Margaret Fay Shaw

The youngest of five sisters, Shaw was born in her family's "substantial mansion",[1] built from homemade bricks in 1829,[2] in Glenshaw, Pennsylvania.[3][4]

The mansion was on land where the Shaw family had lived since her great-great grandfather, Scottish iron foundryman John Shaw, had emigrated to the United States with his four sons in 1782, divided his land grant between them, and had given his surname to the surrounding district.[5][6]

Margaret's great-grandfather, Thomas Wilson Shaw, Sr., lived to be ninety-six and often told the story in his old age of how his own father had lifted him up on his shoulders to see George Washington ride by on a white horse during a visit to Pittsburgh.[7]

Shaw's paternal grandfather, Thomas Wilson Shaw, Jr., served as a surgeon in the Union Army during the Battle of Gettysburg and worked later as a slum doctor among immigrants working in the Pittsburgh steel refineries,[8] even though the Shaw family's wealth was also largely drawn through canny investments in that same industry.[9]

Shaw's father was Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute graduate and civil engineer Henry Shaw. Henry Shaw had privately longed to become an artist, but his dream had been prevented by his own father, who, "regarded artists as Bohemians in velvet jackets and flowing ties, supported by their parents". Henry Shaw instead became an art collector with a hobby of making etchings. In later years, his "greatest delight was seeing the International Exhibition of paintings that came into the Carnegie Museum once a year."[10]

Margaret's mother was, "a New England Yankee", whose Puritan ancestors had arrived in the Colony of Connecticut in 1640 and eventually migrated to Bennington, Vermont. Margaret later recalled her mother as a woman for whom, "breeding and mental ability were what mattered", and who accordingly, "found the wealth, without the distinguished minds, of the Pittsburghers difficult to take. But she had in my father a like mind in taste and in books."[11]

In addition to raising her as a Presbyterian,[12] Margaret's parents were reportedly very loving and attentive[13] and she developed a passionate interest in music from an early age when she learned to play the piano. After her parents died when she was 11, she moved to Scotland as a teenager and attended St Bride's boarding school in Helensburgh, near Glasgow. It was there that she was first introduced to Scottish traditional music and started learning to speak Gaelic.[3] The first performance of Gaelic song she heard was during a special concert at St. Bride's by the famous song collector Marjory Kennedy-Fraser,[14] "who", according to Robert Perman, "had made a career of collecting Gaelic songs in the Hebrides and singing her own Anglicized versions of them. The songs entranced Margaret, but at the same time she was aware that there must be more to them and determined that one day she would hear the originals."[15]

While studying at New York University, she returned to Scotland in the 1920s and was overjoyed to once again the songs she had heard at St. Bride's, but sung in the original Gaelic by native speakers of the language.[16]

After her plans to be a concert pianist were thwarted by rheumatism, Shaw switched, to the horror of her family, to the new field of ethnomusicology with the encouragement of Nadia Boulanger and Eileen Costello and turned to full time folk song collecting. She realized over time, however, that the study of Classical music had not prepared her for collecting from traditional singers in Celtic languages, whose repertoire uses a completely different system of scales, tonalities, and modes.[17]

She eventually came to South Uist, of which she later recalled, "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. Of course, I was not looking for islands: I was looking for a way to live my life."[18]

While staying in Lochboisdale, she was entertained by the singing of two sisters, Mairi and Peigi MacRae.[3] They told her that if she came to visit the former blackhouse at their remote croft, they would teach her all the songs they knew.[19][20][21] Enthralled by their singing, she ended up living with them for the next six years and became a close friend. During this time, she 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.[3] Two-thirds of the contributors to the book were women. One of the most prominent figures featured in the book's songs and stories is St Bride, about whom many local customs were recorded. The book also preserves many waulking songs.[22]

Shaw's photographs highlighted the working lives of women in South Uist, who played crucial roles in their families and local economies.[22]

Shaw's photographic work attracted the attention of John Lorne Campbell. He came to South Uist to seek her help in the production of the book about Barra he was working on with Compton Mackenzie.

On an extremely wet and rainy evening in 1934, Campbell was introduced in typically Scottish style as "Young Inverneill" to Margaret Fay Shaw by the manager of the Lochboisdale Hotel on South Uist.[23] Campbell later recalled, "As so often happens, we didn't take to each other at first, but we got to know each other and we were working in the same little world."[24]

Their courtship was slow and awkward, but in March 1935, Margaret Fay Shaw brought Campbell to meet her family in Glenshaw, Pennsylvania. She later recalled that he spent the whole visit chasing butterflies in the nearby forest or typing up books and articles in his room. The whole Shaw family accordingly decided that Campbell must not be seriously interested in Margaret and no one was more shocked than she was when Campbell proposed marriage on the last day of his visit.[25]

In June 1935, John Lorne Campbell and Margaret Fay Shaw were married by Rev. Calum MacLeod in the manse of John Knox Presbyterian Church in Glasgow. Neither family attended and the bride was given away by family friend Fred Moir. At the groom's insistence, the entire ceremony was conducted in the Scottish Gaelic language and the bride was relieved to learn that she had only to say, "Tha" ("Yes"). The Campbells spent their brief honeymoon in the Lofoten and Vesteraalen Islands of Norway before returning to Scotland.[26]

In 1937, the Campbells travelled to Nova Scotia with an Ediphone to record Canadian Gaelic folklore and traditional singers. The Campbells spent six weeks in Cape Breton before moving on to Antigonish County, where they used the Ediphone to record upon wax cylinders ninety five Gaelic traditional songs and ballads, two games, seven local songs, and three original songs sung by their composer. The Campbells also persuaded Jonathon G. MacKinnon (1869–1944), the former editor of the literary magazine Mac-Talla, to introduce him to Gabriel Syllibuy, the Chief of Cape Breton's indigenous Mi'kmaq people. The Campbells recorded Syllibuy as he described, in the Mikmaq language, an account from the oral tradition about the arrival of the first Gaels in the Province. The Campbells also recorded other Mikmaqs singing Roman Catholic plain song hymns in the Mik'maq language.[27]

The Canadian Gaelic song recordings made in Nova Scotia by the Campbells were later transcribed into musical notation with the assistance of Irish traditional musician and collector Séamus Ennis and published in the volume, Songs Remembered in Exile: Traditional Gaelic Songs from Nova Scotia Recorded in Cape Breton and Antigonish County in 1937, with an Account of the Causes of the Highland Emigration, 1790–1835.

They lived in Barra until the Campbells went into long term debt to purchase the Hebridean island of Canna in 1938.[3]

After having to take over the running of the Canna estate during her husband's brief mental breakdown and institutionalization, Shaw followed her husband into the Catholic Church in Scotland a few years after his own conversion in 1946. Shaw always insisted, however, that her favorite English-language Presbyterian hymns from her childhood, such as Charles Wesley's Christ the Lord is Risen Today, be sung during Low Mass at St Columba's R.C. Church upon Canna, much to the incomprehension of the island's Gaelic-speaking population.[28]

After years of taking care of her husband during multiple mental health struggles, Shaw was finally able, following the Second World War, to find enough free time to complete her life's work: Folksongs And Folklore Of South Uist, which was published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1955. Ray Perman has described the resulting volume, upon whose strength Shaw, "was awarded four honorary degrees",[29] as, "a selection of the songs she had taken down, including songs in praise of South Uist, love songs, lullabies, laments, songs of exile, songs as accompaniment to dancing or working, such as milking songs, spinning songs and waulking songs. She also included stories and anecdotes, prayers, proverbs, herbal medicines, charms and recipes."[30]

In a 2004 article about Shaw for The Guardian, correspondent Brian Wilson wrote of the book, "Not only was it a scholarly presentation of the songs and lore which she had written down during her sojourn on the island, but also an invaluable description of life in a small crofting community during the 1930s."[3]

Shaw was most pleased, however, by the response that her book received from the Macrae sisters, as well as the many other South Uist Gaels whom the book described and from whom its contents had been collected. Shaw's book was, "accepted... as a warm and authentic tribute to their culture and way of life."[31]

The Campbells donated their house to the National Trust for Scotland in 1981, though she continued to live there even after her husband's death in 1996.[4] For her contributions to the study and preservation of Gaelic music and culture, she was awarded honorary degrees by the Universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, St Francis Xavier, and the National University of Ireland.[32]

Shaw died in Fort William in 2004 at the age of 101. It was announced in The Guardian that Margaret Fay Shaw, in accordance with her wishes, was to be buried in South Uist.[3][4]

In 2007, scholars gathered in a conference in her honour in South Uist called "Gleann na Ceolraidh", meaning "Glen of the Muses" in Gaelic. As part of this event, a CD featuring recordings of folk songs Shaw collected was released. It was recorded by two of her close friends, Paul McCallum and Vivien Mackie.[33] In 2019, Shaw was commemorated in the film Solas, which made use of previously unseen footage Shaw shot in the Hebrides.[14] Today, Canna House, which houses the collections she and her husband made during their lifetimes, remains one of the most important archives of Gaelic culture and language in the world.[14][34] Many of the early sound recordings she made are available online on the platform Tobar an Dualchais.[4]

In November 2022 Shaw's work featured in the GLEAN exhibition at Edinburgh's City Art Centre of 14 early women photographers working in Scotland. The photographs and films that were curated by Jenny Brownrigg were by Shaw, Helen Biggar, Violet Banks, Christina Broom, M.E.M. Donaldson, Dr Beatrice Garvie, Jenny Gilbertson, Isabel Frances Grant, Ruby Grierson, Marion Grierson, Isobel Wylie Hutchison, Johanna Kissling, Isabell Burton-MacKenzie and Margaret Watkins[35]

Perhaps the most moving tribute, made in response to both the 1955 publication of Margaret Fay Shaw's Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist and her role in helping to inspire a Scottish Gaelic language revival, was made in a poem by South Uist Bard Fred Gillies:

"An eibhleag anns an gann bha 'n deo

Sheid i oirre, 's thug i bheo a rithist."

"An ember was dying; she blew on it

And brought it to life again."[36]

• Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist (1955)
• From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides: An Autobiography (1993)
• Eilean: The Photography of Margaret Fay Shaw (2018)

• John Lorne Campbell
• Marjory Kennedy-Fraser

• Canna House at the National Trust for Scotland
• Recordings by Margaret Fay Shaw on Tobar and Dualchais