Working in harmony Putting a poet's words to music hasn't happened often enough in Scotland - until now. Chris Dolan reflects on a rare musical foray into Scottish verse

memory of his father. Over a table full of pints, declaimed loud in

fraternal concert, it takes on a

rousing, spiritual (in the black American sense) quality. ''We watched the last Cunarder gli-ide/ down to the sea.'' An anthem for a lost world of shipbuilding, working-class pride, dashed hopes.

Saturday's chorus was made up

of men and women who wouldn't have known, from the clues in the song, that we're singing here about Greenock. But there's not much you can tell Lancashire folk about disappearing worlds. ''My father's eyes were boiler-suit blue/he took pride in what he'd learned to do . . .'' The pub band, Moorland Folk's previous number had been: ''The cotton mills are closing down all over Lancashire.'' Only two people - the band's singer and a Darwin poetry buff - knew the name Donny O'Rourke, who wrote the lyric. A music fan had heard of Ceolbeg, legendary Scottish band from whose number Dave Whyte, Down to the Sea's composer, sprang.

This was no jersey-clad, traddy-folk, real-ale pub. The audience would have been more au fait, I guess, with Justin Timberlake or Johnny Cash numbers than Fairport or the Chieftans. Down to the Sea is just a great song: local, universal, intimate and open. ''Those are ghosts that won't be laid/they go down to the sea.''

I first heard Donny sing in Edinburgh a couple of years back. Closing down the Book Festival, he suddenly, daringly, slipped from reciting to singing a cappella. Another of his collaborations with Dave: ''When the calendar's turned full circle/and you'll be where your dreams go next . . .'' It was an audacious act: the vulnerability of the lone poet. It

was also celebratory, a beautiful coda to a festival of thought, humanity and solidarity.

In Scotland, there has long been an association between melody and the written word. It's welded in the figure of Burns, the poet-collector, lover of the old tunes, soldering new lines to familiar airs. It's in the oral traditions of the makars, the Travellers, the Gael. You can't read Sorley MacLean without hearing the melody ringing between the lines. Yet putting a poet's words to music hasn't happened often enough in Scotland - until now.

In Spain, the poetry of Lorca, Machado, even sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers such as Quevedo or St John of the Cross, are better known, across the generations, than the verses are here of, say, Goodsir Smith, or Scott, or Stevenson. The singer/songwriter movement in Europe, from its inception, had musos such as Joan Manuel Serrat and Paco Ibanez scouring bookshelves for material. Mainstream acts - Maria Dolores Pradera, even Julio Iglesias - picked up on them. Now classic, complex poems are sung round Eurocamp fires, in bars, at parties. Humming the tune the next day, revellers go out to find and read, thus keeping alive, the originals. Something similar happens in France, from Piaf to Juliette Greco and George Brassens. In Germany and Italy, too, songwriters square up to great poetry.

''We're not the first,'' says Dave Whyte. ''Jim Reid sang Violet Jacob poems. Tony Cuff set a whole number of poems.''

William Soutar's erotically emotive The Tryst - ''O luely, luely cam she in/And luely she lay doun'' - was Dave's first foray into adapting poem to song for Ceolbeg. The band went on to perform and record a whole series of his settings.

''Once I started, I thought there'd be thousands of poems I could

put a melody and arrangement to. Didn't turn out that way.'' There are several elements. Dave needs to pick up his guitar, or sit at the piano, in front of a dog-eared anthology. ''Love of the poem first, obviously. A musicality that lends itself to both my ear and my eye. When the words are unmistakably in a minor or major key. A certain structure I think I can make work.''

While he was making it work just dandy over a number of years, Donny O'Rourke was busily writing, editing and making TV programmes at Scottish Television. I was about to say that Donny is a wonderfully generous poet - he has laboured happily to promote the work of fellow writers - but, in fact, the compulsion is more than benevolence. It's a love, a vision, of Scots culture, into which his own fine, clear, layered poetry fits. With programmes such as A Fine Song, he was already exploring that misty strath between the bens of our popular music and rugged

literature. The planets finally aligning themselves, Donny and Dave met and began work.

Still Waiting to be Wise, their first collection of sung poems included Down to the Sea. It ranged from the deft and intimate - Adults in the Dark - to the socially perceptive Saltcoats Sinatra. Donny wrote each piece specifically for Dave to set to music: sharp songs, songs to raise the spirits, sad songs; but each one still breathes and grapples on the page.

Tom Wright, best known for his drama writing, died, sadly, last year, bequeathing money for various

literary projects. Tom was a music fan, and a poet. Whyte's and O'Rourke's forthcoming collection, And This Shall Be For Music, is a fitting memorial to him. From Scotland's riven history - ''If aa the bluid shed at thy Tron, Embro' . . . were sped intae a river . . . 'Twad ca' the mills o' Bonnington . . . Forever and forever'' (Lewis Spence, Capernaum); to songs of broken love - ''Will she recall the eyes of brown/

as I recall the blue?'' (Stevenson); and more recent tragedies - ''Nancy with the golden hair/Tender as a dove/Hooked on glue and heroin/ And illicit love'' (Eddie McGrory: Nancy).

Treated to a private rendition of the new collection, I thought Dave Whyte's arrangements, guitar style, his voice, step outside the pattern and mould of the traditional form. The memorable melodies, prettily poised between modern and timeless, shape themselves around the power of the stanzas. With this kind of vigour, and sensitivity to both author and audience, Scots music might yet harness a millennium-worth of magnificent writing. By the commitment and zeal of Wrights and O'Rourkes, the talents of a Dave Whyte, our weans might yet be singing Mackay Brown and Neil Munro alongside Burns and Kylie. ''And this shall be for music when no one else is near/The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!'' (Robert Louis Stevenson: I Will Make You Brooches.)

And This Shall Be for Music,

Settings of Scottish Poems, Dave Whyte and Donny O'Rourke, Last Track Records, (pounds) 10.