Below is the complete album of songs from the show.

Here is the short synopsis of the plot and structure of the show

SEVEN SOULS ON GALLOW GREEN​

A Community Music Drama
Book, Music and Lyrics by Alan Fleming Baird



THE STORY

We open on a scene familiar to anyone who has spent an evening in Paisley. A singer-songwriter sits on a stool with his guitar, a microphone before him, a pool of warm light around him. He begins to sing, warm, unhurried, a local musician with a local story. But this is no ordinary gig. (The Storyteller's Prologue)

  The band accompanies him quietly. The rest of the stage is in darkness. This is exactly what it appears to be: a musician, a song, a room. For now.

The song he sings draws his audience in. They find themselves in a modern museum exhibition about the Paisley Witch Trials of 1697, the last mass execution for witchcraft in western Europe. Around twenty people were accused and imprisoned. Of those, seven were hanged and burned on Gallow Green. Their ashes lie at Maxwellton Cross, at the intersection of Maxwellton Street and George Street. It is those seven that this show remembers.
The singer becomes the museum guide and, as he tells the story from 1697, something extraordinary begins to happen. The visitors find themselves drawn toward two large wooden chests of period costumes. They dress in costumes from the time of the trials. They transform. The past reaches out and claims them.

  The lighting shifts. The clinical white of the museum gives way to a warmer, older light. The band begins to add period costume pieces quietly as the transformation happens around them. The folk singer hands his jacket to the actor playing The Expositor, who puts on the period coat. The singer-songwriter and the Expositor are now two distinct presences on the same stage.

NARRATION 1  Opening
Now step from the present and into the past,
To a town where a shadow was destined to cast,
To Bargarran's people who worked and who prayed,
Who gathered and danced and who were not afraid,
For the world they had built seemed as solid as stone,
And none of them knew what the future had sown.

The drama of Bargarran in 1697 begins. (For A Story Must Be Told)
We are introduced to the people of Bargarran enjoying a Beltane celebration on the green, dancing, singing, neighbours greeting neighbours, and children playing by the burn. This is a community at its warmest and most innocent. (On Bargarran Green) One man, moved by the beauty of the evening and the place he has always called home, begins to sing. The community joins him. (You Are Always Home To Me) Among them, at the edge of the gathering, stands Agnes Naismith, present, belonging, but somehow not quite included in the warmth around her.

Before the whispers about Agnes fully surface, the community pauses to sing a cautionary tale they all know well. (The Tale of the Spaewife) is a song from the folk tradition of the community singing together about a legendary figure, a seer whose gift for telling was also her curse. She saw what others could not, and spun what she saw into a story. Once the thread left her hands, it could not be gathered back. The community sings this tale with warmth and energy, completely unaware that they are about to enact it.

  The lighting is at its warmest here, amber and gold, the suggestion of firelight. The band plays openly, joyfully, part of the community. Music stands face outward. This is the world as it should be.

The Expositor/Tour Guide (in period costume) steps forward. In rhyming couplets, he reveals what lies beneath the surface of the community's warmth. Whispers, rumours, the dark talk that follows Agnes wherever she goes. No proof. Just words.

NARRATION 2  The Whispers About Agnes
The cup is raised, the song is sung,
But darker words fall from the tongue.
For Agnes walks apart from here,
And whispers follow, dark with fear.

They say she knows the devil's ways,
That she has walked in darker days.
That when she speaks a blessing dies,
That truth is hidden in her eyes.

No proof is needed, just a word,
A whisper passed, a rumour heard.
And Agnes knows the talk is near,
For she has seen the eyes of fear.

She asks for nothing, wants no part,
Of darkness lodged in any heart.
She only wants what all souls need,
To live and work and plant her seed.

But still the whispers find her out,
And fill the air with seeds of doubt.
So Agnes stands and turns to say
What honest hearts must say today.

Agnes responds with quiet dignity, singing of the only things she has ever wanted: honest work, honest worth, to be left in peace. (Let Me Be) The community listens. Then life simply carries on without her.

  As Agnes sings, the lighting narrows to a single spotlight. The band plays more quietly, more carefully. The music stands have shifted almost imperceptibly, closing slightly inward. The community is still present, but something has changed in how they stand.

NARRATION 3  Time Passing
And so the day turns and the world carries on,
The moment of stillness already is gone,
For life will not wait on the sorrow of one,
The fields must be tended, the work must be done,
And Agnes walks back to the edge of the crowd,
While over the town hangs an invisible cloud.

The working women head to the fields. (Life's A Bonnie Spell) The children play their counting game by the burn, an innocent melody that will thread through the rest of the evening in ways none of them could imagine. (The Children's Song) And then the gossip surfaces. One voice speaks of witches. Then another. Then the whole community is singing, the rumour becomes a roar, the Expositor at their head, absolutely certain, absolutely righteous, absolutely wrong. (There Are Witches)

  The lighting begins its shift toward red as There Are Witches builds. By the song's end the stage is washed in deep amber. The band is fully engaged, driving, relentless, part of the frenzy.

Act One ends with the community unified behind their conviction, singing with one voice, the Expositor leading them into the darkness of what is coming. (A Truth To Declare) The lights go down.

  The final image of Act One: the Expositor and the full community, arms raised, the stage bathed in deep red light. Then blackout. The band holds the last chord until silence.

Act Two

Act Two opens as Act One began, but differently. The folk singer is back on his stool with his guitar. The same microphone. The same pool of light. But he is in period costume now. He has not returned to the present. Something has been carried across that cannot be put back. (The Storyteller's View)

  The lighting is cooler than Act One. The warmth is gone from it. The band re-enters in their period costume additions, taking their places quietly. The Expositor stands at the edge of the light, watching.

The community reassembles. Life appears to continue normally, the drinking song, the familiar warmth of neighbours together. (Drinking Song) But the audience hears it differently now. The innocence of Act One is gone even if the melody is not. The accusations resurface, more driven than before. (There Is Evil Where The Darkness Gathers)

The Expositor explains:
NARRATION 4  The Pivot To Naming
The frenzy grows, the names must come,
The crowd demands that justice be done.
But who shall bear the heaviest weight?
The popular, the pious,
Or those the town would isolate?
For fear will find the easiest door,
The one already marked as other,
Set apart,
The one they'd seen before.

Names are spoken publicly. Real names. Neighbours. Friends. People the community has known all their lives. Once spoken, they cannot be unspoken. (There Are Names)

  The lighting moves back toward red as the accusations build. The band drives the songs harder than before, the same melodies, but something darker underneath them. The children's song melody surfaces briefly in the accompaniment as the Expositor steps forward.

Agnes is brought to trial. The community sings its judgment, calm, certain, procedural. (Cast Them Out) Agnes says nothing in her defence. She simply stands. Then she raises her head.

  The band plays the antiphonal trial anthem with the choir, female voices and male voices alternating, the structure echoing the Scottish Presbyterian psalm tradition. Agnes stands motionless at the centre. The lighting is cold and formal. This is not a mob. This is a court. That is worse.

NARRATION 5  The Trial
The names have been spoken. The accusations stand.
The community has gathered. Justice is at hand.
What God has shown us we cannot ignore,
The darkness walks among us as it has before.
And so this court convenes in God's own name,
To drive the evil out and fix the blame.

[Agnes is brought forward]

Agnes Naismith, you stand accused.
The court will hear how truth has been abused.
You are called to answer for what has been said.
Speak now your defence
Or stand condemned instead.

Agnes steps forward. Facing condemnation, facing death, she finds in herself something older and stranger than fear. She curses the community that has condemned her with a fury and a power that silences everyone on stage. (Carry This Curse Till The Last)

  During the curse song, the violinist leaves the band and begins to circle Agnes slowly as she sings. The violin's voice becomes something ancient and unsettling, the bow a kind of incantation made audible. The rest of the band is still. When the song ends, the violinist returns to their place. Silence.

Seven chords sound in darkness. The Expositor speaks seven names.

  The band plays the seven chords live, slow, separated by silence, the musicians visible in near darkness. The audience sees the human hands producing each blow. After the seventh chord, complete silence. Then the Expositor speaks into the darkness.

NARRATION 6  The Seven Names
[spoken, no rhyme — the formal voice breaks]
Katherine Campbell.
Agnes Naismith.
Margaret Lang.
Margaret Fulton.
John Lindsay of Barloch.
John Lindsay.
James Lindsay.

Seven souls on Gallow Green.
The tenth of June,
Sixteen ninety-seven.

Gone where we cannot go.

In the silence after the names, the full company sings, unaccompanied, bare human voices, the band completely still and silent, the children's innocent counting game one final time. The melody that began the evening in innocence now carries the full weight of everything that has happened.

  The band lays down their instruments. Every musician sits or stands completely still as the company sing unaccompanied. The absence of music where music has been constant throughout the evening is its own dramatic statement. The instruments are silent. Only voices remain.

One two three / someone's at the door
One two three / grab your stones and sticks
Four five six / name them if you dare
Four five six / point and they'll be there

On the final word, the Expositor raises his arm and points into the darkness upstage.

And Agnes is there.

Dressed in white, still and certain, emerging from exactly the place he is pointing toward. Is she the condemned woman returning to claim her town as she promised? Is she a ghost? A haunting that has never left Paisley in three hundred and twenty-nine years? A memory the community cannot shake? The show does not answer. The audience does.

  The lighting shifts to a single cool white spot on Agnes, stark, clean, otherworldly. The band remains completely still and silent. Agnes sings alone, unaccompanied at first, the guitar joining her quietly as the song progresses. The Expositor's arm lowers slowly as she sings.

She sings of home, of belonging to this place, this town, these people, with a tenderness that breaks the heart. (I Am Always Home To Thee)
In the stillness that follows, one member of the community walks through the familiar streets of his town and finds them changed. The place is the same. Something has left its mark that cannot be removed. (Nothing Has Changed At All)

  The lighting shifts again, neither the warmth of Act One nor the red of the accusations. Something cooler, more ordinary. The world as it is after something terrible has happened. Band members begin quietly, almost unconsciously, to remove their period costume pieces. The historical world is releasing its hold.

As the community slowly returns to the present, shedding their period costumes, becoming themselves again, they carry the weight of the story they have just lived. (For A Story Must Be Told — Finale) The Expositor hands the period coat back to the folk singer. He does not put on his guide's jacket. He is no longer the guide. He moves to his stool. As the community slowly returns to the present, shedding their period costumes, becoming themselves again, they carry the weight of the story they have just lived. 

The show does not end in darkness. The community, returned to the present and carrying the weight of what they have done, finds its way toward something harder and more honest than certainty. The finale reprises the melody of The Tale of the Spaewife, the community's own cautionary song, the warning they sang and ignored, now with new words. The tale has been told. The harm has been done. And finally, at the last, the community seeks to find honesty. (Finale: Seek To Find The Honesty)

  For the final song, the full company stands together in contemporary dress. The band plays simply, quietly, beneath the voices. The lighting is warm, but not the innocent warmth of Act One. Something older and more knowing. The folk singer plays his guitar. This is how the evening began. This is not how it ends.
  (Gone Where We Cannot Go)