The story of John Duncan's subject Marjory Kennedy-Fraser

YOU know how it is when you run into a vampire. You start chewing garlic furiously, sharpen your wooden stakes and make an interminable number of films about it. Well, it might seem hard to believe, but the Celtic Revival has its very own female vampire who is accused of having sucked the blood out of the Gaelic tradition and who is regularly anathematised by true believers.

Her name is Marjory Kennedy-Fraser and we have an excellent portrait of her by John Duncan – one of her devotees and therefore also anathematised. Sorley MacLean, in an essay he was later to describe as “immature”, wrote: “This Celtic Twilight never bore any earthly relation to anything in Gaelic life or literature. It was merely one of the latest births of the English literary bourgeouisie, and its births are to Gaelic eyes exceedingly strange, whether they be Mr John Duncan’s Bride or the late Mrs Kennedy-Fraser’s ‘Mairead òg with her sea-blue eyes of witchery’.”

MacLean wrote that essay in the 1930s when the true nature of Gaelic song was scarcely understood outside the Gàidhealtachd and it is entirely understandable for its day. But it will not do. Not today. There is no need to throw out the baby with the bath water – a particular pleasure of the world of academe which is frequently left childless as a consequence. MacLean was, of course, big enough eventually to see a bigger picture, and you’ll have a chance next week to judge Duncan’s Saint Bride for yourself.

I have been emphasising the relationship of human figures to the environment in Jack Yeats and William McTaggart. Although McTaggart was as true a Celt as you could ask for, and Yeats was brother to WB – one of the leading figures in the Celtic Revival, neither Jack Yeats nor William McTaggart was what you might call a Celtic Revival artist. In fact they didn’t fit any bill at all. But Celtic Revival artists there most certainly were, and John Duncan was a leading example. So what does this portrait of the anathematised Kennedy-Fraser tell us?

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First, that it is an excellent and dignified likeness, second, that everything about her – her complexion, her clothing, the erect carriage of her head, the containment of her hair – is at one with the colours and forms of her Hebridean environment.

The eyes are superbly handled. Many portraits are admired for the way the eyes follow the viewer; though if you look at the eyes, it is almost inevitable that they do. But you can’t get Kennedy-Fraser’s eyes to follow you. Somehow, Duncan has them focused somewhere well behind your shoulder. You also know that from the set of the mouth this may be a woman capable of a smile but she is not one with whom you would lightly pick an argument. Her lips are almost as impersonal as the colours of bracken and seaweed which they share.

Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser was born in Perth in 1857 and died in Edinburgh in 1930. She was the daughter of Elizabeth Fraser and the renowned singer David Kennedy who initially educated her. By 1870, she was providing piano accompaniment for his recital tours of Scots song. In 1871, the family formed a highly successful vocal group in which she sang contralto. Their round-the-world tour from 1872-1879 took in the Antipodes and North America, concluding in South Africa. Kennedy-Fraser next studied voice production with Gambardella in Milan and Marchesi in Paris.

Her interest in Gaelic song started in 1882 but was interrupted by a last family world tour. In 1887, she married Alec Yule Fraser who died only three years later, leaving Marjorie with two children, David and Patuffa – the latter named by a visiting friend. Teaching song and piano in Edinburgh, Kennedy-Fraser also found time to assist her brother-in-law, Tobias Matthay, with The Act of Touch and to study at the Reid School of Music with Professor Niecks; so hers was primarily a classical training and she had no real roots in the tradition.

However, in 1905, at John Duncan’s suggestion, she found her true calling, collecting folk song on Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides, and therefore became a vampire. Many regard Kennedy-Fraser’s involvement with Hebridean song as unfortunate. It is true that not only was she deeply indebted to the native Gaelic-speaking collector Frances Tolmie, she altered her material, conflated different versions of songs, adapted words from other songs not always appropriate, and arranged the whole in a manner which, to some, has too much Celtic mist about it and with English translations which are sometimes cringeworthy in style.

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On the other hand, she was one of the very first to make field recordings; she was absolutely honest about what she was doing, (stating in print that there was no substitute for the tradition as sung traditionally); and her arrangements were sensitive to the modal character of the material, varied in their use of texture. For people including leading composers such as Bantock and FG Scott, they were a source of inspiration. Her Songs of the Hebrides have become minor classics and, besides their value as art-song arrangements, advanced in style for the period, they contain important introductory material, including significant contributions from her Gaelic-speaking collaborator, Kenneth MacLeod, with whom she worked from 1908 and whose contribution is as open to criticism and praise as was hers.

The famous song The Road to the Isles was written by him in 1915 at her request for a tramping song for British troops fighting in the First World War, setting a tune by Pipe Major John McLellan, picked up in Barra. Alright, alright; popular as it is, it was cobbled together and is not truly traditional, but telling that to the devotees of the incomparable Kenneth McKellar (who sang it with a clarity and precision you’ll rarely hear these days) would be little more than mean-minded. But what about Cuchullain’s Lament for the Death of his Son?

This appears uniquely in Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser and nobody ever sings it. In fact, it is the only Ulidian lay surviving – Ulidian meaning from the Ulster cycle of Celtic tales. What is more, nobody (my brave self excluded) even deigns to mention its existence. They even go so far as to say that no Ulidian lays exist at all, despite the fact that the BBC broadcast it years ago, sung most beautifully by Finlay MacNeill at my request while surrounded by fields of garlic and hedged in by wooden stakes and crosses and with a mallet at the ready in the hand of producer, Martin Dalby.

So does this lay, collected by MacLeod from Duncan MacLellan on Eigg have no validity? Or is it so dangerous that even the BBC’s precautions are considered insufficient? John Duncan made a heroic image of CuChulainn and included in its title CuChulainn’s own declaration “I care not though I last but a day if my name and fame are a power for ever!”

THE story behind the song starts off on the island of Skye with CuChulainn fathering a child with Aoife and then leaving her to get on with it. But before he leaves he puts a geasa or obligation on the child, Connlaoch, never to tell his name, so when Connlaoch comes to his father’s land in Ulster, he refuses to tell his name and his father, not recognising the young man, challenges and kills him. WB Yeats wrote a sort of ballad about it, but it isn’t as good as this song, cursing Aoife but above all lamenting the death of Connlaoch.

CuChulainn’s reputation was not just that of a great fighter, it was also that of a man capable of something approaching insanity with battle rage. It is fascinating to see how the great Irish artist Louis le Brocquy depicted him as the ancient myth describes him in his warp-spasm, one eye hanging out on his cheek, the other receded into his skull, his head and backside twisted round, his mouth foaming and his muscles in knots. The Gaelic name for Meadowsweet is Crios Chuchulainn – Cuchulainn’s belt. Meadowsweet contains salicylic acid, the basis of aspirin and ibuprofen, and is used to control fevers. I discussed the matter once with a fever specialist and she suggested that CuChulainn might have been suffering from a form of malaria known as blackwater fever, because in extreme cases the urine turns black.

Obviously CuChulainn wasn’t that bad or they’d have included black urine in the description. But the specialist did say that it did not require much poetic licence for such terrifying symptoms; they occur in reality. So my guess is that he carried dried meadowsweet around with him in his belt so that when he felt a fever coming on he could make a tisane and at least contain the symptoms, if he chose. But grief is different from rage and when CuChulainn discovers what he has done, he is so grief-stricken he is put to fighting the waves as the only way to cope with him.

CuChulainn’s Lament in Kennedy-Fraser is not the only unique item. Another in Songs of the Hebrides is Smàl an Tùrlach, a Peat-Fire Smooring Prayer. It was collected from Isabel MacLeod on Eigg and there is no good reason to doubt its authenticity. A peat fire can easily be kept in overnight by smooring – an activity traditionally undertaken by the woman of the house and accompanied by prayer or song. In this example, the burning peat becomes a metaphor for suffering:

Rìgh nan Dùl, Rìgh nan Dùl,/ Smàl an tùrlach, smàl an tùrlach;/ Iosa, leam ’nam shuain, ’nam dhùsgadh./ Rìgh nan Dùl, Rìgh nan Dùl,/ Smàl an tùrlach, ’s bàth le deòir/ Fàd na còmhraige ’s na cuartaich,/ Bàth le d’ dheòir, bàth le d’ dheòir.

(King of the Heavens, smoor the fire; Christ with me in my sleep and my waking. King of the Heavens, smoor the fire and smoor the fire of battle and of fever with your tears.)

A peat fire has unique qualities. The disadvantages are that it produces large quantities of very fine ash which spread throughout the house and, if smoored regularly, the smoke deposits a thick tar inimical to modern chimneys. But the advantages far outweigh these problems. A peat fire rarely, if ever, sparks; it burns slowly and steadily; it heats a whole room, but does not burn your shins; it can be made to produce flame, but is hot enough when it glows; it is steady and does not require constant re-fuelling. As such, it is an excellent fire on which to cook. George Bain, another Celtic revivalist but one who has somehow evaded anathematisation, nicely illustrates this function by turning the smoke into an elaborate interlace, in his cover for Smùid-Mòna – Peat-Reek, a song with words and music by Somerled MacMillan, the bard of the Clan MacMillan. Much of the success of the Songs of the Hebrides publications was due to Kennedy-Fraser’s own performances with her daughter Patuffa, who assisted on many of the field trips and was studying at the Matthay School in London. Subsequently they toured America and gave recitals in London, Patuffa playing the clarsach.

Marjorie continued as chief music critic for the Edinburgh Evening News and, in 1917, wrote a libretto for Granville Bantock’s opera The Seal-woman, which was produced in Birmingham in 1924, and in which she took the part of Mary MacLeod under Sir Adrian Boult.

The opera, which incorporated many of the tunes she had published, was subsequently broadcast. She died in 1930. John Duncan died in 1945. Perhaps more than half a century on we are culturally grown up enough to accept them as they were and not as how we think they should have been.

Next week it will be Christmas Eve and John Duncan has something to say about it that takes us beyond Sorley MacLean, in his youthful protest, to a vision of Renaissance significance and beauty.