Following her conservatory studies, MacKenzie was, for a short while, a member of the Boston-Irish band St James Gate (vocals, concertina, whistle), featuring on their eponymous album in 1985.
While performing at a concert in a village hall in South Uist, MacKenzie was spotted by Martin Swan, an English-born musician and television producer of Scots descent who was filming in the area.
MacKenzie sang and handled vocal arrangements, while Swan played the majority of instruments (acoustic, electric and electronic) with further contributions from Martyn Bennett on pipes and fiddle.
Containing a mixture of traditional and original Gaelic songs, it included contributions from Sedenka (on the tracks "E hó hì" and "Rol hol ill leò") and performed well[clarification needed] in the World Music charts.
Signing a new deal with Shanachie Entertainment Corporation later in 1995, MacKenzie recorded her third solo album Spiorad (Spirit) in France with Chris Birkett producing and co-arranging once again.
The first of these was "Wind Chases The Sun" (released February 10, 2007), which was an original MacKenzie country ballad dealing with the plight of Native-American political prisoner Leonard Peltier.
"Amazing Grace" was a more traditional work – a MacKenzie vocal arrangement of the popular hymn, which also featured Rhiannon Giddens (soprano), Miriam Stockley (alto) and Michael Laffan (bass).
On April 5, 2007, MacKenzie released a third download single - "Unelanvhi Uwetsi" - another version of "Amazing Grace" recorded by the same lineup as the previous one, but this time with words from the Cherokee hymn written by Reverend Samuel Worcester and Elias Boudinot.
The next day (on April 27, 2007), she released a fifth download single, "Wheeling Island Girls", another original Old Timey song based on family reminiscences of West Virginian life at the time of the Great Spring Flood of March 1936.
On July 22, 2007, MacKenzie released her fourth album Indian Summer, which celebrated the connection between Celtic and American cultures and explored her own roots on both sides of the Atlantic.
Rhiannon Giddens (from the African-American jug band Carolina Chocolate Drops) contributed fiddle, banjo, "flat-footin'" dancing and additional vocals to many tracks.
teaching at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) and Edinburgh Napier University and is looking forward to further recording projects, including a World Music album Global Sequence and a collection of Batonebi (Georgian Healing) Songs.