An Overview of Music in East Lothian 1945-2000

Joan Bassett

Social changes influenced the development of music in East Lothian. In the late forties and fifties, musical activities were very much town and village orientated, before cars expanded people's 'locality', and TV kept them in of an evening. Every town and village appears to have had its own choir. The education department of the co-operative movement gave financial support to choirs, and ran competition festivals across the county; this support continued into the 1980s. We may presume that the disappearance of this support was a contributory factor in the demise of many choirs, together with the growth of pop music and the subsequent lessening of the numbers of young people willing to join.

The Fisherrow Fishwives' Choir, started c. 1935, was said (in the 1960s) to have 'fizzled out [because] we all grew old'.

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© 2004 Fourth Statistical Account of East Lothian Society