WHAT made a young American woman give up her privileged life in the States last century to devote herself to gathering and preserving Gaelic songs and culture?
It’s a question that has long exercised the mind of award-winning Gaelic singer Fiona J Mackenzie, and in an attempt to answer it, she has researched and written the first biography of the remarkable Margaret Fay Shaw.
While the work of Shaw and her husband John Lorne Campbell is recognised as key to the Gaelic renaissance in Scotland, Shaw’s contribution has been slightly overshadowed, according to Mackenzie.
“There’s not really been a huge amount written about Margaret herself,” she told the Sunday National. “It’s mostly been about John and part of the reason I wanted to write this book was to address that.”
As the former archivist on the island of Canna which was gifted by the Campbells to the National Trust for Scotland in 1981, Mackenzie has had access to Shaw’s diaries and letters to help her write the new book, The Cadence Of A Song. She was also close friends with Magda Sagarzazu, who was like a daughter to the couple and encouraged her to write the book.
It celebrates how Shaw’s extraordinary work in documenting and preserving traditional Gaelic songs and customs took her from turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania to 1920s New York, Paris, Nova Scotia and the Hebrides, where she lived until her death in 2004 at the age of 101.
Shaw not only preserved songs which could have been lost but also became a skilled photographer, and it was her photographs of the Hebridean landscape and people that first caught Mackenzie’s eye.
“I think her photographic collection is just one of the best collections of ethnographic representation in the whole world,” she said.
As a Gaelic singer, Mackenzie was very familiar with the songs Shaw had collected, and by the time she became archivist on Canna, she had a solid foundation to build up more knowledge about this remarkable woman.
Researching further, she discovered that Shaw’s childhood was marked by tragedy as she lost her mother when she was just seven years old, followed by her father when she was 11. Raised by her aunts and older sisters, Shaw’s solace was music, having taught herself the piano when she was very young.
When she was 16, her family packed her off to Helensburgh with a family friend and his daughter. The Shaw family had their roots in Scotland as the sisters’ great-great-grandfather, John Shaw, had emigrated with his four sons to the US in 1782 and built the first iron foundry west of the Allegheny Mountains.
It was in Helensburgh that Shaw first heard a performance of a Gaelic song. It was an Anglicised version, however, and Shaw knew instinctively that this was not the original.
She later wrote: “As a child, I had learned Scots songs and a few of Robert Burns’s, but these she sang were completely new. To think they had been found in the Hebrides and I had never known anything about them! But there was something wrong, I felt; there was something more to these songs. If I could only go to those far-off islands and hear those singers myself!”
Over the next few years, Shaw travelled frequently from America to visit the Scottish islands, at one point living in Skye for three months in order to learn Gaelic.
However, it wasn’t until 1929 that she settled in South Uist, having given up her dream of becoming a concert pianist as a result of rheumatoid arthritis. She left her studies in New York but was still unsure about what she was searching for, according to Mackenzie.
“Margaret was looking for song but also for a home, I think,” she said. “She was trying to find out where she fitted in, and somehow the landscape and the people particularly appealed. She instantly felt an affinity with the islanders, although this American woman – who smoked like a chimney, drank and swore – must have seemed a bit strange to them at first.”
On December 31, Shaw was invited to a Hogmanay dinner at the local merchant’s house, and her life changed for good when one of the maids sang a Gaelic song to entertain the guests.
“Margaret knew instantly that this was the pristine thing she was looking for,” said Mackenzie.
The maid, Mairi MacRae, agreed to teach her the song and others if Shaw went to live with her, her son and her sister, Peigi.
“That was it – Margaret went and stayed with them for six years and completely immersed herself in the community,” said Mackenzie.
The small dwelling, which had no running water, was a huge contrast to the mansion where Shaw had grown up but she settled in and began her manual transcription of the sisters’ songs.
“She didn’t have any recording machines like John had, so she wrote them down in musical notation with the sisters singing them over and over again until she got it right,” said Mackenzie.
“This is where she sets herself apart from any other collector as she immersed herself in Hebridean life, with her photographs complementing her collecting work.
“Most of the collectors would come and go after a couple of weeks, but she stayed and got her hands dirty. She helped with the croft work, she dug the peats, she milked the cows, and I think when you look at her photographs, you can see that the people trust her. They knew that she was basically one of them, and she collected the songs in a complete and very natural way.”
Her family at first thought Shaw had taken leave of her senses, but later her sisters visited her on South Uist and saw how well she was accepted by the people there.
“That mollified them a bit,” said Mackenzie.
Shaw’s only indulgence was to take a room at the Lochboisdale Hotel once a week so she could have a hot bath and it was in the hotel that she met Campbell, who sought her out as he needed photographs for a book about Barra he was working on with the author Compton Mackenzie.
It wasn’t love at first sight, but the relationship developed over time, and the pair married, settling at first in Barra where they developed their collecting partnership.
“John had the technical side and his Gaelic was much more proficient at that time than Margaret’s, but she had the ear to be able to transcribe the songs that John was recording, so they formed this incredible partnership,” said Mackenzie.
Had they not, many of the songs would certainly have been lost.
There are 101 songs in Shaw’s book alone which, with her photographs, document a culture already being eroded by modern life. Her contribution to Scotland’s heritage was recognised with honorary degrees from both Edinburgh and Aberdeen universities.
Mackenzie is convinced Shaw’s story has a lesson for today in terms of Gaelic and identity.
“Margaret didn’t come from Scotland, yet she learned Gaelic and she managed to save a part of our heritage which we wouldn’t have otherwise,” she said.
“She is a huge lesson for us because everybody can play their part – you don’t have to be from that island, that glen, or wherever.”
Mackenzie hopes the new book will fill the gap about who Shaw was and what gave her the drive to give up her privileged life to record Gaelic songs before they were lost.
“I think the answer is that it is all about love – love of a heritage and love of a culture,” she said.
The Cadence Of A Song by Fiona J Mackenzie is published by Birlinn
