When I first heard the songs folklorist Margaret Fay Shaw collected in South Uist, while I was in South Uist myself, I felt something shift in my cultural focus. These were not simply tunes from the past; they were living, breathing fragments of a world, carried in women’s voices, shaped by work, weather, and memory.
Part of the reason they struck me so deeply is that, in my own way, I've walked a similar path to Margaret's. Like her, my first musical love was classical music. Like her, I had to learn Gaelic from scratch. And like her, I went to live on the island of Canna, where I worked as the archivist in the very house she called home. I too lived surrounded by the storms, the silence, and…
