Scottish Cowboy Ballads & Early American Folk Songs

Also known as Sorley the Bard, Shackleton developed his chops busking on the streets of Edinburgh with his father, Norman Shackleton, who took his own life in the summer of 2023. To work through his grief, Shackleton took a year out and recorded this album of the songs they used to sing together as a tribute. We get 16 traditional cowboy and American folk and country ballads, reimagined in a Scottish brogue as Shackleton reaches back through the folk revival of the 1960s to the heritage of Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. Accompanied by acoustic guitar and banjo, he sings, whistles and yodels his way through such storytelling songs as ‘Pretty Saro’ and ‘The Jolly Cowboy’ and, perhaps best of all, a keening version of the Appalachian classic ‘O Death’, famously sung by Ralph Stanley on the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack.