- Active: '90s
- Genres: Folk
Biography
Alan McIntosh Brown was born in the city of Dundee on the east coast of Scotland and lives in the Highland Perthshire village of Aberfeldy, where he has been a schoolteacher for almost 30 years. He is well-known in the area as a singer, writer, broadcaster, compere, public speaker, and journalist.He has twice won the prestigious Scottish Folk Directory Songwriter Contest and been successful in several songwriting competitions held throughout Scotland. He plays guitar and sings on the folk club/concert/village hall/hotel circuit, and his first solo album, Some Roads, was a local best-seller. He is currently recording his second professional album.
He has published articles, mostly on music and musicians, in magazines in Scotland (The Scots Magazine -- in which he has a monthly column called Broon's Reel -- and Living Tradition), Ireland (Irish Music Magazine), England (Folk Roots), the United States (U.S. Scots), and Canada (Celtic Heritage). In addition, he has had poetry published in Chapman (Scotland) and Fair Upon Tay -- an anthology of Scots song, verse, and prose used in schools.
He has been a producer/presenter with Heartland FM -- Britain's original small scale independent local radio station -- since its beginnings in 1992. His weekly folk, traditional, and acoustic music programme, Scene Around, has won Station Awards and welcomed musical guests from all over the world. He has also broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland, Clare FM (Ireland), and Radio Tay. He has also written and acted in a play on the life of Robert Louis Stevenson titled The Canary-Bird and King Lear, which was performed successfully at the Commonwealth Arts Festival in Edinburgh in 1986 and has had other works performed at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, and the Cumbernauld Theatre. He has introduced the In-Concert series for radio broadcast as well as outdoor events such as Highland Games and for the past three years has compered the very popular outdoor Highland Nights -- the oldest in Scotland -- held weekly each summer in Pitlochry. He has done the rounds of the Burns Supper circuit throughout Perthshire, Dundee and Fife, being invited to sing, to address the haggis and, ultimately, to propose The Immortal Memory, which he has done on several occasions, most recently in Dallas, TX. ~ Alan Brown, All Music Guide
