ONE of the seminal albums of the 1970s is to be restaged as a new work in Scots by one of the country's most acclaimed writers.

James Robertson, author of And The Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack, has written a Scots version of Joni Mitchell's 1976 album Hejira for Glasgow's winter traditional music and folk festival.

Pilgrimer, its songs reset in Scotland by Robertson, will be performed at the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow in January.

The melodies of the songs are being slightly altered to fit the new words and every song on the album has been "rewritten in the Scots form", the director of the popular annual festival said.

Donald Shaw said: "I met up with James and James, I've known for a while, is a big fan of Joni Mitchell. He had been working on this idea of rewriting the album in the form of Scots song. It's beautiful, the way it has been written.

"But James is not a songwriter - that is not his area - so it is always interesting when you get poets writing for musicians, there is that discussion about when a poet becomes a song.

"Karine Polwart has been making the songs work, and the first half of the show will be Scots singers like Annie Grace and Karine [as well as Dick Gaughan, Julie Fowlis] and the second half of the concert will be an all-comers homage to Joni's work, a greatest hits."

Performing on the night, January 16 at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, will be Grammy-winning US guitarist Larry Carlton, who played on the original recording of Hejira itself.

Other singers and musicians on the night will be Rod Paterson, Scottish Album of the Year award winner Kathryn Joseph and Annie Grace.

Pilgrimer, the festivals says, "reimagines Joni Mitchell's classic 1976 album Hejira, whose Arabic title denotes both the prophet Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina in 622, to escape persecution, and any flight from danger or hostility."

Mr Shaw said that Robertson had finished his writing of the work by August this year.

He said: "I thought this will be terrifying to announce if it isn't finished.

"But it was done, and I think it has been in his mind for a while."

The album's songs have been altered for their new Scottish context, so that the opening track, Coyote, has been changed to a fox.

The project also feeds into one of the main themes of Celtic Connections this year, of migration, emigration and immigration.

"That project, and others in the festival, are around the theme of migration," Mr Shaw said. "And when the refugee crisis really kicked off in the summer and there was all those horrific images, it really made me think that music has taken free movement for granted.

"We are at a really interesting point now, at a cross roads for music, because the music we know now would not be if it wasn't for the migration of people into the big cities, and from people coming together from completely different contexts.

"For me - I have toured in around 40 countries - including in war zones, but I have never really thought of that issue: 'I'm sorry you cannot come in'.

"The world has shut its gates, and many parts of the world you cannot just jump in a plane and go there.

"That is why international festivals that can be brave, and programme those musicians from as many of those areas as they can, are important."