Wednesday 20 July 2016

Our Uist Sojourn. Day 3





For folk who have never visited the Western Isles before, and Uist in particular, the fact that you can’t go anywhere or do anything without everyone knowing about it, can be a bit stressful.  In fact, to me, that’s what makes South Uist so wonderful. Within 2 minutes of getting toff the ferry in Lochboisdale, I had been identified by the man coming to give me my hire car and asked “Now  do you know how to get to Taigh Mairi Anndra”, despite me never actually having said to the company what and where I was going! Then 2 miles further on, I bumped into a good friend of mine, Uist poet and actor Angus Peter Campbell who had heard I was coming to the island. I had also finally managed to find a hairdresser who could cut my hair ( one of the drawbacks of living on Canna is the impossibility of getting your hair done unless you go to the mainland) . I walked in the door and the lovely lady, whom I had never met before, said “ Oh yes, you’ll be the lady who’s staying in Taigh Mairi Anndra this week.”.
This is one of the qualities of Uist folk which so endeared Margaret Fay Shaw to them. She felt instantly welcomed and cherished by people here, felt like a family member. Even if local folk harboured  some reserved suspicion of her, it was never obvious to her and they would have been horrified , had it been so.  This she talks about in her papers which I have been presenting this week in the area.  Last night, I was drafted in at the last minute to sing at the launch of a new book at Kildonan Museum, by Professor Alan Riach of Glasgow University, on the great Gaelic bard, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair’s ,epic poem, Birlinn Clanranald. One of my first ever song tutors from Uist, Catriona Garbutt ,was unable to perform so “could I just do a few songs to fill the gap”. Delighted to do so but as always, when singing here, I  am conscious of the need to ‘make sure it is just right’ – song choice, gauge the audience, right words, it’s not just a case of getting up and singing any old song. Does the audience want ‘big’ songs, do they want something light and ‘joiny-in-y’, do they have Gaelic, do I have the right introduction information? These are all imperative, and rightly so. Having been given some wonderful songs by the Uibhisteach over the years, the least I can do, is make sure they are right and that folk want to hear them.


And that, I feel is largely what Margaret felt too. She seems to  have been driven by a need to preserve the songs and to preserve them immaculately. 


To have the correct words, the correct, metre, the correct provenance. She recognised that Peigi and Mairi were entrusting t her, the future of their songs and heritage, that she had the skills which they did not, to notate the songs, to record the words , correctly for future generations, in order for us to have an accurate picture of their lives, once they were no longer here.

Spending time with local people, looking at some of Margaret’s pictures is a most illuminating experience and I am learning lots, the most important being that for many of the pictures, it is too late for us. Too late to gather the information. The people in the pictures are obviously long gone but even family members don’t recognise their forebears. Something for us all to remember and not to ‘leave for the young ones to do’.

However one question almost certainly answered for me. I have recently been delving into Margaret’s diaries of her time here in North Glendale and trying to piece together a picture of her life, that she hasn’t put down on paper. She was having Gaelic lessons “ from the local minister” but she never mentioned his  name. She was also very good at sprinkling her diary entries with ‘codes’ and caricatures! She talks of lessons with ‘MM’.  I find mention in other correspondence of her friend ‘the Little Minister’. Then in Alleghenies ( “From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides” Birlinn Press. ISBN: 9781841587707 ) , she mentions ‘the young minster who was somewhat eligible”. So I put 2 and 2 together and hopefully have added it up to 4. Also in her ‘Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist”, she mentions recordings songs from the Rev Murdo Macleod, of Daliburgh.   So unless I am very much mistaken, MM is Murdo Macleod and he is the  Minister who was teaching Margaret Gaelic and that perhaps she carried a torch for him! Pure guesswork of course…… But so much of this job is just that, trying to piece together a huge jigsaw and get the whole picture!
Can anyone tell me if this the Rev Murdo Macleod of Daliburgh, c 1930?

The day ends with a fierce electrical storm and the glen is in total darkness, much as it would have been 86+ years ago. Except now, there is the neon glow of Televisions, coming from the odd window and the lights of the Lochboisdale ferry twinkling in the distance. As the thunder rumbles and the wind blows, I remember Margaret’s description of a gale:
“The wind sometimes drives the spindrift across the island to whiten the faces of men trying to tie down the remains of a haystack. The walls of my room would billow in and out like an accordion: the rook would shale and flaming peat would blow out into the room. At such times there can be no opening the door or the roof might depart. But there is more safety in a thatched house on such a night than under the fearful noise of a tin roof which is being lifted slightly with each terrible blast”

Such it was and still is…


Tuesday 19 July 2016

Day 2- A Uist Sojourn

Our first evening took us  to the first presentation undertaken and delivered successfully in Eriskay Hall.
 My own vivid memories of my first time in this hall was at the very first Ceolas Gaelic Summer School in 1996, 20 years ago. I was studying Gaelic at the time, had just started my serious stufy of Gaelic Song and to me, everything was new and fresh and exciting, possibilities boundless as far as song was concerned. I had purchased my first copy of Margaret Fay Shaw’s seminal work “ Folksongs and Folklore of South Uistt” on the first day and was instantly entranced by her depiction of a disappeared way of life. It became my Gaelic song ‘bible’ straight away and has been so ever since.
The phrase which keeps springing to my mind, as I sit here outside Taigh Mairi Anndra on a day so different from yesterday, blue skies and skylarks.  Is “ If you had told me 20 years ago, that one day I would be charged with looking after Margaret ( and Johns) precious archives and  reminding people of the preciousness of it all, I would have said , in Gaelic “ Thalla! ( Away ye go”) or Mach a seo- Get out of here”! This to me is, apart from the births of my 3 children, the most precious job I could ever hope to do in my life. Margaret Fay Shaw , in folklore circles, has achieved almost mythical proportions of ‘Celtic excitement’  and ‘academic worth’ but here, sitting looking at the place in the rocks  where Peigi Anndra did her washing and stopped for a second to let Margaret take her picture, the realisation that in fact, Margaret was all ‘about’ life, seeing her friend’s life through an outsiders eyes, eyes for the future generations of people interested enough to seek out the knowledge, joys and heartaches of the hard working people of South Uist.


The Eriskay Hall presentation and the following one in Kildonan Museum were both heart-warming and scary!  I am conscious that to some, I am ‘teaching my granny to suck eggs”. To some this information and these pictures will be as familiar as a pair of slippers on a cold day. I apologise in advance but say that I hope people will go away at least having learnt something they didn’t know before, or see a picture or film, or hear a song, they didn’t know before.
Eriskay saw me deliver Margaret’s paper “ Contrasts” which describes her contrasting musical lives, from the hallowed corridors and dressing rooms of Carnegie Hall, New York, to the songs sung by a nursemaid in Boisdale House on New Year’s Day.  Margaret’s words, not mine, form the text part, I merely enhance it with pictures, film, sound archive and my own voice.  This paper was last heard n Women’s Hour, on the BBC in 1956, never since.  It has never been published so It is unlikely to have been heard since.

Kildonan sees me deliver “Hunting Folksongs in the Hebrides” which was published in the National Geographic Magazine in 1947.

 Again, unless someone happens to have a copy of this publication tucked away in an attic somewhere or one is an academic, it is unlikely that anyone present would have seen this paper before. Margaret describes in vivid detail, her arrival in the Hebrides, hearing songs for the first time, the people she lived with and their traditions and customs- for Hogmanay, weddings, death and rats! Again I ‘fill in the gaps’ with the pictures  which she used in the article and add film, sound archive of the songs she talks about, as well as use my own voice.
The response from the audience is, to me as both a singer and a folk-curator, quite overwhelming. The silence in the room is tangible as folk strain to listen to Peigi’s spindly voice on the ‘wire’. There are chuckles at some of Margaret’s anecdotes and tears too, at Margaret’s final piece of film, taken for her 100th birthday.
It is important that folk do not forget their history. In this modern word of stresses and strains, politics and terrorism, it is important to remember where you come from. Uist is special in that it most definitely has a strong sense of place and identity. People love to hear their ancestors and their voices, see their images and the place they come from.

Here, using Wi-Fi, which Peigi and Mairi would have surely  found so unbelievable, it is my duty to remind us all of where we come from and the part that Margaret and John Campbell played in this. And as for  telephone?  Well……….








Monday 18 July 2016

Taigh Mairi Anndra- first night. in Uist...

                                                What would these walls say…
                                                                  A Uist sojourn……

All the phrases which come to mind  in this particular moment, sound trite and ‘cheesy’ but for once, they are real. As I stand in the doorway of the tiny thatched cottage called “Taigh Mairi Anndra” in Scottish Gaelic,  ( The House of Mary, daughter of  Andrew), perched away up on the hill at the end of rough track in a small glen in South Uist, the Outer Hebrides, I contemplate the weather battered landscape in front of me. The house behind me, has walls three feet thick and I wonder what they would say “if they could talk”. What did they hear? Who did they see? “Breathtaking” in the literal sense, the wind blows today from the South West and carries with it, clouds of soft and curiously mild rain. I am used to island life , I live on the even tinier island of Canna in the Inner Hebrides,  but Uist has a peculiar softness, tinged with rough edges, which Canna doesn’t possess. Canna is green and verdant with basalt cliffs topped with heather moors. Uist is hilly moorland, interspersed with  lochans ( small lochs)  and dotted with sure footed island sheep. I know the island well, I have been coming here to work and on holiday for many years.
But this trip is different, special. I am here as one of the first people to stay in Taigh Mairi Anndra, since it was renovated as a self catering holiday home. Why is this one different? There are many such cottages hidden away as secret gems in the Outer Hebrides, with low doorways, thatched roofs and satellite dishes tucked away on fences and behind fuel tanks, to be brought down by the first sheep with a scratchy fleece…
                                         
                                                                         Margaret Fay Shaw
Taigh Mairi Anndra was the home of two sisters by the names of Peigi and Mairi Macrae. They spent most of their lives together in this tiny cottage until their deaths in the 1960’s and 70’s.  Unremarkable in their birth, they have left the world with an incredible legacy of Gaelic song and folklore, myths and stories. Songs and stories, which they recognised as needing to be preserved for future generations but  were without the means to record these memories and melodies. Until one New Years Day in 1928 when an ‘exotic’ young American woman happened in on them in Boisdale House  where they were invited to ‘perform’ Gaelic songs for her. Hailing from Pittsburgh her name was Margaret Fay Shaw and she had travelled to the Uist in a bid to find ‘the pristine’ form of Gaelic song, she had once heard sung by song collector Marjory Kennedy Fraser whilst at school in Helensburgh for a year as a teenager. Now in her early twenties she wanted to learn the language and the songs and entranced by a song sung by Mairi Macrae, she asked the sisters to take her in and teach her their songs. They agreed and she went to stay with them in this very cottage for almost 6 years, living as a croftswoman ( albeit with occasional trips to the Lochboisdale hotel for a hot bath and good dinner! She went onto create a formidable legacy of song and photorgraph – she was one of the first female photographers of the 20th Century, for us to enjoy and cherish today. In 1935 she married fellow folklorist John Lorne Campbell and their joint life’s work is in in Canna House on the Isle of Canna where I have the privilege of being the archivist for these precious collections.
This week ses me undertaking presentations on her work, using her song transcriptions  and ohotographs, Johns sound archive recordings and some of Margaets unpublished papers on various aspects of Gaelic folklore ‘hunting’.
I have the prividleg of staying in Taigh Mairi Anndra for the week, which has been beautifully restored to modern standards. But more important than the central heating or wifi is the fact that I look out on the same view as Margaret did 90 years ago. These walls have heard many songs. These walls have heard laughing and tears. These walls belong to a people long gone but they have left us with something so precious, it is hard to put it into words.

What will tomorrow  bring? The Uist mist currently hangs over the cottage but theres a glimpse of blue sky in the promise……