AN ugly episode in Jess Smith’s youth was the catalyst for a beautiful poem that has been set to music and is now included in the new Songs for Scotland album.

Scotia’s Bairn was created as a response to the bullies who tormented her as she grew up in the travelling community.

“Being bullied went with the territory,” remembers Smith whose home, which she shared with her parents, seven siblings and their dog, was a single-decker bus.

“My father had been through the war and just wanted to keep moving although my mother would have liked to have settled in a house. I was happy – I loved it.”

Although the family were on the road all summer, Smith was keen to be educated and attended school regularly.

“We went to the tatties and went to the berries and that bought the school uniform,” she explains. “I remember my mother bought me a lovely satchel and I was heading home one day from school in Kirkcaldy when a couple of lads and lassies approached me. I wasn’t in the mood for being ridiculed that day and when one pulled my satchel off I just saw red and went for him. A couple of passing miners fortunately stopped me but I remember saying to them, ‘We are all the same – why do they do this?’

“A couple of days later I was on the bus to school and the only free seat was beside me. A lassie got on but refused to sit there.

“When I told my mother what had happened she said I had seen more in my short life than that lassie would in her entire life. She told me that the bullies were on a narrow path and I was on a wide open plain.”

Years later when she was writing her first book, Jessie’s Journey, the two incidents came back to her and she wrote Scotia’s Bairn.

In it she tells of all the wonders she has seen on her travels and how her people were the “brave ones who hid, not burned the tartan” and those “who spoke the Gaelic in secret places”.

The poem ends: “I am part of the True Earth, the sea, the sky, I am the Scotia Bairn.”

The poem helped to make her book a bestseller with many readers contacting her to say it should be in schools.

Ritchie Feeney, who has designed the striking cover for the Songs for Scotland 2 album, set the poem to music and says he is delighted it has been included as a track on the album.

“When I saw it I was transfixed,” he says. “Jess is a very important voice. I thought it could be enhanced by putting an evocative and atmospheric soundscape on it that speaks of Scotland. I tried to get a sense of landscape as it touches so much on Scotland’s beauty.

“As well as trying to pay respect to the travelling community I tried to add a universal feel to appeal to those from different walks of life in Scotland and make it more accessible.”

Both Smith and Feeney hope the new album will help to keep Scottish culture at the heart of the independence debate.

As well as producing a downloadable album of songs it is hoped that enough money can be raised through the project to fund a scholarship for young musicians named after Scots polymath Alasdair Gray.

Kevin Brown, producer of Songs for Scotland 2, said: “Scotia’s Bairn is the only spoken-word piece on the album and it delves beautifully into an ancient dimension of the Scottish experience – ‘travellers’. Jess’s poetry is just beautiful, as is her delivery. Where else would you hear this?”

For more information on Songs for Scotland 2 go to www.songsforscotland2.eu or visit the Songs for Scotland Facebook page.

The National is project sponsor for Songs For Scotland 2. Every Monday, we will publish a weekly piece about one of the artists taking part.