This is a past event
Elphinstone Institute Public Lecture Series
This lecture tells the story of American folklorist Margaret Fay Shaw and her husband John Lorne Campbell and their incredible archive collection of Gaelic song, history and folklore, now housed on the tiny cat haven of the Island of Canna, one of The Small Isles.
Margaret Fay Shaw collected one of the world’s most important collections, if not the most important collection of Gaelic song and folklore, over the course of her life. At the age of 16, she made her first visit to Scotland at the invitation of a family friend and spent a year at school in Helensburgh, outside Glasgow, where she first heard Gaelic song. The subsequent arrival of this young American on the island of South Uist in 1929 was the start of a deep and highly productive love affair with the language and traditions of the Gaels.
Shaw was also an outstanding photographer, and her still pictures and cinematography contributed to an invaluable archive of island life in the 1930s. She met the folklorist John Lorne Campbell on South Uist in 1934; they married a year later and together helped to rescue vast quantities of oral tradition from oblivion.
The song lecture “Curiosity Killed the Cat”, tells the story of Margaret and her life and work, why it was and is important to Gaeldom in particular and to the world in general, both in terms of the folklore past and a future culture. We will find out why cats figure so prominently in the story and their impact on her life.
This lecture is also illustrated with images, some unseen by the general public, of private and public importance, of Margaret’s travels and of her animals.
Did Curiosity actually kill the Cat or did it make it live?
Royal National Mod Gold medallist Fiona J Mackenzie is a Gaelic singer, tutor and researcher, based in Dingwall in the Highlands. Born in Aberdeen and brought up in Morayshire, Fiona had no connection to Gaelic culture until she moved to the Highlands in the early 1990s. After working for many years in Gaelic medium education, she was established as the Gaelic Song Fellow for Highland Council from 2001–2009.
Fiona is a graduate of Aberdeen University (Scottish History and Music) and has a Master’s Degree in Song & Performance from the University of the West of Scotland, which focussed on the life and work of American born folklorist Margaret Fay Shaw. This entailed spending extended time on the island of Canna, the home of Margaret's’ collections. Fiona developed a show (Little Bird Blown Off course) based on Margaret's work, with the National Theatre of Scotland in 2013 and it toured the Highlands in September of that year before playing to capacity audiences at Celtic Connections 2014.
Fiona was BBC Scotland Traditional Music Personality in 2004 and the following year won the Royal National Mod Gold Medal . She has 4 albums to her name and records on the Greentrax label. Fiona is a keen proponent of using social media for promoting Gaelic and Gaelic culture, and was the first person to use Twitter to teach Gaelic, Tweeting short manageable Gaelic words and phrases with pronunciation guides.
- Speaker
- Fiona Mackenzie, freelance scholar and performer
- Hosted by
- Elphinstone Institute
- Venue
- MacRobert Building, MR051
- Contact
-
No Booking required. Entry £3 (Free for students)
Elphinstone Institute
MacRobert Building, King's College, Aberdeen, AB24 5UA
Tel: +44 (0)1224 272996 Fax: +44 (0)1224 272728 Email: elphinstone@abdn.ac.ukThe Elphinstone Institute 1995-2015
Celebrating 20 years of Ethnology and Folklore Research