Crazy Horse, Sandy Denny, Martin Carthy, Clarence White, Sean O’Riada, Jack Mitchell, John MacLean, Big Bill Broonzy, Hamish Henderson, Robert Burns and everybody else he ever met, read, saw, heard or spoke with.