The years pass and the music travels south, towards the Mississippi, where it mixes with the spirituals and chain-gang gospels sung by slaves under the hot Delta sun. Another century later, in the 1940's, in Nashville Tennessee, Hank Williams stands in the ice-blue spotlight of the Grand Old Opry, singing his cracked, haunting songs. These bittersweet songs are stamped with the same sense of pain, alienation and yearning as the ones that rung out in the freezing Atlantic night two centuries before.

A short hop forward, a decade later, on September 9th 1956, Elvis Presley, explodes out of fifty million TV screens across America and at a stroke, popular culture is changed forever by this musical fusion.

Fast forward another half-century to the present. Saturday night in Glasgow's city centre. Hundreds of chattering Glaswegians pour out of the cinema, exhilarated by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon's performances as Johnny Cash and June Carter in Walk The Line. Sure enough, Witherspoon's roots, like those of Cash, Presley and the music they played, can be traced directly back to Scotland.

Is Scotland linked to Country music? Scotland, you could argue, is the spiritual home for country music.

Shortly after her father's death in 2003 Rosanne Cash attempted to trace her family's Scottish roots. “I knew that my ancestor, William Cash, came over on a brigantine called 'The Good Intent' and landed at Salem," she said, “so I got on the internet and started researching what happened".

The Cash experience is perhaps not so unique. Although interestingly in their case the family tree eventually stretched back close to Celtic royalty no less. They are a direct ancestor to Ada of Warenne, the sister of King Malcolm IV, who sat on the Scottish throne from 1135 to 1165.

The Cash influence is still scattered all over Fife today, with several streets and farms bearing the name 'Cash'. Between 1717 and 1770 over a quarter of a million Scots fled to the new world, fleeing from drought, hunger, rising rents and persecution. Many of these settlers were Presbyterian Scots and Scots-Irish, who migrated from the lowlands of Scotland to Ulster in Northern Ireland, before travelling on to America. Interestingly some of these migrants were National Covenanters. As hunted rebels they wore a red piece of cloth around their necks as a sign of their faith. This insignia would give the world the term 'rednecks'.

These people did not take much with them, but what did survive the crossing was their heartfelt songs such as 'Sallie Gooden', 'The Great Speckled Bird', 'Frankie and Johnny' and 'She Walked Through the Fair', (which was appropriated centuries later by Simple Minds for their single 'Belfast Child'). These were poor people's songs. It was music from a culture rich in oral tradition, where narrative, storytelling, was the primary focus. This approach would be hugely influential on what would develop into Country and Western music.

Many of the Scots and Scots-Irish settled in the Appalachian mountain range which runs parallel with the eastern seaboard of the United States and stretches northwards from Tennessee. Up in this high, rugged, sometimes inhospitable yet beautiful country, a landscape not so different from the one they had left behind, the music mixed with new influences. To the simple Celtic musical palette of voice and fiddle was added guitar, which brought a new, rhythmic, dynamic to the music. As the railroads opened up the vast new country other influences came to bear.

The experiences of the black slave population in the south and the Scots migrants along the eastern seaboard were not so dissimilar. Poverty and hardship, battered pride, persecution and religion were their key touchstones. Music was their release.

Musically speaking, the rich, lugubrious gospels and chain-gang work songs of the south were a world away from the narrative ballads of the Appalachians. However, spiritually, the two cultures were closely linked. Gradually the music fused over the years. Folk ballads merged with spirituals which melted into blues. This suffused with bluegrass and transformed into rhythm and blues. 'What do you call it when all those things come together?' Film director Martin Scorsese asked The Band's drummer Levon Helm in his 1978 music documentary 'The Last Waltz'. Helm, who grew up in Arkansas, not too far from the Southern foothills of the Appalachian mountains, just smiled and replied 'rock and roll.'

The Scots were, in part, a rebellious nation and it is no great surprise that country music in general and figures like Johnny Cash – the man in black – in particular, are so exalted by Scottish audiences today. The American writer James Hall drew this portrait of a young Scots-Irish frontiersman of the late eighteenth century, surely a prototype of the later Western cowboy hero:

He strode among us with the step of Achilles. I thought I could see in that man one of the progenitors of an unconquerable race . . . he had the will to dare and the power to execute. There was something in his look which bespoke a disdain of control, and an absence of constraint in all his movements, indicating a habitual independence of thought and action.

The will to dare. Disdain of control. Independence of thought and action. Hall could easily have been describing Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash a century later, men who had the energy and drive of their forefathers. Those determined pioneers who crossed vast oceans in flimsy wooden ships, helped raise a great nation from dust and scrub.

Today you can walk into Glasgow's Grand Old Opry, on Govan Road, in the city's south side and be transported to a world of Stetsons, six guns, cowboy boots and rebel songs. This is a world where ladies are called 'Maam' and the rebel is still king. The Glaswegians line dancing on the floor know, perhaps instinctively if not intellectually, that the American music they are dancing to including Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, George Strait and The Dixie Chicks, bears the genetic stamp of their ancestors.

The influence of these ancestors on music and culture is incredible and incredibly disproportionate. Not only can country stars like Glen Campbell, Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn all trace their roots directly back to their Scottish ancestors, but also Neil Armstrong, Davy Crockett, Thomas Edison, Steve McQueen, Arnold Palmer, Robert Redford, Mark Twain, Judy Garland and no less than fourteen US Presidents including Truman, Roosevelt and more recently Bill Clinton. They can all look back with some pride to the young men and women shivering on that brigantine in the mid-Atlantic nearly three hundred years ago, singing songs of love, loss, pride and defiance as the vastness of the new world loomed ahead of them in the darkness. Without them the world would be an incomparably poorer place.

Further Information:

Courtesy of Scottish Government - Scotland.org .

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