Alexander (Sandy) Ross Boyd of Largs, Ayreshire, Scotland was one of those pipers whose impact on the Maritime piping community was of major proportions and is still being felt even to this day.

Sandy’s year of birth differs in different sources. Lofty MacMillan gave it as 1908, John Gibson gave it as 1907, and Sandy once gave it himself as 1903. At any rate, he was born to Samuel Boyd and his Highland wife, Christine Ross who had come from the Black Isle, just north of Inverness in the Highlands.

There are differing versions of his piping tuition as well. According to one source, Sandy became interested in the pipes during a visit to the Highlands at about the age of eleven and began to take lessons through the Boy Scouts. He later studied with Willie Barry, Willie Ross, and John MacColl. In another version, Sandy was initially taught by Duncan Grant and later by John MacColl and then by Robert Reid. Regardless of who his teachers were, and in which order they influenced his piping, Sandy emerged one of the finest pipers ever to be heard in Nova Scotia, and he had a tremendous impact both as a performer and as a teacher on the number and quality of pipers wherever he went.

Sandy was in the Merchant Marines, serving as a steward aboard the H.M.S. Arranghi, which had taken troops to Jamaica after Dunkirk. On the return trip, the ship put into the port of Halifax in 1942. Sandy and another piper, Hector MacLean were playing their pipes on the decks every evening. The young soldiers from the Pictou Highlanders, who were stationed at the Citadel, on occasion marched past the Bedford Basin on maneuvers and heard the pipes. One evening a couple of them rowed out to the ship to meet the musicians. There was little to do on the ship, which was being re-supplied, so Sandy went ashore, pipe case in hand, to the Halifax Citadel. Sandy was invited to play a tune, and then another and still another. Later, he was invited to make a quick trip to New Glasgow, which turned into a visit of several days. When the Arranghi completed its re-supply and moved on, Sandy was left behind. He stayed with his friends in the Pictou Highlanders for some time before he was officially ‘discovered’. He was then sworn into the Pictou Highlanders and immediately became a Canadian citizen.

Sandy made his first appearance in Inverness later that year. He was a gifted piper, a natural, and a man who played for the love of it, who needed no invitation to play and who was hard to stop once started. When leaving to go to Cape Breton, he was advised to take the ferry across to the Island and when he got there, take his pipes out and start playing. He would be instantly welcomed, and would never want for a place to stay. This may have set the style of the remainder of Sandy’s colourful life. Sandy certainly was to come back to Cape Breton time and time and time again.

Towards the end of the war, the Pictou Highlanders were stationed in Saint John, New Brunswick where Sandy was introduced to that city’s piping community. John Gibson told a wonderful story in an article in The Clansman (February/March, 1992) that involved Sandy and a piping friend, Norrie Warner, of Port Hawkesbury. They were both in Saint John with the Pictou Highlanders at the time and were roaming the streets, looking for some action. When they came up to the Admiral Beatty Hotel, they found that there was a dance going on inside. With no tickets, they managed to get in on the pretense that they were musicians.

Once inside, the two pipers got out the pipes and literally took over the whole evening, playing a variety of non-piping tunes and at one point were found leading a long line of revelers around the dance floor to “Pistol Packin’ Mama”. They were given their own table and were treated to more drinks than even these seasoned veterans could consume, despite their frequent practice. The next morning, Norrie informed a very hung-over Sandy Boyd that they were in big trouble, that they got arrested for creating a disturbance, and that they were to go up before the Colonel. “Och no,” Sandy started, miserably, but his face brightened when Warner laughed and showed him the $200 they had made in tips!

In 1946, with the war service at an end, Sandy found himself turned loose in New Glasgow where he met and married, fathering two children. According to Sandy MacBeth of Stellarton, Sandy Boyd used to spend hundreds of hours playing his pipes there, on the concrete walk in front of his house. “There was an old, retired minister living next door,” MacBeth recalls. “The wife would come out, bawling and crying when she would hear the pipes. Her boy, you see, was killed in the First World War, and the pipes reminded her of that.”

Sandy MacBeth had a great many good stories about Sandy Boyd’s time in Pictou County. “On one of his side trips at that time,” MacBeth recalls, “Sandy was travelling in a car with some of his new friends from the Pictou Highlanders when they happened to spy a moose, near the Tantamar Marshes, on the way to New Brunswick. ‘Look at the moose,’ one of the men cried to Sandy. Sandy looked out the window and saw the huge animal lumbering along there, beside the road. ‘If that’s a moose,’ said Sandy, in his Scottish brogue, ‘I’d hate to see a rat in this country!’ “Sandy was a fine man,” MacBeth continues. “He loved to play football - soccer, you know? But later on, coming on the end, we never saw that side of him. He couldn’t stand prosperity! That was his problem.”

Sandy was not made for family life, and his marriage was a rocky one from the start. His wife hated his piping, the drinking that went along with it, and his frequent disappearances, sometimes for weeks and even months. In the end, she refused to allow him to have his pipes in the house. “He kept his pipes at my place,” says Sandy MacBeth. “He kept his kilt and that down at Charlie Madden’s for a while but then Charlie’s wife kicked him out of there. I don’t know where he kept his gear after that, but he always kept his pipes at our place.”

The situation proved to be untenable, and Sandy left wife and family behind. “When he left for good,” remembers Sandy MacBeth, “he come up and took his pipes, and he caught the four o’clock in the morning train. He took off for Ontario, I believe.”

In 1947, Sandy was living in Soldier’s Cove with Black Jack MacDonald, then Pipe Major of the Cape Breton Highlanders. Francis MacKenzie happened to come and stay with his uncle, Black Jack, while recovering from appendix surgery, and he received piping instruction from Sandy for about five and a half months. By the summer, Sandy was back in Ontario where he was heard piping at Niagara Falls. Lauchlan MacLean, only about sixteen at the time, thought he was an amazing piper, but more knowledgeable people in the large crowd that had gathered were either non-committal, or dismissed him as a ‘bar room piper’.

In 1948, Sandy returned to New Brunswick where he played for a time with the New Brunswick Scottish Pipes and Drums under Pipe Major John MacLeod. On one occasion, the band travelled to Waterville, Maine for the November 11th Memorial celebrations. The evening before, Drum Major Lofty MacMillan suggested to Pipe Major MacLeod that they try to find Sandy and make sure he was ready for the performance the next day. For all they knew, and knowing Sandy’s wandering ways, they thought he could well be in New York before morning.

Eventually they tracked him down in front of a restaurant where a large crowd had gathered. They could hear Sandy playing “Deep In The Heart of Texas” long before they could work their way through the crowd to where he stood, his table covered with empty beer bottles and Yankee bucks. When Pipe Major MacLeod told him to stop, Sandy said, “We are in America now. There is nothing but poverty under the Union Jack. I know! I served. Give me the Stars and Stripes!” pointing to the table loaded with beers and money. They managed to corral Sandy, and he was on parade the next morning, but in the afternoon, Sandy played what he said they liked to hear in America, everything from “The Halls of Montezuma” to “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.

The band knew that Sandy was a great piper and they sent him to Hamilton, Ontario to play for the North American Championships that were held there at that time. When it came time for Sandy to present himself before the judge, Pipe Major Hugh MacMillan, he was nowhere to be found. A search ensued, and Sandy was found entertaining a large circle of admirers at the far side of the field. He was taken to the judge who asked him what he would like to play. Each of the contestants were expected to submit the names of three of each of the necessary tunes, but instead, Sandy simply answered, “What’d ye like tae hear, Sir?” The result of the competition was a tie, and Sandy was called upon to return to the platform and repeat his tunes. This time, he ‘walked away’ with first prizes in both the Piobaireachd and the March, Strathspey, and Reel. When the prizes were being presented, however, Sandy was nowhere to be found. He had gone off to play for a wedding aboard the Maid Of The Mist at Niagara Falls. He found out about his win when a newspaper clipping was later sent to him.

On another occasion, in 1949, Sandy travelled by boat to Digby and then on to Halifax by train with the New Brunswick Scottish to play for the city’s 200th Anniversary. In the train, an amply supplied makeshift bar was set up on Lofty MacMillan’s bass drum, with Sandy Boyd on one side and Pipe Major John MacLeod on the other. Sandy and Pipe Major MacLeod piped from Digby to Halifax, and the other band members claimed they never heard anything like it before or since. In the morning, Sandy was found under his blanket, completely dressed from the night before.

Despite their efforts to keep Sandy and his gift of music with them, Sandy moved on about 1950, returning to Cape Breton. True to the advice he received on his first visit, he was never lacking for a place to stay, and in return for room and board, he would teach the children of the house to play the pipes. Many pipers in Nova Scotia today had their start with Sandy as their teacher. One of Cape Breton’s most accomplished fiddlers also attributes much of his learning to Sandy. Cameron Chisholm, of Margaree Forks, tells how Sandy stayed with his family when he was just a pre-schooler, and again later when he was a bit older. Sandy would pipe every day in the kitchen, playing airs and laments, marches, strathspeys, and reels, jigs and hornpipes - medleys of tunes that sometimes lasted more than half an hour at a time. Cameron learned a lot of his tunes from Sandy’s piping.

According to the Casket, in 1950, ‘Jock’ Boyd of Scotland performed at a concert in Antigonish on April 26th. In 1951, he played in a concert in Inverness. In 1952, he was recorded by BBC Scotland for a program to be aired in that country. On November 21st of that year, he played in another concert in Antigonish - his “magic bagpipes” keeping the audience spellbound. He later played at the St. Andrew’s Night Banquet in Antigonish. In 1953, he played at the evening concert at the Antigonish Highland Games and again at the St. Andrew’s Night Banquet in November.

“About 1953 or 1954,” Jack MacIsaac remembers, “Sandy was living in the Inverness area, and he would come over to the Gaelic College to visit with Danny MacIntyre and his brother Peter MacIntyre, who were teaching piping at the College then. A.W.R.MacKenzie was trying to get his girls’ band together, and he didn’t have a whole lot of time for us boys. When Sandy would appear on the scene, he’d send Sandy in to teach us, sometimes for two or three days at a time. Sandy was a good teacher! You enjoyed your lessons with him. And he would play all this lovely music. It was a real inspiration for us.

“One evening Sandy went into Baddeck with Danny and Peter MacIntyre to a dance at the yacht club,” Jack remembers. “The band was Gib Whitney’s Orchestra from Sydney, and they were playing out on the wharf. Sandy got the pipes out and started playing with the orchestra. He could play anything from the “Twelfth Street Rag” to the “Boogie Woogie”. He was up on the wharf, and you know how he goes, and he was weaving and ducking, and perhaps he had one skinful too many because he went right off the end of the wharf! He climbed back up out of the water and took his pipes apart and dried the reeds off, then put them back in and started up playing again. Away he goes, soaking wet from head to toe, but that didn’t matter! That night they got him back to the Gaelic College, and he was staying in the hut, you know what they were like, and not much heat in them in those days. He hung his green kilt up to dry and climbed into his bunk, and the next morning he was dressed back in it.”

In 1954 and 1955, he was listed as being from Dunvegan, Inverness County, and teaching piping in Big River. His 6/8 march, “Crossing The Causeway”, was published in the July issue of The Piper and Dancer Bulletin. Also in 1955, he placed third in the Open Piobaireachd with Pipe Major Duncan Rankine of the 2nd Btn. Black Watch (RHR) of Canada taking the first prize and Pipe Major J.T. MacKenzie of RCAF Rockcliffe taking the second. He played in the evening concert at the Antigonish Highland Games. According to the August issue of The Piper and Dancer Bulletin, Sandy was a leading character in the National Film Board’s film called “The Wandering Piper” which was made in Nova Scotia. The young boys he was teaching in the movie were Harold and Jimmy MacDonnell. Among the many others he taught must be numbered Rannie Kennedy, who became a very popular piper in his time and was depicted on a post card piping at the Canso Causeway shortly after it opened.

Sandy moved to Glencoe, Ontario at the end of the summer season in Nova Scotia. At that time, Pipe Major William Webster had re-organized his pipe band in Glencoe, with his two sons, Kenneth and Donald, and a large number of younger players. Sandy’s arrival was heralded with much anticipation. He was certainly the finest piper ever heard in Glencoe, though John Wilson was not impressed, at least not at first. The band was scheduled to perform at a local fair and when they were finished, Lauchlan MacLean’s father, who had Sandy as a passenger in his car, could not find him anywhere. Lauchlan was left to look for him. The vanishing piper was found entertaining at the local Legion, and it was Lauchlan’s job to try to take him home. In the end, he loaded Sandy onto the back of a stable truck hauled by six draft horses, each weighing a ton, and drove him home through the streets of the town, Sandy piping away on the back. Sandy left Glencoe after a year or so, and no one there heard from him again.

In 1956, he attended the Toronto Pipers’ Society Indoor Games held at the Fort York Armouries. Though he was not listed among the prize winners, and may not even have been entered in the competitions, he entertained with selections on the pipes afterwards and, as John Wilson reported in the March, 1956 issue of The Piper and Dancer Bulletin, “a good time was being had by all.”

By 1957, however, he was back in Nova Scotia and was teaching piping in Marble Mountain. That year, he played for the Highland dancing competitions at the Antigonish Highland Games. Sandy’s stay in Nova Scotia was much shorter this time for he ended up in Glengarry County, Ontario in time for the Maxville Games, and a year later was still there, teaching and playing. “Like the Scarlet Pimpernel,” reports The Piper and Dancer Bulletin of July 1958, “piper Sandy Boyd is liable to pop up in the most unexpected places.”

In 1963, the magazine announced that Sandy was in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia where he was teaching piping and planning to start a junior pipe band. He was back in the Antigonish area in 1965, living with Morrison and Kaye Beaton in Brierly Brook. He started teaching their two youngest sons, Francis and Allan. In January 1966, Sandy performed at a Burns Night Ceilidh, playing what was called in The Casket report - “Swing Piping”.

There was a notice in the paper on March 3rd that the Legion Hall would be used to hold piping classes for boys and girls ages 10-14. The teacher was Sandy Boyd. Thirty-five children signed up. Some of them would persevere, and eventually become the pipe section of the internationally acclaimed Antigonish Legion Pipe Band. Sandy was still living with Morrison Beaton’s family in Brierly Brook, and the two young Beaton boys made their first appearance as pipers at the Games that summer. In August, Sandy was staying with Dan MacKinnon in North Grant and it was there that Scott Williams found him and began taking lessons with him. Within a short time, Sandy was back in Brierly Brook and Scott continued to take daily lessons from him there.

Sandy used to take his three students, Francis and Allan Beaton and Scott Williams to play at house ceilidhs throughout much of Antigonish County. He had each boy play in turn and then together, and it was always a scramble to learn a new tune to play before the next such ceilidh. Then he would play himself, often far into the night.

Sandy had a favourite routine, his ‘party piece’, that went something like this. Two people would stand, one on each end of the room, each holding a tall glass with a good, stiff drink of rum in it. Sandy would begin to play “The Drunken Piper” and march across the room. When he would reach the glass of rum, he would drop the blowpipe out of his mouth and take a swallow of the drink, pull the blowpipe back into his mouth, and resume marching to the other side of the room without missing so much as a gracenote of the tune. Once back at the other end, he would repeat the maneuver. Gradually, as the glasses emptied, Sandy would begin to stagger, slightly at first and then in a more exaggerated manner, as he appeared to be suffering from the effects of the rum. He would weave back and forth and at times his knees would seem to be giving out, but he would manage to keep marching and playing. By the time one glass was empty, Sandy would be on his knees, still playing and still marching along to the music to get the last sip from the other glass before finishing his tune lying on the floor. To show his apparent utter state of drunkenness, he would allow the pipes to sag and moan their way to silence. It was Sandy’s favourite party piece, and served in no small measure to sustain his dependence on alcohol that accounted for much in his nomadic way of life.

By late October, Sandy was on the move again, this time to the Kentucky area of the United States. Where he went, and with whom, it is difficult to say, but it was not too long before Sandy popped up unexpectedly, back at Lofty MacMillan’s in Saint John, New Brunswick. Lofty woke one night to find Sandy, clothing in tatters, shoes worn out, and sick, tapping at his window. Though he did not yet know it, Sandy had become a diabetic and he was, Lofty believed, close to death’s door. Lofty took him in and began the task of restoring him to what must now pass for good health. With new clothes, his medical condition diagnosed, and receiving treatment for it, Sandy spent several months recovering at Lofty’s, promising to behave himself, to stay put, and to stop drinking. To continue to drink, he knew, would result in his death. He would stop. He taught Lofty’s son, John David to play the pipes, and by 1968 had introduced the boy to the joys of piobaireachd. He could not ignore his demon for long however. It was not in his nature to stay in one place, and one day he was gone.

About 1974, Sandy turned up in Barra Glen, Victoria County where he lived for about eighteen months with Rod C. and Helen MacNeil. They had six children, five of whom became pipers, and the sixth was a drummer. Helen remembers that “after breakfast, Sandy would go upstairs to his room and he would be awfully quiet. One day I passed by his door and it was open, and there he was, sitting with the pipes on his shoulder, the drones turned off, and no reed in his chanter. It was plugged up with something you see, so the air wouldn’t pass through, and there he was, playing his tunes, and not making a sound. He played like that all day long. Sometimes he played his chanter, but usually it was on the silent pipes. He didn’t want to disturb me, you know, though I loved to hear the pipes. I still love the pipes. Sandy taught my son Paul when he was only about ten years old. Lorne and Marian and Myrna were away at college and Rosemary was more interested in drumming then. So was Timmy. He just taught Paul.”

From Helen and Rod’s, Sandy went to stay with Neil James MacNeil in Gillis Point. Then he went down to Little Narrows, to a MacKinnon’s. It doesn’t appear that he did any teaching there, however.

It has been estimated that, in his last dozen years or so, Sandy stayed in a hundred different homes. In many of them, he taught the children how to play the pipes. In others, he simply played his chanter and his pipes for hours on end. Gradually, his health deteriorated, though when he was able to stay away from alcohol for any length of time, he seemed to rally. He still showed up unexpectedly, pipe case in hand, ready to play for anyone who would listen, and ready to tell the old stories about his time with the great John MacColl, his most influential teacher. Sandy spent most of the late 1970s with Willie D. Chisholm of Margaree who took care of him as best he could.

Sandy died on January 13th, 1982. His funeral was held on the 18th, and he was buried in Sydney Forks, among strangers. A special bank account was opened by the Antigonish Highland Society to collect funds to have him reburied in Iona, among friends.