November 9th 1903 saw the birth near Pittsburgh of Margaret Fay Shaw, the American writer who did much to record the music and culture of South Uist.
Margaret Fay Shaw was one of the most notable collectors of authentic Scottish Gaelic song and traditions in the 20th century. The 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 both 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.
She came of Scottish Presbyterian and liberal New England stock. The family owned a steel foundry in Pittsburgh and her parents were cultured people. Margaret was the youngest of five sisters and her early years were idyllic. Her first love was for the piano and she continued to play throughout her life.
By the age of 11, however, she was orphaned and obliged to develop the independence of character which was to lead her into a life's work far removed from her upbringing. 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.
Wanting to hear it in its "pristine" state, in 1924 she crossed the Atlantic again, this time engaging in an epic bicycle journey, which started in Oxford and ended at the Isle of Skye, where she remained for a month. It was during this trip that she began to use photography to earn a living, selling prints to newspapers, and magazines such as the Listener.
But it was not until she arrived on South Uist that she found her spiritual home. She was invited to the "big house" in Lochboisdale for dinner, and two sisters who worked there, Mairi and Peigi Macrae, were brought in to sing for the company. Margaret had never heard singing like it. For the next six years, she became their lodger and dear friend. They shared with her all of their immense stock of oral tradition which she faithfully transcribed, learning Gaelic as the work proceeded.
Her most important published work was Folksongs And Folklore Of South Uist, which has never been out of print since it was first published in full by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1955. 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.
This classic work was undoubtedly the centrepiece of Shaw's career, though she also wrote several other books, including an autobiography, From The Alleghenies To The Hebrides.
On the neighbouring island of Barra in the early 1930s, an extraordinary social set - a kind of Bloomsbury in the Hebrides - had developed around the presence of Compton Mackenzie. One of his closest collaborators was John Lorne Campbell, who came from landed Argyllshire stock and had developed his interest in Gaelic at Oxford.
The two patricians set about producing The Book Of Barra, a collection of the island's history and traditions, to raise funds for an organisation called The Sea League, which they had established to campaign for the exclusion of trawlers from Hebridean waters.
Hearing great reports of an American woman's photography on South Uist, Campbell crossed over by ferry to seek her involvement in illustrating The Book Of Barra. He walked into the Lochboisdale Hotel one rainy evening in 1934 and found Shaw sitting at the piano; a suitably romantic initiation to a relationship which was to last for more than half a century. They married the following year and made their home on Barra until, in 1938, Campbell bought the island of Canna, where they lived for the rest of their scholarly lives.
The island was given to the National Trust for Scotland in 1981, and John Lorne Campbell died in 1996.
There was nothing dry or academic, however, about Shaw. She travelled regularly to America until her late 90s. The fearsome ferry journey between Mallaig and Canna was regularly undertaken with equanimity, and she fortified herself to the end with the finest Kentucky bourbon. Her love of the Hebrides was, above all, for the values and lifestyle of the crofting people, and, particularly in South Uist in that 1930s heyday, it was deeply reciprocated. It is there that she will be laid to rest.
During her latter years she stayed at Canna House until her death at the grand old age of 101 in 2004.
