Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw (Dec 2004)

Subject: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: Weasel Books
Date: 15 Dec 04 - 02:51 PM

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=593183

The great collector of Gaelic song and promoter of it's culture.

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: Sandy Mc Lean
Date: 16 Dec 04 - 09:35 AM

What a great example she set for those wishing to learn "the old tongue"!
      Moran taing dhuibh a Mhairead!
               Sandy

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Dec 04 - 01:56 PM

Here is the link

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: GUEST
Date: 16 Dec 04 - 07:39 PM

How pathetic that in a forum claiming to be about folk music, this obituary is virtually ignored, and goes uncommented upon.

I guess that says it all about the depths this place has sunk to these days.

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: Amos
Date: 16 Dec 04 - 08:53 PM

I think waiting no more than six hours to condemn the whole community says more about you than it does the community, Nameless.

In any case the link you made is very helpful and a good profile of a wonderful gal.

A

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: Peace
Date: 16 Dec 04 - 08:57 PM

Rest easy, Margaret.

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: Gypsy
Date: 16 Dec 04 - 10:35 PM

a tip of me hat to ye, lassie. rest well.

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: pavane
Date: 17 Dec 04 - 05:56 AM

Guest,
Possibly the collectors of Gaelic song are not well-known to this mainly English-speaking forum. It's certainly not a name I would have known.

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: GUEST,Philippa
Date: 17 Dec 04 - 08:09 AM

definitely a name I knew, and her collection of songs and info is a treasure
Here's the Independent obit pasted in:

The Independent (London) http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=593183
December 15, 2004, Wednesday

OBITUARY: MARGARET FAY SHAW;
COLLECTOR OF THE GAELIC SONGS AND FOLKLORE OF THE HEBRIDES

HUGH CHEAPE

MARGARET FAY SHAW was a woman of rare qualities and achievements as
the distinguished collector and editor of Scottish Gaelic song and
important traditional material, writer, and photographer and
recorder of the way of life of the Scottish Hebrides.

She was born at Glenshaw, near Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, in 1903,
the fifth and youngest of the children of Henry Clay Shaw and his
wife Fanny Maria Patchin, of a New England family from Old
Bonnington, Vermont. Margaret recounted her family history with
relish and charm: she was descended through three generations from
John Shaw, who had emigrated from Scotland to Philadelphia in 1782
and cast the first cannon which armed the ships that defeated a
British squadron on Lake Erie in the War of 1812. The family had
settled on a grant of land in the west of the state and built a
house, "Glenshaw", where Margaret herself was brought up.

Following the death of both her parents when she was still a girl,
Margaret was looked after by her eldest sisters and attended local
elementary school and then boarding schools at Bryn Mawr near
Philadelphia. Conventional schooling was irksome and unfulfilling
but music struck a hidden chord. She learnt to play the piano by ear
and later was taught to professional level in New York, Paris and
London.

Meanwhile, at the suggestion of a Scottish family friend in 1921,
Margaret was sent across the Atlantic to spend a year at St Bride's
School in Helensburgh. She heard the folksong collector Marjory
Kennedy-Fraser singing her Songs of the Hebrides at a concert in the
school and decided she wanted to learn them for herself. These
were "art songs" rendered in English: Margaret became determined to
discover the music in its original forms and words.

Back in America she was convinced that she must return to Scotland
in her search. She toured parts of Britain including the Island of
Skye with her sister in 1924 and then in 1926 undertook, even by the
standards of the time, an extraordinary journey by bicycle the
length of the Hebrides from Castlebay to Port of Ness. She gained
many enduring impressions on this odyssey but one in particular was
to change her life; of all the places she visited, the personality
and spirituality of South Uist moved her most strongly and, in her
own words, "There was something about South Uist that attracted me
and never left me."

After recurrent rheumatism, for which she received treatment in New
York, and against her family's wishes, she returned to Scotland and
to the Hebrides as a form of self-healing. She was to recall the
advice of an elderly academic in the United States: "Now, Margaret,
don't let anybody do any of your thinking for you."

From 1929 until 1935 she lived with two sisters, Mairi and Peigi
MacRae, in their croft house in the township of North Glendale by
Lochboisdale in South Uist. She learnt Gaelic from these two
remarkable people and their neighbours, who were also richly endowed
with a wealth of song of great beauty, and sang with no instrumental
accompaniment. Without recording apparatus, knowledge of Scottish
Gaelic was essential for transcribing the songs with their diversity
of modes and scales, which Shaw herself well understood, and she
took down and annotated folksongs and the essential stories behind
the songs.

The material collected in those years was later published in the
meticulously edited Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist (1955),
with subsequent editions in 1977, 1986 and, in paperback, in 1999.
The book comprises songs in significant cultural variety - songs in
praise of Uist, love songs, laments and songs of exile, lullabies,
songs for dancing (the popular puirt-a- bial or "mouth-music"),
milking songs, spinning songs, waulking songs, clapping songs and
quern songs - with traditional material including stories,
anecdotes, prayers, proverbs, cures, charms and recipes, all vivid
testimony to the amount and variety in the culture of a single
community in the early 20th century, and, in Margaret Fay Shaw's
treatment of it, a unique and sympathetic insight into a world that
has largely disappeared.

Shaw's book has preserved a rich store of music and folklore from
one of the richest tradition-bearing societies in Western Europe and
has brought it into a wider currency and popularity. Her
extraordinary contribution to scholarship was recognised with
honorary degrees from St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, the
National University of Ireland and Aberdeen and Edinburgh
universities. The book was richly illustrated with photographs by
Shaw, showing her hosts and neighbours going about their everyday
lives and the images also demonstrating her regard for them and a
strong empathy with Gaelic in the Hebrides. On a recent visit to
South Uist to participate in the opening of an exhibition at
Kildonan, she was greeted with: "A Mhairead, thainig sibh
dhachaigh!" ("Margaret, you've come home!").

Another student of Gaelic language and tradition, the Oxford-
educated John Lorne Campbell, met Margaret in Lochboisdale in 1934
and they were married in Glasgow the following year. They made their
home at Northbay in Barra in a small corrugated-iron house with
Margaret's Steinway grand piano. Campbell was studying crofting
agriculture and Scottish Gaelic and shared there in the company of
Compton Mackenzie and his Barra "Bloomsbury" set. His new bride did
not at first find this as congenial as he, though subsequently she
became firm friends with Compton Mackenzie. She inherited his 1930s
typewriter, which she continued to use for the rest of her life,
giving such a unique stamp to the stream of her letters to family
and friends.

Campbell was also looking for a home on the West Coast and a place
to make into a first-rate farm. They bought the island of Canna in
1938, where they created a hospitable home and Margaret set up a
pedigree herd of Highland cattle. They continued their recording
work, including trips to the Gaels of Nova Scotia, and had visits
from the MacRae sisters, Uist and Barra friends and scholars of
Gaelic folklore and music.

The "isolation" of a Hebridean island did not necessarily suit
Margaret's temperament and this ensured a steady stream of visitors
to Canna House to receive hospitality of a rare and memorable kind -
"to enjoy the island and its peace" (in Margaret's words) and to
savour her piano playing with equal ease from the classical
traditions of Europe and the modal magic of Gaelic. As a lifelong
devotee and carer of cats, she noted that they liked Bach but left
the room with Bartk. And such was the reputation of the Campbells of
Canna that the numbers of visitors sometimes had Margaret "growling
with the cats".

This rich and extraordinary life has been recounted in her
autobiography, From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, first published
in 1993 and written in a spontaneous and amusing style immediately
reminiscent of her own voice. Her powers of memory and recall of
people and events were always impressive, especially in South Uist,
and the book's focus on Gaelic culture is enhanced with accounts of
the Aran Islands in Galway and visits to Mingulay and to St Kilda on
the eve of evacuation in 1930.

The Campbells presented the island of Canna to the National Trust
for Scotland in 1981. Margaret continued to live there after the
death of her husband in 1996. Her 100th birthday party with the
island community was unforgettable, with drams and her own playing
of Strauss waltzes and Uist lullabies, together with a celebratory
BBC television programme, Among Friends, broadcast for the occasion.

An award of Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical
Society was made in November of this year for a lifetime's
achievement in promoting an understanding of the culture of the
islands of Scotland, not only through her scholarly writings but
also with her photography and film. In a Gaelic song in her praise,
a friend and neighbour in South Uist, Fred Gillies, included the
words of which she was justly proud: ". . . an ember was dying: she
blew on it and brought it to life".

Margaret Fay Shaw, musicologist, photographer and writer: born
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania 9 November 1903; married 1935 John Lorne
Campbell (died 1996); died Fort William, Inverness-shire 11 December
2004.

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 17 Dec 04 - 08:27 AM

I shall not comment further here, as an obituary is no place to argue, but if Guest of 07:39 thought as much about Mrs Shaw as he implies I do not think he would have used this thread to try and score political points. If you need to win that much, Guest, you are welcome to it. Take this back to the playground with your other meaningless trophies.

Sympathies to Margarets family and friends for their loss and for any distress caused by the thoughtless actions of anonymous trouble makers.

Dave.

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: Sandy Mc Lean
Date: 17 Dec 04 - 04:27 PM

Margaret was held in high regard among Cape Breton and Scottish Gaels , but sadly their numbers are growing fewer, at least those who still have Gaelic as a mother tongue. I can understand why she would be unknown to most Mudcatters but it is wonderful that her passing has been noted.
             Slainte,
                Sandy

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 18 Dec 04 - 02:21 AM

Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist is a particularly interesting and important study, besides being a useful counterbalance to wildly romantic earlier works such as Kennedy-Fraser and MacLeod's Songs of the Hebrides. John Lorne Campbell was the more prolific writer; see in particular his Highland Songs of the Forty-Five and Songs Remembered in Exile: Traditional Gaelic Songs from Nova Scotia.

Subject: RE: Obit: Margaret Fay Shaw
From: GUEST
Date: 04 Feb 05 - 07:41 PM

Ged tha sinne 'n-seo gur h-ionndrainn,
Thigeadh dhuinn a bhith ro aighearach-
sibh a' dearrsadh 'nur reul-iuil duinn
mun teid sinn iomrall air ar Slan'ear.

I had no idea the good lady had passed on.
And Glendale will be changed forever now.