Flora MacNeil

Flora MacNeil, MBE (6 October 1928 – 15 May 2015) was a Scottish Gaelic Traditional singer. MacNeil gained prominence after meeting Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson during the early 1950s, and continued to perform into her later years. Early life MacNeil was born in 1928 into a Gaelic-speaking and Roman Catholic family inside her parents' croft at Ledag, Castlebay, on the island of Barra, which is sometimes called, "the island the Reformation never reached". There were singers on both sides of the MacNeil family, but the menfolk were often away at sea for long periods, leaving the women to raise the children and tend the croft – while constantly singing to assuage their labours. Her mother was Ann Gillies. Her father, Seumas MacNeil, worked as a fisherman and died when Flora was 14. In these pre-television and pre-radio days, ceilidhs were a regular occurrence on Barra, and from earliest childhood MacNeil later remembered "soaking up" literally hundreds of songs, as if by osmosis. While most of MacNeil's repertoire was learned from her mother, one of Flora's other sources was her mother's cousin, Mary Johnstone. Johnstone's parents had lived locally, but had been evicted during the Highland Clearances. They had moved first to Bernerary and then to Mingulay, before their daughter moved back to her ancestral district on Barra. In later years, Johnstone would regularly visit Flora's mother and often sang at local ceilidhs and, for this reason, Flora's repertoire also included many Gaelic songs from both Benerary and Mingulay. Clearly, the music was in her blood: by age four, famously, she was already tackling the sophisticated Jacobite war poetry of Mo rùn geal òg ("My Fair Young Love"), one of the Òrain Mòr, or "Big Songs"."Traditional songs tended to run in families and I was fortunate that my mother and her family had a great love for the poetry and the music of the old songs. It was natural for them to sing, whatever they were doing at the time or whatever mood they were in. My aunt Mary, in particular, was always ready, at any time I called on her, to drop whatever she was doing, to discuss a song with me, and perhaps, in this way, long forgotten verses would be recollected. So I learned a great many songs at an early age without any conscious effort. As is to be expected on a small island, so many songs deal with the sea, but, of course, many of them may not originally be Barra songs.