Review: The Cadence of A Song, The Life of Margaret Fay Shaw

Fiona Mackenzie brings to her biography of Margaret Fay Shaw two significant gifts.  Firstly, she spent almost 9 years as archivist of Canna House, the home that Margaret Fay Shaw shared with her husband, the folklorist John Lorne Campbell, and therefore has a profound acquaintance with Shaw’s diaries and family papers.  Secondly, Mackenzie is, herself, an accomplished singer of Gaelic songs.  Her introduction explains why her subject means so much to her, and introduces the vivid personal insights that come from having, like Fay Shaw, lived in the places she is describing. She has also crafted musical performances around this topic, most notably with the National Theatre of Scotland in 2014 (Little Bird), and that artistic sensibility adds immensely to her narrative.

The bones of Fay Shaw’s life are fairly well known.  Born in 1903 in Pennsylvania, as a young woman Fay Shaw came on a ‘study abroad’ trip to Helensburgh in 1920-1 (Mackenzie’s dating corrects Shaw’s own memory, p.24), and there encountered Gaelic song as sung (albeit inauthentically) by Marjory Kennedy Fraser.  A few years later, she returned to live in South Uist, where she began to document Hebridean life and record songs particularly as sung by Peigi and Màiri MacRae of Glendale.  Meeting and marrying John Lorne Campbell, the couple established themselves on Canna, and spent many years there continuing to interest themselves in ethnographic collecting. The structure of this book follows that narrative very clearly.

The book’s Foreword gathers in words from people who knew her directly or who were influenced by her work, another touch that transforms this book into something which can speak to more than just one life. This also helps us to understand why Fay Shaw was welcomed as she was into the communities she worked with. These are personal stories of someone remembered to be unfailingly direct and ‘honest’ in her dealings with people, in turn a good host to those who visited her in Canna.

Opening chapters help us to understand the paternal Scots-American ‘roots’’ of Shaw’s interest in music, and an understanding of the hospitable environment of her early childhood, rocked by the tragedy of her both her parents’ successive premature deaths. A rather troubled adolescence was brought to a more settled end by her journey to Scotland. Even on the boat across the Atlantic, Shaw began to take photographs and write about her fellow travellers, beginning the pattern of ethnographic recording which marked her life. We also read here (p.35-37 ) of the famous encounter with Marjory Kennedy-Fraser singing Gaelic songs, including a note of the songs sung on that occasion. The concert apparently also introduced her to the name of Frances Tolmie, and the moment with the idea of collecting folk songs might have been seeded, along with the understanding that Kennedy-Fraser’s version, with piano, was not the ‘pristine’ original of the songs.

Returning to study music in New York, Shaw gained tools that she subsequently drew on in her collecting.  One was the ‘Metay System’ (p.56), a memorising aid using “touch and sound to internalise music”; another was refining her perfect pitch and using this for music transcription from the ear to the page.

In 1924 she returned to Scotland with a friend, Isabel (Izzy) Conklin, planning to cycle the length of the country from the south of England up and eventually through the Hebrides (with a short break on the train from Carlisle to Glasgow, p.73). This was a formidable adventure, and was carefully documented in the diaries, along with all the stories of the places they passed through.  Neither was it a direct line; the itinerary took them north of Inverness, to Strathpeffer, and then west to Achnasheen, and from there west to the islands, where serious Gaelic learning was to take place. Shaw’s first stop was Portree in Skye, where she met with local cultural figures such as the piper, folklorist and naturalist Paul Seton Gordon (p.78): the beginning of a long and musically productive friendship.

Returning to Scotland in 1926, she arrived more directly into Glasgow for a cycle to Oban and thence the Hebrides: Mull, Coll, and then Barra. Immediately, her writings show, she realised how different these communities – and even their forms of Gaelic – were from what she had encountered further north. It’s important to realise that the songs collected are not simply ‘Gaelic songs’ but songs from particular singers, in particular places. From Barra, onwards to Eriskay, and South Uist, the island which would become in the future her home and research base. Upwards through Benbecula, North Uist, Harris and Lewis, the odyssey through the Hebrides drew to a close.

The next couple of years took her to Ireland – a country excited by its new-found Republican status – where she met people actively curating their oral song culture into notation, and ventured out to the Atlantic Aran islands.

It is remarkable to note how song collecting comes with these epic voyages – as Burns travelled around Scotland in the 18^th century, so started this encounter with Gaelic song.

Of all these places, it was South Uist which called her: the isolation from modern tourism, and her sense that Gaelic there was less inflected by English.  The description of North Glendale, where she stayed for almost 6 years, is remarkable (p.124-182), giving the reader a sense of a place that had a rich residual oral heritage, poised at the cliff-edge beyond which this history would have disappeared without active curation into a literate form, accompanied by vivid photography, ethnographic description, and, later, with John Lorne Campbell, audio recordings. This is the material that the author of this book curated at Canna House, and her notes on this help the reader to understand the richness of this collection.

The croft on which she stayed as both beautiful and tough, a life marked by hard physical labour and lightened by singing and poetry. The sisters Pèigi and Màiri MacRae, her hosts, were also remarkable woman; their family history show how crofters in the 19^th and early 20^th century struggled to find secure tenancies and secure employment (Peigi, for example, had worked as a girl in the herring trade, in Shetland, p.143).  Gaels travel, and clearly this brought these women into contact with many songs.

Readers wanting to know particularly about the Uist songs should head to pp.159-168, which makes the point that the words are at the heart of this repertoire; the section on waulking songs does a great job of describing both the songs and the cloth working that it accompanied. Dancing songs – puirt a beul – also dances off the page. The resulting collection Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist (1955) was and still is a milestone publication, containing songs, and photographs.

In due course, Shaw meets, and marries, John Lorne Campbell, and with him develops further competency with sound recording, both in Scotland and in Cape Breton.  When Lorne Campbell bought the island, this became her permanent home, and is lovingly described in chapter 12 as a kind place for many visitors, name-checking some of the most well-known figures from the Scottish folk revival, music composition and literary circles: new friendships continue to be forged, and older ones curated (the Visitor’s Books clearly run to many volumes) (p.224-319).  Old age may have been difficult, but honorary degrees brought late in life recognition for Fay Shaw’s contribution to Scottish life.

The end of the Canna chapter glides smoothly into the author’s work there, and Shaw’s memories overlap with her own friendship with Magda Sagarzazu, first archivist, then also companion and carer to Shaw at the end of her life.

Fay Shaw died in 2004, aged 101, and was buried beside her friends Pèigi and Màiri in South Uist.

This book is very readable (the publisher’s website calls it ‘enchanting’, and I’d agree with this), with careful documentation of transformative encounters which enabled Margaret Fay Shaw to become such a remarkable observer of Gaelic song.  Her ability to speak to anyone, to make friends quickly, and to get to the heart of conversations, shines clearly through the account. The Epilogue takes us into Canna House today, owned by the National Trust of Scotland: the invitation, and door, is open for a visit.

Further Reading

• Margaret Fay Shaw, From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides: An Autobiography (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008)
• Fiona J. Mackenzie, The Cadence of A Song: The Life of Margaret Fay Shaw (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2025)
• Fiona J. Mackenzie, “Eun Bheag Chanaidh” (Little Bird of Canna) – a song about Fay Shaw (Bandcamp)