Flora MacNeil

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.

[2] 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.

By age four, famously, MacNeil 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".

Word of MacNeil's talents as a Gaelic singer had already preceded her and she was embraced by Edinburgh Communist poets and folk song promoters Hugh MacDiarmid, Hamish Henderson and Sorley MacLean.

[2] With their assistance, she found a public platform in the burgeoning round of Edinburgh ceilidhs and concerts that marked the first stirrings of the British folk revival.

[7] Following the performance of several border ballads and Scottish Traveller songs, Henderson announced that the concert goers were, "due back in the Western Highlands".

[9] Towards the end of the Ceilidh, master of ceremonies Hamish Henderson announced that Calum Johnston would be performing Roderick Morison's Òran do MhacLeoid Dhunbheagain ("A Song to MacLeod of Dunvegan").

Instead of patronizing the Bards and holding feasts at Dunvegan Castle for his clansmen, the Chief had become an absentee landlord in London, who "spent his money on foppish clothes".

"[11] In a further declaration of the pro-Soviet sympathies of the organizers, Henderson ended the Ceilidh by singing a Scots language tribute, set to the tune of Scotland the Brave, to John Maclean, a major figure in the Red Clydeside era, whom the text inaccurately claimed as the fiere, or comrade, of Vladimir Lenin and the "mate" of Karl Liebknecht.

[12] Henderson then concluded the Ceilidh by singing what was then Scotland's de facto national anthem, Scots Wha Hae by Robert Burns.

[2] While performing in 2000 at the annual Christmas Island Ceilidh in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, MacNeil spread her arms wide and cried, "You are my people!"

[17] In 1955, Flora MacNeil married fellow Barra native, Alister MacInnes, who worked as a lawyer in Glasgow, where the couple raised their five children; Kenneth, Cairistiona, Seumas, Maggie and Donald.