20th C WOMEN SINGERS, FEMALE AND MALE COLLECTORS
Several male 20th Century song collectors in Scotland had one outstanding woman informant. Gavin Greig had Bell Robertson, Rev Duncan had his sister Margaret Gillespie, J M Carpenter had Bell Duncan, Hamish Henderson had Jeannie Robertson, and Kenneth Goldstein had Lucy Stewart. These women had learned their songs orally and sang them in social settings, then shared their songs. Below are a few of the best known singers, and those who wrote down or recorded their songs.
Four out of six are women who gathered in and wrote down Gaelic songs. One was a visiting American enthusiast on Eriskay, one a social collector in her own Skye community, one a singer collector on several islands and another American who collected widely, alone then with her husband.
AMY MURRAY
Margaret F Shaw says ‘The first person to take a scientific interest in Gaelic folksong was Miss Amy Murray, an American who visited Eriskay in 1905 and who is said to have taken down about 100 airs there with the help of Fr. Allan McDonald. 26 of these were printed in her book, ‘Father Allan’s Island' [1921]. 14 more were discovered in the Father’s notebooks. The rest seem lost.’ ‘Father Allan's Island’ is the story of her visit of some months to Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides, where she went to collect folk melodies and stayed 'from a Lady Day to a St. Michael's.'
GHEIBHINN DKUIT FION (I would get a glass of wine)
Morag, love, come back to your wee son! I'll give you a fine speckled salmon, I'll give you wine. Every night I'll be with you, but I'll not be rising with you in the morning .
Murray
A book review says ‘Miss Amy Murray presents with charm and insight the wonder tales, the simple faith, the folk music, and the colour of the daily lives of the inhabitants of the tiny isle of Eriskay. The book incorporates some thirty representative folk-songs with music.’ ‘Fortnightly Review 1921’.
ORAM NA SMEORAICH (Song of the Mavis)
The Mother-mavis says 'Son of the Servant of Mary, Come home, come home, to dinner, to dinner!'
The son says ‘What dinner, what dinner?’
The mother says ‘Hard reed-bread and oat-bread. Hard reed-bread and oat-bread’
The son says ‘Be quick—be quick—be quick!’
Murray
In April 1906 Murray published in the Celtic Review seven of the songs she collected in Eriskay. Four years earlier she had stayed for a time in north Skye. And earlier again, an online picture from "The Celtic Monthly" (October 1902) shows ‘Miss Amy Murray of New York, winner of the 1902 Dundee Mod, with a 28 or 29 string harp. It is not a clarsach, but a lever harp with semitone mechanisms on the tops of the strings.’
'S FHUAIR MI NAIGHEACHD DI-CIADAIN (I got news on Wednesday)
I got the news Wednesday, Putting sorrow on hundreds, that you're gone on your journey, to Paradise faring. Thy mother is stricken.
Murray
FRANCES TOLMIE (1840-1926)
Margaret Fay Shaw names Frances Tolmie as the second person ‘interested’ in studying Gaelic song because her collecting work was not published till 1911, but she had gathered songs from the 1850s to 1902. This rather modest but very influential Gaelic song collector was born into a bilingual family at Uiginish Farm just over the loch from Dunvegan Castle in Skye. In her late teens she began to write down tunes and words for Gaelic songs she learned or remembered. Some she had heard in nurseries while a child or working as a governess. She wrote of ‘loving singer’ Margaret MacNeill, known as Peggy Dairymaid, who sang ‘in croaking tones’ beside 5 year old Frances’ Minginish bed ‘on wild nights, with whirring wheel, of incomprehensible old unhappy things ‘. Others came from adult singers in Skye, Uist and Oban.
While living in Bracadale manse on Skye [1858-62] Frances was recruited by Emily MacLeod, sister of the chief of Dunvegan, to help collect in the 1000 pairs of socks MacLeod had contracted to supply to a Highland regiment. Her mother insisted Frances have an escort for her travels across wild moors to the scattered dwellings where knitters lived. On their long walks elderly Oighrig (Effie) Ross, a cottar living alone in a bothy, taught Frances old waulking songs, including one about the mythical male Gruagach and another about the 16th C battle of Millegaraidh, and five more she published. Francis described Oighrig as ‘wild-looking, and apt to turn crazy if unduly provoked’ but practical and ‘a kind creature’.
The ‘Song About The Ghruagaich’ is a lamentation by a mother for her daughter, who was slain by for sinful language towards an intractable cow by the cattle’s magical invisible male guardian.
Oh, a sorrowful woman am I, mourning solitary in this glen, sorely afflicted and in anguish, laying thee out, thou darling of thy mother.
Frances noted four songs from her aunt Annabella Mackenzie, one about a female Ghruagaich, a mermaid. I was searching for sheep, a maiden I saw sitting on a rock alone, she wore a grey robe, but this changed, she stretched herself and became an animal without horns. She cleaved the sea through the isles, towards the spacious region of the bountiful ones.
As told in Chapter One, in 1870/1 Frances got ancient Ossianic lays, 'The Lay of Fraoch' and 'Ossian’s Warning to his Mother', from Margaret MacLeod of Portree. If thou be my mother, who art a deer [Ossian’s mother had been transformed into a deer] be up before the rising of the sun. Beware of the sons of the artificers and their dogs. Two dogs and ten on a leash they have.
Margaret also sang verses from 'The Lay of Diarmid'. Fionn was jealous that his wife Grainne had fallen for Diarmid, handsomest of the Fianna. Fionn challenged Diarmid to kill a monstrous boar, and he was poisoned by a bristle.
These same lays and eulogies for chiefs were sung to Frances by Mrs Herrot [Harriet] MacVicar on a visit to Newton Farm in North Uist. ‘Herrot was spinning and was asked to sing to me. As I admired the song we both went up to a quiet garret where I learned it from her.’ Herrot was elderly, tall and grey. Margaret Macleod and she both ‘sang with great reverence as if about a sacred subject.’
In 1873 Frances became one of the earliest women students at Cambridge, then lived in the Lake District till 1895 when she returned north. To Oban, Edinburgh and in 1915 back to Skye. In Oban friends gave showed interest in her singing of old unpublished songs, When they heard she had ‘a rolled-up bundle of manuscripts she had cherished for years they encouraged her to work on writing down tunes for these. She set to work on these pencilled notes of 30 years before, and added songs recalled from her earliest childhood, some heard sung by her mother, others waulking songs.
She consulted Mary Ross, a maid in the family house in Oban, and the collection eventually published included no less than 37 songs Frances got from Mary. Mary was ‘tall and alert-featured, highly capable, quick with her tongue and an excellent cook’, from Killmaluag in Trotternish, the ‘MacDonald country’ at the very north point of Skye. Mary was known as Mairi Roghnall (Ranald’s daughter). Ranald’s second wife was a busy weaver, so Mary looked after her younger siblings out on the level grassy machair, where she ‘learned many songs and rhymes from an old man they met herding cows there’. In ‘The Old Songs Of Skye, Frances Tolmie and her circle’, Ethel Bassin gives us five full pages about Mary Ross and some of her songs.
Frances sent her MSS to one of the friends who had expressed interest, Celtic scholar Rev George Henderson of Eddrachillis, Sutherland, who rather sat on Frances’ work for some years until he was reminded of them by Winifred Parker who was studying Gaelic with him. She was of Highland descent, an enthusiastic member of the London-based Folk-Lore Society, and a friend of the Society’s secretary, Lucy Broadwood. In 1911 a double number of the ‘Journal of the Folk-Song Society’ was given over to ‘105 Songs of Occupation from the Western Isle of Scotland’, described by Lucy Broadwood as ‘one of the most important contributions yet made towards the preservation of the purely traditional music and poetry of our British Isles in general and of Scotland in particular’. Broadwood had both Highland and Lowland Scottish ancestry, and had herself collected tunes/ songs in Arisaig. The Journal was at the time printed for members only, and a large number of Scots became temporary members paid a year’s subscription to get a copy. Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote to Lucy Broadwood saying he had found some ‘extremely beautiful tunes there. What a strange country, so utterly different from our English Idiom’.
The Tolmie issue of the Journal was to have been published in 1909, but this was forestalled by the first volume of Margaret Kennedy-Fraser’s ‘Songs Of The Hebrides’. Tolmie and Fraser were near neighbours in Edinburgh, and Tolmie shared songs with Fraser, writing how impressed she was at Fraser’s recitals, commenting how Fraser had ‘devoted your genius', and thanking her and Rev. MacLeod ‘for a great Lesson’. Later she wrote, ‘A course of lectures from you on [the principles of Music and scales in general] would be of immeasurable benefit to us all, Highland & Lowland, and give correct precision to our judgement and taste’. Fraser made an arrangement in English of ‘The Lay Of Fraoch’ as ‘The Daughter Of Maeve’. The two continued to correspond, with Frances continuing to praise Fraser’s performances, approach and presentations.
MARJORIE KENNEDY-FRASER [AS COLLECTOR]
Fraser’s interest in Gaelic song was sparked through a volume of Breton folk songs by L A B Ducoudray with ‘apt accompaniments and singable French translations.’ ‘I felt that there might still be a like work to do among the Scots Gaels, if only I knew where to begin’. In 1904 artist John Duncan was painting on Eriskay, and wrote to Fraser saying this was the very place for her to research. In 1905 he wrote again urgently to say that American lady collectors Amy Murray and Evelyn Benedict were on the ground and Fraser should come without delay.
The first tune Fraser noted on Eriskay became her ‘Eriskay Love Lilt’. She later wrote she had brought home a good haul of tunes, and others could collect and write down the Gaelic words. She went on to also collect in Barra and four other Hebridean islands, recording them on a wax cylinder phonograph. In Her autobiography ‘A Life In Song’ she carefully credits 13 Gaelic women singers who gave her songs. Her recordings are in the School of Scottish Studies Archive at the University of Edinburgh.
WOMEN SINGERS IN THE GREIG-DUNCAN FOLK SONG COLLECTION
The song-collecting work in North-East Scotland of schoolmaster work of Gavin Greig of Whitehill and Rev James Bruce Duncan of Lynturk near Alford began in 1902. The collection was at last fully documented in eight volumes from 1981 to 2002. It included 1,933 songs arranged according to themes: nautical, military, historical songs, narrative songs, songs of the countryside, home, and social life, songs of courtship, songs of love, songs of parting, children's songs and rhymes. Three of the women informants shared impressive numbers of songs.
BELL ROBERTSON OF BOYNDLIE –‘THE GREATEST BALLAD SINGER OF ALL TIME’
Bell Robertson [1841-1922] of Boyndlie, sent texts of over 420 songs to Gavin Greig and Rev James Duncan. In her entry about Bell in ‘Greig-Duncan Vol Eight’ and also in her chapter ‘What A Voice’ in Gifford and McMillan, Elaine Petrie gives much interesting material about Robertson. Bell’s mother Jean Gall, who was her principal song source, had in turn learned most of her songs from her own mother. Many of them were older narrative ballads, but Jean did not like ‘bloody or tragic songs’, or ‘anything that savoured of superstition, and would only pass ‘bits’ of these on to Bell. Bell gathered songs at meal and ales [harvest suppers], from family friends and farm servants.
She regarded the ballads as ‘part of our country’s history’, recorded them carefully and noted down variants she heard. She disapproved of the way previous editors had merged versions of ballads they published. Her texts ‘are usually the most complete versions and there are around 140 items for which she is the sole source’.
QUEEN ELEANOR
Queen Eleanor sick, and very very sick, and sick and like to die
And she sent for two friars from France to pardon her sins ere she die
The king put on a friar’s coat, Earl Marishal on anither
And they are in before the queen like twa friars baith thegither
The first great sin that ever I did, I’ll tell it presently
Earl Marishal he got my maidenhead, under a cloth of gold
[Also, the Queen poisoned bonny Lady Rosamund, she carried poison in her breast to poison King Hendry, she loved best her son by Earl Marishal and worst her son by King Hendry, ‘For he is headed like himself, bool-backit like a bear’]. The King says,
Had I not sworn by my sceptre and crown, and by the heavens so high
There sud not one drop o your blood be spit, Earl Marishal ye sud hang high
She turned her about wi a direfu look, and her face to the other side
We heard no more o her secret sins, but she hadna been married a maid
MARGARET GILLESPIE OF WEETINGSHILL
Mrs Margaret Gillespie nee Duncan [1841-1913], sister of Rev James Duncan, had a remarkable 466 songs in her repertoire, many learned from her musically-talented family, plus more from school mates, neighbours, house servants, journeyman carpenters and foremen working at her millwright father workplace. She married James Gillespie, a journeyman slater, in 1867 when working as a domestic servant at Weetingshill. Her husband died when scaffolding on a building gave way, and she moved to West Regent St Glasgow where she took on lodgers, and there ‘discussed her songs’ with her brothers George and James. For much more information see Elaine Petrie’s entry about Gillespie in ‘Greig-Duncan Vol Eight’ and also in her chapter ‘What A Voice’ in Gifford and McMillan.
MALLY LEIGH
When Mally Leigh came down the street her capuchen did flee
She cust a look behind her to see her negligee
We’re aa gaun east and west, we’re aa gaun aa ajee
We’re aa gaun east and west, for love o Mally Leigh
At ilka step her pong pong gid, ilk lad thought That’s to me
But fint a ane was in the thoughts o bonnie Mally Leigh
And when she reached the palace porch, there stood earls three
And ilka ane thocht his Kate or Moll a drab to Mally Leigh
A prince came out frae mang them aa, wi garters at his knee
And danced a stately minuet wi bonnie Mally Leigh
ANNIE SHIRER OF KININMONTH (1873-1916)
She collected and contributed by post 260 songs to Gavin Greig as ‘A Kininmonth Lass’, and rhymes to the Rymour Club under her own name. Although she sent Grieg no tunes herself, he commented on ‘the trouble she takes to bring me into touch with those who know and can sing the tunes’.
Revival ballad singer Anne Neilson says in her biographical note on Annie in Greig-Duncan Vol Eight, ‘As a singer, I have been much attracted to the vigour of many of her song versions as well as to the range of her material. But my lasting notion of her is of a keen but untutored intelligence eagerly seeking an outlet’.
GIL MORICE
Gill Morris was an Earl’s son, his name it waxed wide
It wisna for his riches great, nor for his muckle pride
But it was for a lady fair lived up on Garrow side
It’s ye maun tak your sark o silk wi yer ain han sew at the sleeve
An ye maun come to good greenwood, spear nae Lord Baron’s leave
Gill Morris sat in good greenwood, he whistled and he sang
O what means aa this men comin here, and my mither tarries lang
He’s tae aff Gill Morris’s heid and set it on a spear
And the meanest o aa Lord Baron’s men got Gill Morris’s heid to bear
O then oot spoke Lord Baron, what’s this ye tell to me
O had I kent he was your son, I’d rather it had been me
In 1910 and 1911 the Rymour Club of Edinburgh published some of the ‘large and remarkable collection of rhymes, sayings, games, songs, etc, from Miss Annie Shirer, an enthusiastic gatherer of folklore’. They commented that her other contributed material was ‘extensive enough to enrich the pages of the Club’s Miscellanea for several years to come’. Some years after her death her family had a clear out, and burnt most of ‘Annie’s kist’, but some material was saved and published in ‘Gaitherins Fae Annie’s Kist’ in 2000.
My name is Queen Mary, my age is sixteen, my father’s a farmer in Auld Aberdeen
He’s plenty of money tae dress me sae braw, but nae bonny laddie will tak me awa
One morning I rose and looked in my glass, Said I to mysel, ‘What a handsome young lass’
Wi my hands at my side I gave a guffaw, there’s nae bonny laddie will tak me awa
MARGARET FAY SHAW [1903-2004]
She was born in Pennsylvania, and came to Scotland as a teenager. At school in Helensburgh she heard and was entranced by Marjory Kennedy-Fraser singing her Anglicised versions of Gaelic song. ‘I had hoped to be a musician, but developed rheumatism’ and she couldn’t play. She saw 23 doctors, the last of whom asked her what she would do now she was getting better. ‘I’ve been on a bicycle tour through the Hebrides, and I would like to go back there, to live and to collect songs and learn Gaelic.’ Shaw became an early ethnomusicologist, and moved to South Uist. ‘Of all the islands I'd visited there was something about South Uist that just won me; it was like falling in love; it was the island that I wanted to go back to.’
‘O Gur Trom Tha Mo Bhean-Sa’ is a sailing song from Eriskay, comparing his wrecked fishing boat to his wife in childbed. Sung by Peigi Nill MacIsaac
My wife is heavy, heavy with child. The bed beneath her is hard, her ribs are on stones. She is in childbed, the women of the country will not come near her. I would give a kiss to the hand of the joiner to see you out again, if I could get you back again I would go with you to Jura.
For her first months Shaw stayed in one of the Big Houses. At a New Year in Boisdale House laundry-maid Mairi and cook and dairy-maid Peigi MacRae were called up from the kitchen to give a song. ‘’Mairi sang a song that was absolutely wonderful, I’d never heard anything like it’. Shaw asked to be taught it. ‘Yes, if you’ll come and see me, I’ll teach you that song.’ Shaw saw ‘the little thatched house with a blue door’ and thought ‘this is where I ought to stay’.
She lived for six years with sisters Mairi and Peigi MacRae in seaside Glendale across the Loch from Lochboisdale, learned all their songs and recorded a great deal of information about the songs and stories they knew. Much of this information was published in her book Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist.
‘Peigi was a tiny wee thing, I felt huge beside her and I’m five feet one. Peigi and Mairi had the greatest wisdom, tolerance, cheer, and courage, and yet had so little. They were glad to have nice things, but they didn’t expect them.’
Here are a few of the songs sung by Peigi and Mairi MacRae
‘Mo Chubhrachan’. A widely-known cradle song of a mother whose child has been stolen by the fairies.
I searched the hill from end to end, to the edge of the streams, but did not find my Chubhrachain (little fragrant one). I found the track of the brown otter, of the wild duck on the pond, of the spotted red fawn, of the cow in the bog, of the mist on the hill, but did not find my Chubhrachain.
‘An Gille Donn’ The lament of a woman whose love drowned when his ship was wrecked in the Sound of Canna.
I am tormented since the beginning of spring, I have given lasting love to the sailor of the waves.
‘Falt Trom, Trom, Dualach’
Heavy heavy curly hair, there are yellow curly tresses around the shoulder of my sweetheart. It is your proud mother who was to blame that we did not marry. But you are my first girl since I began sweethearting.
‘Crodh Chailean’ This song was sung by the proprietor of an Edinburgh tavern frequented by Burns and cronies, who called themselves the Crochallan Fencibles.
Colin’s cattle would give their milk to my beloved, on the top of the moor without milking song or calf.
Mairi MacRae said Colin was a fairy with his human sweetheart who made the song.
Her sister Peigi sang another fairy song about a young girl asking the Each-Uisge [water-horse] to set her free to go home.
Shaw published 53 of the songs the MacRae sisters sang to her. The 109 songs in her book ‘are those that were sung in Glendale, South Uist, at dances and weddings, at daily tasks or at the fireside.’
‘The number of songs that are extant [in 1936] in the Hebrides is extraordinary.’ What she published was ‘only a half of what I have transcribed myself, and less than a tenth of number that my husband and I and our friends have recorded; and that can only be a small part of what might have been recorded.’
‘O Ho Nighean, E Ho Nighean’ Sung by Peigi Nill MacIsaac
O my maiden of the beautiful dark hair, they took you from me. Many a night though the drifting snow I reached you. You would mend and wash my shirt, and milk the cattle at the sheiling. But you prefer a new lover and have left me like a motherless lamb. Before, I was like a broken battered sword with you, for three months I asked your mother for you, and when refused I abandoned all my boats and nets.
Shaw married John Lorne Campbell and they moved to Canna, where they worked together gathering and researching songs, recording them on successively sophisticated machines - wax cylinder, then wire and then tape.
