Recently, I had the pleasure of spending a Friday evening in a tiny pub called Captain’s Bar in Edinburgh, Scotland. I was visiting for the weekend with a friend. We had set out to find some trad music.

The evening was quietly iconic. The pub was a good choice – tiny, packed in with maybe twenty locals and visitors (about all the place could hold comfortably), and familially attentive to Henry, an employee of the bar that showed up on his off nights to provide and emcee impromptu trad music.

We sat on what looked like a remnant half-length church pew, the last open spots in the place, and listened as one song after another was played by Henry and other pals of his (as well as random willing offerers) that had showed up that night. Jovial songs; contemporary covers; reels; and mournful ballads were performed at b-grade proficiencies but made more than dazzling by the experience in its sum. Some were too eager; some (the on-duty barman for instance) had to be dragged into it. But everyone who shared did so from the heart and contributed to the exquisite woven fabric that was that evening.

I was struck at how transporting and ascending it proved to listen to the musicians (and the lone storyteller who also shared his craft with us) as they performed. The songs sung that night painted pictures I had never seen before. It was like looking at footage from an exotic country you didn’t know existed. Songs of a lover bemoaning having been drafted and getting just one more night to wed his bride before being called out to fight where he would surely perish. Songs of historic fishing grounds that were destroyed by industry and greed in the span of a score’s years. Songs of traveling the world and finding nowhere like home.

Letting those stories wash over me was moving and powerful. Songs sung soulfully communicated distant, different, dire, painful, contemplative, remorseful, simple, or beautiful truths in flavors I hadn’t ever tasted. There are so many lives; so many pockets of nature and history and society that are so vastly different than anything I’ll ever be able to relate to or understand. But I can try, and I can listen, and I can learn from them. I can enjoy seeing breathtaking humanity in all its pain and mistakes and bent beauty through those colored-glass windows. And I can add my song to the mix for however it might do the same for others. (Don’t worry, my friend and I got in there too.)

-LS