900miles (Terry Callier)

Wee Pluto - Nae Time Fur The Blues

A song written about history of the Zeppelin to fulfill a brief for the UWS Songwriting Masters Module Portfolio, 2021. Thanks to Craig Durning on the guitar, Lewis Oxbrow on the bass vocals, Lauren Gilmour at Novasound for the production, and always Becci Wallace for encouragement and support.

Float Like The Hindenburg

Composed and performed by Lewis Oxbrow and Doctur Normul, recorded by Ally at University of the West of Scotland in Ayr and produced by Lauren Gilmour (Novasound) for UWS' Songwriting Masters Module Portfolio, July-August 2021.

We started on the same page, took inspiration from traditional folk songs, in particular, sea shanties and pirate ballads, and a certain boating scene from The Truman Show.

https://soundcloud.com/docturnormul

Paper Trail, feat. Doctur Normul

Mary Matilda Allen Esther and Lee- Doctur Normul and Nasty Nesto

Super Alien

The Phantom of the Copula(DUB)

They said Cattle Kate was a dirty rustler and a filthy whore. 

They cried out, “rangeland justice,” when she became the only woman ever lynched in the nation as a cattle rustler.

They called her killing “justified” when six prominent cattlemen strung her up with her secret husband on a hot July Saturday in 1889 in Wyoming Territory.

They said, “She had to be killed for the good of the country.”

Even now, in the 132nd anniversary of her death, plenty still say history got it right and that her lynching was good riddance.

But as seductive as that legend is, it doesn’t hold a candle to the truth. Because history was dead wrong about the woman labeled “Cattle Kate.”

Digging for the Truth: 

The real woman the cattlemen lynched that day wasn’t a rustler. She wasn’t a whore. And she’d never been called Cattle Kate until she was dead and her culprits needed an excuse. Her real name was Ellen “Ella” Watson. She had just turned 29. She was one of the few female homesteaders in all of Wyoming Territory and a wannabe American citizen. She was raising a boy, and she was cooking dinners at her secret husband’s roadhouse for 50 cents a plate. Her big sin was her homestead claim, with its precious water rights, in the way of her powerful cattleman neighbor, A.J. Bothwell. Don’t forget her husband, 38-year-old James Averell, whom the Cheyenne daily newspapers portrayed to the world as her pimp and a murderer.

In reality, Averell was about the most successful “settler” in the Sweetwater Valley between Rawlins and Casper. He had been appointed postmaster by President Grover Cleveland, notary public by Wyoming Gov. Thomas Moonlight and had just been named a justice of the peace by the Carbon County Board of Commissioners. Twelve days before the lynching, Averell was one of the election judges when his roadhouse hosted the election of delegates to the Wyoming Constitutional Convention—the same roadhouse the Cheyenne dailies would pretend was a “hog ranch” full of prostitutes.

Averell was also fearless in his “letters to the editor,” which exposed the land grabbers and the misdeeds of the cattlemen who were trying to keep out homesteaders. His latest attack had revealed that Bothwell’s “Town of Bothwell” was nothing but a land scam.

But darn, if history isn’t stubborn about clinging to myths and fabrications that fit the favored plot line. For a long time, the favored plot line in this tale was that cattlemen were being ruined by ruthless rustlers, and that “Cattle Kate” and Averell were the leaders of the pack. Twenty-five years after the lynching, Dr. Charles Penrose, in The Rustler Business, went so far as to declare, “She had to be killed for the good of the country.”

Not until 87 years had passed since the lynching did anyone question history’s take on “Cattle Kate.” The first book to say, “Whoa,” was Dorothy Gray’s Women of the West, in 1976. She quotes an unnamed source calling Watson’s hanging the “most revolting crime in the entire annals of the West,” which is saying something for a history filled with revolting crimes.

But what set history on its ear was George W. Hufsmith’s 1993 book, The Wyoming Lynching of Cattle Kate, 1889. “When I first began probing into the so-called ‘Cattle Kate’ affair, I had no idea that the whole story was pure fabrication,” he wrote. “This story is so controversial,” he added, “that for over 100 years, it was a mistake to even ask what happened that hot July afternoon in 1889 when a gracious young woman and an innocent homesteader were hanged from a pine tree in the Sweetwater Valley.”

To this day, the city of Rawlins remembers Watson and her murder in its Rawlins Main Street Mural Project, noting she and Averell had been “hanged by greedy land barons.” The mural honors their true characters, declaring, “Ellen and Jim fed the hungry, clothed the naked and took anyone in.”

Ballad of Ella Watson and Jim Averell

Ballad of Ella Watson and Jim Averell (Psychobilly Freakout)

Forget About You Mastered.WAV

Through its vivid depiction of the loosely connected everyday lives of residents of a single stairwell in a Glasgow tenement, ‘Sandstone & Lime’ challenges us to think about what, if anything, community and neighbourliness mean to us now.

Words, music, guitar and vocals by Fergus McNeill
Piano arranged and performed by Jamie Campbell
Clàrsach and violins arranged and performed by Sam MacAdam 
Additional vocals arranged and performed by Outi Smith
Recorded and engineered by Keith Bird at UWS
Mixed and mastered by Paul McGeechan

© Fergus McNeill 2023

Sandstone & Lime

Buy on Bandcamp

Chumbawamba vs Network

...is not normal and nothin is a story I won't tell...
Political folk punk bluesy vocals mostly on guitar.

900miles (Terry Callier)

DoctUrNormUL

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