It’s a digression, maybe, but I micht tell ye hoo a new song gets into my list.  I must add a new song every sae often, ye ken.  An’ I ha’ always a dozen or mair ready to try.  I help in the writing o’ my ain songs, most often, and so I ken it frae the first.  It’s changed and changed, both in words and music, over and over again.  Then, when I think it’s finished, I begin to sing it to mysel’.  I’ll sing while I’m shaving, when I tak’ my bath, as I wander aboot the hoose or sit still in a railway train.  I try all sorts of different little tricks, shadings o’ my voice, degrees of expression.

Sometimes a whole line maun be changed so as to get the right sort o’ sound.  It makes all the difference in the world if I can sing a long “oh” sound, sometimes, instead o’ a clippit e or a short a.  To be able to stand still, wi’ ma moth open, big enow for a bird to fly in, will mak’ an audience laugh o’ itself.

Anyway, it’s so I do wi’ a new song.  I’ll ha’ sung it maybe twa-three thousand times before ever I call it ready to try wi’ an audience.  And even then I’m just beginning to work on it.  Until I know how the folk in front tak’ it I can’t be sure.  It may strike them in a way quite different from my idea o’ hoo it would.  Then it may be I’ll ha’ to change ma business.  My audiences always collaborate wi’ me in my new songs—­and in my old ones, too, bless ’em.  Only they don’t know it, and they don’t realize how I’m cheating them by making them pay to hear me and then do a deal o’ my work for me as well.

It’s a great trick to get an audience to singing a chorus wi’ ye.  Not in Britain—­it’s no difficult there, or in a colony where there are many Britons in the hoose.  But in America I must ha’ been one o’ the first to get an audience to singing.  American audiences are the friendliest in the world, and the most liberal wi’ applause ye could want to find.  But they’ve always been a bit shy aboot singin’ wi ye.  They feel it’s for ye to do that by yer lane.

But I’ve won them aroond noo, and they help me more than they ken.  Ye’ll see that when yer audience is singing wi’ ye ye get a rare idea of hoo they tak’ yer song.  Sometimes, o’ coorse, a song will be richt frae the first time I sing it on the stage; whiles it’ll be a week or a month or mair before it suits me.  There’s nae end to the work if ye’d keep friends wi’ those who come oot to hear ye, and it’s just that some singers ha’ never learned, so that they wonder why it is ithers are successfu’ while they canna get an engagement to save them.  They blame the managers, and say a man can’t get a start unless he have friends at coort.  But it’s no so, and I can prove it by the way I won my way.

I had done most of my work in Scotland when Mac and I and the wife began first really to dream aloud aboot my gae’in to London.  Oh, aye, I’d been on tours that had crossed the border; I’d been to Sunderland, and Newcastle on Tyne, but everywhere I’d been there was plenty Soots folk, and they knew the Scots talk and were used to the flutter o’ ma kilts.  Not that they were no sae in England, further south, too—­’deed, and the trouble was they were used too well to Scotch comedians there.