Over the course of the first three decades of the 20th century, armed with recording equipment, Marjory Kennedy Fraser visited hundreds of individuals acorss the Western Isles and captured their song on wax cylinders.  Digital copies of nearly 300 of these cylinders are now available via our catalogue, allowing scholars, enthusiasts and others to hear them and also to help better identify who these people were, where they came from and what they were singing.

Marjory Kennedy-Fraser

Background

Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, singer, pianist, folk-song collector and arranger, was born in 1857. She was the daughter of singer David Kennedy (1825-1886). Her series of works The songs of the Hebrides published variously between 1909 and 1922 remain a useful resource for both Gaelic and English speakers. She collected songs chiefly in the Western Isles.

For service rendered to the cause of music in Scotland, an honorary degree of Doctor of Music was conferred on her in 1928. Marjory Kennedy-Fraser had also been awarded the C.B.E. She died on 22 November 1930.

The Recordings

The cylinder recordings were made (largely) between 1907 and 1927 and were gifted to the University of Edinburgh by Marjory in 1930. In the years since, copies were made by the School of Scottish Studies in the 1970s and digitised copies were made for us via a specialist contractor in 2014.  It is derivatives of the latter which we have now put online.

What is on each cylinder is indicated by labelling on the boxes that contain the cylinders and also on/in the sleves containing the individual cylinders.  It is predominantly this information which has been used to create the initial catalogue entries.  The best guide we have to the contents of the cylinders is a list which  we have as a negative photostat.

It is impossible to summarise the breadth and variety of what Marjory recorded.  What follows is therefore just a random sample:

• Barra: Fairy song, Clapping Song, Lovesong to a young sailor, Loss of fishing nets, Lament for young son, Barra’s Galley
• Eriskay: Ossianic Rhyme, Drinking song, Lullaby, Small boat song, Cradle song
• Skye: Waulking song; Shepherd love song
• N. Uist: Hunting song, Spinning song, Cradle lilt, Dunvegan dirge
• Eigg: Waulking song, Hymn to Virgin
• The Lewes and Gigha: Love song, Anchor song
• Miss McLean: Witch drowning song, Sweethearting
• Frances Tolmie: Water kelpie, Jealous woman
• Not Western Isles: The King of Cockenzie, Oyster Song

Explore the collection

Cylinder with photostat list

• Browse the recordings in our catalogue
• Browse the photostat list: Coll-1036-cyl

Future tasks

It would be great to amalgamate the contents of the list into the catalogue but this will require someone with an understanding of Gaelic and of the place names of the Western Isles.  In addition, the skills to better identify the many named singers would be a huge advantage to anyone undertaking such work.

In the course of putting these online, we have also identified some cylinders which were mised during the digitisation process.  We are currently thinking about how we might address this.