A Visit with Skinner and Fiona Kennedy

Farewell to Shetland, hello to Aberdeen!

We bid farewell to Shetland at night as we boarded the huge Northlinks ferry to Aberdeen. We again had little bedrooms, as pictured in the earlier article about traveling from Orkney to Shetland. It was nice to meet up with others from our group and hang out, or even play some tunes together, in what at mealtime was the eating area, where you could also choose to use a bit of brute force to open the doors to the deck and enjoy the sea air. Being so far north, we enjoyed a view of the late sunset as we smoothly (usually) glided south through the North Sea.

I woke up in the morning to the P.A. announcement that we were docked in Aberdeen. Though drivers of cars on the ferry had to go down and drive them off in to the parking lot, they and the rest of us nondrivers were welcomed to have a good breakfast on the boat before leaving.

Below are a couple of sunset photos from the ferry, and a view of the granite city of Aberdeen from our boat when we arrived.

The landscape of mainland Scotland, as seen in the area surrounding Aberdeen, is markedly different from the dramatic views in Shetland. Here are a few views of the lush greenery.

One little surprise trip we liked to make in Aberdeen was to the Allenvale Cemetery. We’d get out of the van and I led folk through the gate to a nearby monument at the grave of the legendary fiddler and composer, James Scott Skinner, a great Victorian-era fiddler and composer, who died in 1927.

His grave includes a bust of the composer and an inscription to the “Strathspey King” — a name given him by a newspaper article about him, and an epithet he happily used ever after. The tombstone pays tribute to “the Greatest Violin Exponent and Composer of Scottish National Music” and displays an engraving of the first two measures of one of his most famous slow airs, “The Bonnie Lass o’ Bon-Accord.” Bon-Accord was the nickname for the city of Aberdeen, where Skinner lived from before the age of 10.

Once we arrived at the grave site, I took out my fiddle and played the whole “Bonnie Lass” tune for our group, with its dramatic variations. My hope was that if I played it well enough, Skinner might crack a smile. But as you can see below, his expression remained severe and highly judgmental of my playing.

Skinner was born in 1843 and became virtuoso violinist and fiddler, performing widely and become a sort of rock star of his day. One day in the early 1900s, he played three outdoor concerts, each in a different city, for a total of 12,000 people. You can imagine what this might have been like before the advent of microphones. Also before microphones, he used the “Stroh” violin, which had an amplifying horn attached, to make his first recording, on a wax cylinder in 1899.

He was also a prominent dance teacher, having adopted his middle name “Scott” from the name of his dance teacher, whom he greatly admired. Apparently he won a sword dance competition in Ireland, at which I understand he played fiddle for himself to dance! It is said that many of his solo concerts were quite dramatic, such as the one where he finished his final number by executing a somersault over a couch seating three proper ladies — while wearing a kilt. Anything to make hearts go pit-a-pat, I suppose!

Skinner wrote more than 600 tunes, many of them standards in the traditional music scene today. Several of his tune books are still very popular, though they were expensive projects at the time. One of them even bankrupted him, after which his first wife had a breakdown and entered a mental asylum with the diagnosis “pecuniary embarrassment.”

You can read in my earlier article about his moving lament, “Hector the Hero,” which he wrote and squeezed into his Harp and Claymore book in 1904 at the last minute, after hearing of the tragic and unjust suicide of military hero Hector Macdonald.

Skinner died a year after attempting to compete in the World's Old Fiddlers Contest in Lewiston, Maine, which was open to fiddlers aged 60 and over, from all around the world. But Skinner couldn’t put up with a rule not permitting him to play strathspeys and was also fed up with his pianist, so he simply walked off the stage in a huff. He never played another concert, because on the boat home, he contracted pneumonia and died in early 1927. His tombstone monument was unveiled for a large crowd of admirers by Sir Harry Lauder.

During several of our visits to Aberdeen, we were very fortunate to have a visit with and private performance by the great singer Fiona Kennedy. Both her parents were award-winning Gaelic singers (you may have heard of Calum Kennedy), so she can certainly sing in Gaelic, but is most famous for her traditional and original Scots and English songs on TV, radio, and theater productions in the US and UK, as well as her collaboration with prominent American songwriters. I’ll share some fascinating details about Fiona next week, but for the moment, below are a few photos from our visit with her.

Kennedy sang for us accompanied by guitarist Nils Elders, who is himself a singer, songwriter and producer in his own right, having worked for radio and TV, including US networks NBC an CBS. Nils is the son of one of Fiona’s dear friends, who unfortunately passed away shortly before one of our visits, though she insisted on meeting with us anyway. Very thoughtful and kind.

The clip below gives you a feel for one of Fiona’s intimate performances and chats, from one of her early online “Fiona’s Kitchen Concerts.” She began offering these during the Covid lockdown, and has kept them going regularly on YouTube for the past four years!

In the following video, she first features a local pianist, and sings her first song at about 7:15.