Back Home for the First Time

A keening wind. A whippoorwill. A midnight train whistle. Some things are just born with a lonesome sound – that high, plaintive tone full of longing. Hank Williams was born with it. And Jimmie Rodgers. And when Scotsman Duncan McLean flips on the vintage reel-to-reel recorder and you hear his countryman sing, you know Thomas Fraser was born with it, too.

His voice seems to hold all the vast, empty space around him and the ache for some companionship to ease the suffering of a solitary life. It's a voice ideal for capturing the heartbreak shot through the songs of Williams, Rodgers, and other country legends, but Fraser was an unlikely enthusiast of American country music. A son of the far-flung Shetland Isles and a fisherman by trade, he had no connection to that steel-geetar-'n'-Stetson world except through the radio and 78s brought back from the States by his uncle in the merchant marine. Country music spoke to him so deeply, though, that he devoted most of his 50 years to learning as much as he could and committing his versions to tape on that recorder that he purchased in 1953.

In Long Gone Lonesome, McLean serves as Fraser's Boswell, spinning out from the stage the Burra Isle native's country song of a life: a childhood bout with polio, shyness that bordered on the painful, a reputation in his village as an eccentric and a drinker, a near death experience when his fishing boat sank, and a blow to his head that ultimately cost the man his life. For Fraser, though, the hardscrabble existence in that remote locale was always balanced by the music, and McLean punctuates his stories about Fraser with songs that he loved, which McLean performs with three other Scottish musicians under the name the Lone Star Swing Band. The feel of the show is less like a play than a kind of tribute concert, and with the audience of 150 seated on the Bass Concert Hall stage under strings of bare bulbs with checkered cloths covering long tables in front of the band, it could almost be taking place in a small VFW hall on the dusty flatlands of the Panhandle. That sensation is even stronger once the show proper is done and the tables are cleared away so patrons can two-step to their heart's content as the band plays on. The musicians' feel for the music, their amiable demeanor, even their corny banter ring Texas true. If it weren't for those dang Scottish accents, you'd figure 'em for some pick-up band outta Poteet.

Unfortunately for the Stateside premiere of this National Theatre of Scotland production, presented by Texas Performing Arts, cedar fever had sapped some of the energy from frontman McLean and left his vocals a touch ragged in places on Thursday night. Still, that didn't dim his enthusiasm for his subject or the power of Fraser's story. When, at the end of the show, McLean played a tape of Fraser singing "Over the Rainbow," and then subtly and softly the band joined him to accompany his disembodied voice, we crossed to a place without time, without separation between the quick and the dead, between Scotland and Texas; we ascended to some heaven where music lovers of all times and places abide together, lost in the mystery of a form that knows no nation, knows no age. In that moment, Thomas Fraser was no longer long gone or lonesome in anything but his voice. He was living and embraced by a crowd that truly heard him as he always wished to be heard.