Margaret Fay Shaw (9 November 1903 – 11 December 2004) was a pioneering Scottish-American ethnomusicologist, photographer, folklorist, and scholar of Celtic studies. She is best known for her meticulous work as a folk song and folklore collector among Scottish Gaelic-speakers in the Hebrides, Canadian Gaelic-speaking communities in Nova Scotia, and among Connaught Irish speakers in the Aran Islands. Along with her husband, literary scholar John Lorne Campbell, Shaw helped lay the foundation for both the modern Scottish Gaelic Renaissance and heritage language revival using Scottish Gaelic-medium education.
Early life The youngest of five sisters, Shaw was born in her family's "substantial mansion",Ray Perman (2013), The Man Who Gave Away His Island: A Life of John Lorne Campbell, Birlinn Limited. Page 48. built from homemade bricks in 1829,Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Page 1. in Glenshaw, Pennsylvania.
The mansion stood 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, and built there the first iron foundry west of the Allegheny Mountains. John Shaw later divided his land grant between his sons and permanently gave his surname to the surrounding district.Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Page 1, 4.
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.Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Page 3.
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,Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Page 4. even though the Shaw family's wealth was also largely drawn through canny investments in that same industry.Ray Perman (2013), The Man Who Gave Away His Island: A Life of John Lorne Campbell, Birlinn Limited. Page 48-49.
Henry Shaw, Shaw's father, was a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute graduate and a civil engineer. He 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."
Margaret's mother Fanny Maria Patchin 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."Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Page 5.
In addition to raising her as a Presbyterian,Ray Perman (2013), The Man Who Gave Away His Island: A Life of John Lorne Campbell, Birlinn Limited. Pages 58–59. Margaret's parents were reportedly very loving and attentive and, despite being forbidden at first to touch the instrument, Margaret developed a passionate interest in music from an early age when she learned to play the piano.Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Pages 13-14.
A major role in Margaret's childhood was also played by her parents' African-American servants, the Nash family, who often told her stories from their family's oral tradition, which stretched back to a slave plantation in Virginia and, before that, to Nigeria.Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Page 6. The Irish folklore about the Celtic Otherworld shared during the extended visit of an Irish Traveller woman, whom Margaret knew only as "Irish Kate", fascinated her youthful imagination just as much.Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Page 11.
After her parents died when she was 11, she moved to Scotland as a teenager and attended St Bride's all-girls' boarding school at Helensburgh, near Glasgow. Shaw later recalled that her French teacher at St. Bride's was a native of Aberdeenshire, "and was what would today be called a great Scottish nationalist". For this reason, the French teacher once ordered her students to make drawings to accompany the Declaration of Arbroath, which were hung on the walls until the horrified headmistress ordered them taken down.Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Page 26.
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, "who", according to Robert Perman, "had made a career of collecting Gaelic songs in the Hebrides and singing her own Anglicized versions of them."Ray Perman (2013), The Man Who Gave Away His Island: A Life of John Lorne Campbell, Birlinn Limited. Page 50.
Shaw later wrote about this life-altering concert, "As a child, I had learned Scots songs and a few of Robert Burns', but these she sang were completely new. To think they had been found in the Hebrides and I had never known anything about them! But there was something wrong, I felt; there was something more to these songs. If I could only go to those far-off islands and hear those singers myself!"
Musicologist While studying at New York University, she returned to Scotland in the 1920s and was overjoyed to hear once again the songs she had heard at St. Bride's, but sung in the original Gaelic by native speakers of the language.
After her plans to be a concert pianist were thwarted by rheumatism,Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Pages 57-58. Shaw switched, with the encouragement of Nadia Boulanger and Eileen Costello and much to her family's horror, from medicine to the new field of ethnomusicology and began full-time folk song collecting.Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Pages 39-56. She realized over time 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.Ray Perman (2013), The Man Who Gave Away His Island: A Life of John Lorne Campbell, Birlinn Limited. Pages 50–53.
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."Ray Perman (2013), The Man Who Gave Away His Island: A Life of John Lorne Campbell, Birlinn Limited. Pages 53–54.
While staying in Lochboisdale, she was entertained by the singing of two sisters, Màiri and Peigi MacRae. 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.Solas—Margaret Fay Shaw of Canna; BBC AlbaSunday Feature: Margaret Fay Shaw's Hebridean Odyssey; BBC Radio 3 Enthralled by their singing, she lived 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.
Shaw later recalled, "The words are the most important thing for the singers; the tune is just the carriage that carries the words. I learned that right away at Màiri MacRae's; not matter how cracked or awful the voice was in singing, the words had to be absolutely pure, so that everybody listening got the poetry. And I thought then how vastly important this is to singers to know that the words must be heard, that they should love the poetry."Margaret Fay Shaw (1999), From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides, Birlinn Limited. Page 56.
Much of the information Shaw collected from the MacRae sisters was later published in her book Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist.
Shaw's photographs highlighted the working lives of women in South Uist, who played crucial roles in their families and local economies.
Personal life 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 a 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.Ray Perman (2013), The Man Who Gave Away His Island: A Life of John Lorne Campbell, Birlinn Limited. Page 47. 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."
Their courtship was slow and awkward, but in March 1935, 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 Shaw family accordingly decided that Campbell must not be seriously interested in Margaret, and no one was more shocked than she when Campbell proposed marriage on the last day of his visit.
In June 1935, Campbell and Shaw were married by Reverend Calum MacLeod in the manse of John Knox Presbyterian Church in Glasgow. Neither family attended, and the bride's family friend, Fred Moir, gave the bride away. At the groom's insistence, the 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.Ray Perman (2013), The Man Who Gave Away His Island: A Life of John Lorne Campbell, Birlinn Limited. Page 60.
Language revivalist In 1937, the Campbells traveled 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 95 traditional Gaelic songs and ballads, two games, seven local songs, and three original songs sung by their composer. The Campbells also persuaded , 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 Catholic plainsong hymns in Mikmaq.Ray Perman (2013), The Man Who Gave Away His Island: A Life of John Lorne Campbell, Birlinn Limited. Pages 63–66.
The Canadian Gaelic song recordings the Campbells made in Nova Scotia 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.