Gaelic Scotland is one of the world's great treasure-houses of song. This work is an anthology of music and lyrics from the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands. It provides an introduction to Gaelic tradition, musical transcriptions, and English translations. It portrays the social and historical background of the songs.

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, a steady stream of Scots migrated to Ulster and eventually onward across the Atlantic to resettle in the United States. Many of these Scots-Irish immigrants made their way into the mountains of the southern Appalachian region. They brought with them a wealth of traditional ballads and tunes from the British Isles and Ireland, a carrying stream that merged with sounds and songs of English, German, Welsh, African American, French, and Cherokee origin. Their enduring legacy of music flows today from Appalachia back to Ireland and Scotland and around the globe. Ritchie and Orr guide readers on a musical voyage across oceans, linking people and songs through centuries of adaptation and change.