The great American folklorist Alan Lomax visited my home island of South Uist in the Hebrides in 1951, the year before I was born, to record the indigenous songs and stories of the people. These wonderful recordings have just been made freely available for streaming from the New York-based Association for Cultural Equity.
So I now find old Gaelic people whom I knew as a child singing out of the same global jukebox as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Jelly Roll Morton. Among the marvels that Lomax recorded was a ceilidh in Daliburgh in which you can hear the great Isle of Barra singer An Eòsag and South Uist's Bean Eairdsidh Raghnaill.
Lomax also visited my local primary school at Garrynamonie where he recorded the village children singing four Gaelic songs and four English ones – London Bridge is Falling Down; The Big Ship Sails Through The Illy-Alley-O; May Lies A-Weepin; and In and Out the Window. The fact that these English-language ditties were well-known in school the year I was conceived tells its own story about the displacement of native Gaelic. Since then, the school has been razed to the ground. What remains is the digital glory thanks to the visionary work of Lomax and his kind.
