#blue grass

US Vogue June 1958

Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass

6th January 1978 saw the death in Shetland of Thomas Fraser.

Fraser was a fisherman and crofter from Burra who left thousands of songs recorded at home using a reel-to-reel recorder, and his music was first released in 2002 after his tapes were undiscovered for 25 years.

Thomas Fraser was born in Outterabrake on Burra, a collection of islands and islets which parallel the western shore of Mainland Shetland. . He performed as a musician at family events and gave one of his first public performances in Hamnavoe in 1948.

Despite an innate shyness, his country and western style of music soon became widely appreciated across Shetland. Thomas met and married his wife Phyllis, another enthusiastic Shetland musician, in 1955, and the two went on to record and play together.

Thomas had begun to earn his living as a fisherman on locally based boats at the age of 16. By the late 1950s he was operating his own lobster boat, still in the waters he had known all his life, while also working the family croft. On 19 October 1973 Thomas’s boat ran aground on rocks off Burra.

After spending some time in the icy water he was rescued by other fisherman, but his uninsured boat was wrecked. Early in 1977 Thomas was injured while dredging for scallops and flown to Aberdeen for treatment. Although still clearly unwell after his return to Shetland he refused further medical help and passed away on January 6th aged just 50.

During his lifetime Thomas Fraser has made many recordings of his work on a reel to reel tape recorder, often for family and friends. After his death, requests for copies of his recordings increased. His nephew made some available on cassette during the 1980s, but it was his grandson who began to appreciate the lasting value of Thomas Fraser’s music. This lead to the release in 2002 of a 25 track CD, Long Gone Lonesome Blues. A series of further CDs followed, together with a BBC TV documentary Shetland Lone Star, while the National Theatre of Scotland has mounted a stage production of the Thomas Fraser story.

Meanwhile Thomas Fraser has gone from someone virtually unheard of outside Shetland to a country music legend with an international following. It’s just a shame he isn’t here to see it.

The people of Burra remember Thomas Fraser with The Thomas Fraser Concerts, which were first held in 2002, they have since morphed into the annual Thomas Fraser festival attracting musicians from around the globe.