The red man rides for the white man’s fee, Better than a grave at Wounded Knee, I better he never thought he’d see, The spires of the auld grey toon. John Watt, The Wild West Show One piece of the enduring cultural legacy of the Scottish leg of Buffalo Bill’s 1904 tour not to be overlooked is the late John Watt’s Heroes CD, which contains two songs about the show’s visit to Dunfermline: The Day that Billy Cody Played the Auld Grey Toon, and The Wild West Show. John, a singer/songwriter of considerable acclaim, was a highly respected figure on Scotland’s thriving folk scene. Heroes was released in 2000 and contains seventeen tracks in all, most of them songs which John wrote in homage to his own personal icons. On the cover we find Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull in fine and heterogeneous company with the likes of Joe Corrie, the Fife poet; John Thomson, a young goalkeeper tragically killed in 1931 after an accidental clash with a forward during a football match between Rangers and Celtic; the Kelty Clippie; and John’s own father, Gordon Watt (1891-1983). Towards the end of his father’s long and eventful life, John tape-recorded an interview with him about his many and varied experiences. It was his recollections of Buffalo Bill’s visit to Dunfermline which brought the inspiration for the two compositions which provide the focus of attention here. Among the extensive sleeve notes, we find the following arresting statement: Bill Cody aka Buffalo Bill played Dunfermline, Fife on August 16th 1904 and paraded in Kelty, Fife on the 19th and Cowdenbeath, Fife on 23rd. Well, Buffalo Bill’s show certainly did appear in Dunfermline on the date stated and in Kirkcaldy on the 17th for that matter. However, the bit about the parades in Kelty and Cowdenbeath is, sadly, apocryphal. There’s a funny story about how this confusion arose in the first place and that will be revealed soon enough. The two mutually complementary songs present a stark contrast one with the other. The Wild West Show is strictly realist in tone, while The Day that Billy Cody Played the Auld Grey Toon tends to get a bit carried away with itself. The latter’s wild and fantastic lyrics adeptly underscore the likelihood that onlookers’ perceptions of these colourful strangers in their midst were in a great many cases far more fanciful even than the admittedly sensational reality. Sitting Bull wasn’t there, for the very good reason advanced by John, ‘because that he was deid’. The character ‘Spotted Sloth’, incidentally, was not the name of an Indian on this or any other tour but a stroke of poetic licence. Needless to say, Annie Oakley, likewise alleged in the lyrics to have been present, was nowhere to be seen either. Scottish Venues, 1904

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Scotland