THIS beautifully written biography recounts the life of one of the most important 20th-century collectors of Gaelic folklore and song.
Margaret Fay Shaw grew up in Pennsylvania, but developed an early interest in Celtic culture. After a year at school in Helensburgh, on the banks of the Clyde, and long visits to Ireland and the Outer Hebrides, she moved permanently to Scotland at the age of 24, in 1928. She lived first on the island of South Uist, being tutored in Gaelic and local folklore by the young parish minister, the Revd Murdo Macleod, with whom she very nearly fell in love. She also gained much from attending the island’s Roman Catholic church.
Fiona Mackenzie, herself a considerable scholar of Gaelic music and culture, reckons that it was because Margaret Shaw was American and so in some sense perceived as classless, and also because she attended both Protestant and RC church services, that she was able to enter into a community that normally guarded its privacy very carefully.
Margaret went on to marry another avid Gaelic folklore enthusiast, John Lorne Campbell, and they lived together first in a tiny tin-roofed house on the island of Barra and later in a sprawling Victorian mansion on Canna. It is now a National Trust for Scotland property, open to the public and housing their extensive archive of notes, books, and recordings made on wax cylinders.
Despite being a chain smoker, Margaret lived to be 101, playing her Steinway piano and writing letters to the end. This delightful biography, packed with anecdotes and reminiscences and written by someone who was a friend as well as a fellow researcher, is a fitting tribute to a remarkable lady who did much to preserve Gaelic songs and stories that might otherwise have been lost.
The Revd Dr Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.
The Cadence of a Song: The life of Margaret Fay Shaw
Fiona J. Mackenzie
Birlinn £25
(978-1-78027-959-6)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
