Old and New World Highland Bagpiping

By (author) John G. Gibson

Old and New World Highland Bagpiping is a stimulating and controversial book which also provides a comprehensive biographical and genealogical account of pipers and piping in both Highland Scotland and Gaelic Cape Breton. The result of over thirty years’ oral fieldwork among the last of the Gaels in Cape Breton, as well as an exhaustive synthesis of Scottish archival sources, this book shows that traditional community bagpiping in the Old and New World Gaidhealtachdan was, and for a long time remained, the same. John Gibson explores the distortions introduced by the tendency to interpret the written record from the perspective of modern, post-eighteenth-century bagpiping.

Reviews of Old and New World Highland Bagpiping

"An excellent work, well researched, splendidly footnoted, a book anyone with an interest in the subject will find a 'must have.'" The Canadian Historical Review