A Calling Rings Out Across Hill and Dale

A neighbor's skill at turning trees into bagpipes inspired Joe Hagan as a teen to learn the craft. (By Mary Jordan -- The Washington Post)

EDINBURGH, Scotland It's drizzly and not yet 10 a.m. when a bagpipe tune floats out onto the Royal Mile, Scotland's most famous street. Follow the sound across the cobblestones, past Clarinda's Tea Shop and push open the wooden door of Bagpipes Galore, filled with the smell of fresh wood and machinery, and duck into the backroom where Joe Hagan stands.

He never sits.

You don't get to be one of Scotland's most acclaimed bagpipe makers by sitting around.

"This is not an office job," he says, explaining why there is no chair or stool in his cluttered workshop. "I need to stand to put pressure on the wood. I am always sharpening my tools." He reckons he walks a couple of miles a day within the confines of his 8-by-12-foot shop.

Bits of sawdust cling to his worn gray sweater and black knit cap as he works surrounded by chisels of all shapes and sizes, a lathe and a drill press. All around him, too, are half-shaped pieces of wood that are beginning to look like the chanter, stocks and drones -- the finely carved wooden bagpipe pieces that together give the instrument its distinctive sound.

A set of pipes handmade by Hagan will fetch at least $900 and can cost much more, depending on whether customers want silver and artificial ivory adornments.

"Perfecto!" he says, lifting an eight-inch piece of African blackwood from his lathe, having turned it slowly and carefully, the shavings falling onto a two-foot-high pile at his feet.

Hagan, 65, his pale blue eyes bright and cheery, says he began to learn his craft at 14 when he saw a neighbor turn pieces of a tree into Scotland's beloved instrument. He was instantly addicted to creating something so beautiful.

Does he play the pipes himself? "Of course not!" Hagan bellows. "How could I? I never have time. I have made more bagpipes than anyone else dead or alive." Whether or not he actually holds that distinction, the coal miner's son has made thousands of sets of pipes since he started as a wood-turner a half-century ago.

These days there is high demand for handmade pipes because of the growing numbers of bagpipers, from Saudi Arabia to the United States and Russia. He pointedly notes that talking to curious visitors -- like the Alaskan musician and Chinese film producer who recently popped in -- detracts from his productivity. Then he keeps on talking.

He seeks to create pipes with a "bright, true sound" that are as reliable playing an upbeat dance-hall jig as they are a melancholy "Amazing Grace." "I like them to start at a distance and then come over the hill, the echoes getting louder and louder," he says of the pipes. He says the sound should build until it makes "the hair on the back of the neck stand up." He is as easy with words as he is with wood.

Hagan works with African blackwood -- nothing else will do. One of the odder pieces of pipe trivia is that Idi Amin, the former Ugandan dictator, was a bagpipe enthusiast. In the 1970s, he sought to ban the export of blackwood, hoping that Uganda might become a leader in bagpipe production. Amin went so far as to name some of his many children after Scottish clans, including Campbell and Mackintosh.

Less controversial public figures have wandered into Hagan's workshop and bought his pipes, he said, recalling meeting actor Ed Asner and singer Barry Manilow.

"So many are mass-produced in faraway lands," Hagan says, shaking his head, as if he had just mentioned a death. Bagpipes, he laments, are now being factory-made with drills guided by computers and fit together by teams of assembly-line workers. "When people ask, 'Who made these pipes?' You have to say, 'A company,' " he says.

An elderly woman in a wool cap enters the small front showroom that is separated by an open door from Hagan's workshop. She is looking for a new reed for her chanter, a pipe with finger holes that the musician uses to produce the melody.

While store manager Norrie MacKenzie attends her, Hagan declares -- out of her earshot -- that the customer's chanter is "rubbish." He can tell at a glance that the wood used to make it was too soft, "not suitable at all."

Tom Jamieson, a retired engineer and bagpipe player, comes through the front door. He recently trusted Hagan to restore a set of pipes he inherited from his grandfather. "There are very few specialists left like Joe," Jamieson says.

Just before noon, MacKenzie turns off the Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band CD and starts playing himself. Hagan combs and beads wood. He has no plans to rest his hands, he said, speaking under a sign taped to his wall that reads: "You do not stop playing because you get old. You get old because you stop playing."