Fiona Kennedy
Popular singer in Gaelic, Scots & English
Last week, we took a boat from Shetland to mainland Scotland for a visit to Aberdeen, including a look at James Scott Skinner’s grave, and on several occasions, a chance to meet and hear the beautiful singing of Fiona Kennedy. Below is an article I wrote for Scottish Life magazine’s fall 2017 issue, all about the fascinating background and career of this great singer.
One of the hidden treasures on YouTube is a video clip of the great Scottish singer, Calum Kennedy, singing a duet with his daughter Fiona, probably in the late 1970s. Calum’s characteristically sweet and heartfelt delivery is perfectly matched by Fiona’s voice. The clip is just long enough for us to hear the last verse of “The Crookit Bawbee”:
An’ ye are the laddie that gave me the penny,
The laddie I'll lo’e till the day that I dee;
Ye may cleed me wi’ satin, an’ mak’ me a lady,
An’ I will gang wi’ ye to bonnie Glen Shee.By the time of that video, Fiona Kennedy had already acted in movies and television series since her teens, and toured as the eldest of five daughters in the Kennedy family band. Since then, she has continued to entertain, with countless projects in Scotland and on American television. This fall [2017], she is releasing a new solo CD we'll discuss in a moment.
Calum Kennedy and his wife, singer Anne Gillies, were household names in Scotland in the 1950s and 60s. In fact, when JFK was assassinated in 1963, many Scots feared at first that the headline “Kennedy Shot” referred to Calum! A native of the Isle of Lewis, Kennedy began his singing career after moving to Glasgow for work. There, he met Anne Gillies, and was embraced by her musical family. Anne won the 1952 gold medal for Gaelic singing at the Mod, the national competition promoting Gaelic culture, held annually since 1892. Anne’s younger brother, Alasdair, won the gold medal five years later, and has only recently retired from two long, successful careers, as a singer and a dentist. Their mother Euphemia, originally from Skye, made sure to keep a welcoming Highland home away from home, with broth on the stove, music, and a sociable dram at the ready.
Calum and Anne married in 1953, and sang together for many years. In 1955, Calum himself won the gold medal for Gaelic singing at the Mod, and moved into the international spotlight when he won the 1957 World Ballad Championship in Moscow, beating out 750 other singers with the Gaelic song, “O Mhairi E Mhairi.” Singing mostly traditional songs in Gaelic, Scots, and English, Kennedy also wrote several popular songs such as “Lovely Stornaway.”
The diction and tone of his voice, though not operatic, was polished as compared to the average folksinger. But it was the sincerity of his emotional singing that garnered him loving listeners in Scotland and beyond. Perhaps the intense emotion focused in his voice was what caused him to totally lose that voice for 18 months after his wife tragically passed away in 1974, due to complications from a routine surgery.
Calum recovered and sang again, but the family band was at an end. Though never quite rising to his previous peak, Calum continued singing until his death in 2006. Five years later, the Gaelic Mod instituted an annual Kennedy competition, a top-level contest limited exclusively to past winners of the Mod in Gaelic singing. In presenting the trophy to honor Calum and Anne Kennedy, their eldest daughter Fiona commented that “in many ways they were a golden couple, blessed with hauntingly beautiful voices which delighted and moved audiences at home and abroad.”
Fiona Kennedy has gone on to delight and move audiences in her own right. She has headlined many projects, but particularly enjoys creative collaboration. She sang a Gaelic duo with Karen Matheson of Capercaillie for Transatlantic Sessions, a program which brings together American and Scottish musicians on television, live performance, CD and DVD. She produced a performance featuring herself and five other Scottish singers, called Highland Heartbeat, which is available on a CD but originally was a PBS TV show filmed in Glasgow. This show grew out of her relationship with American public television, where she hosted over 70 episodes of Tartan TV, a magazine-style program exploring stories about Scotland.
While hosting Tartan TV, Fiona came across a stirring exhibit at Ellis Island, sponsored by the National Museum of Scotland. Piles of kists, or chests, were on display, containing items that immigrants brought with them from Scotland on their harrowing journeys across the sea to America. Kennedy turned this experience into “The Kist,” which was born as a song, then grew into a theatrical production which won a 5-star review at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It is an ongoing project drawing upon the kist and its contents as a metaphor for the cultural treasures immigrants from around the world keep close to them in their journeys.
Fiona’s solo CDs offer contemporary and traditional material in English, Scots, and Gaelic, with a gentle folk-pop sound. Her 1995 album Maiden Heaven was produced by Phil Cunningham, and for her 2004 Coming Home album she was backed by top musicians from the traditional Scottish music scene.
Fiona’s newest solo CD is called Time to Fly, evocative of the moment in life when a parent’s children are launched and ready to take flight. Her older two children have followed their father in business careers, while her youngest, Sophie Kennedy Clark, is an award-winning actress. She plays the lead in the 2017 film The First, about silent movie star Mary Pickford and her pivotal role in the development of the Hollywood film industry.
It’s also Fiona’s “time to fly” creatively. She had a hand in writing half the songs on her new CD. The first song, “Down the Line,” speaks of passing on the music to the next generation. She wrote it with the album’s guitarist and arranger, Calum MacColl. MacColl, like Fiona, grew up in a famous musical family, his father being singer and songwriter Ewan MacColl.
The only traditional Scottish song is a beautiful Gaelic/English version of “Christ Child Lullaby,” by a 19th century Highland minister. Otherwise, the American influence in the CD’s music is strong. Fiona wrote one song with Beth Nielsen Chapman, a 2016 inductee into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame; two songs were collaborations with Marcus Hummon, a Grammy Award-winning country songwriter.
However, to my ears, the country music influence can’t disguise the Scottish sound of Fiona’s voice. The sound of American folksingers often draws upon an aggrieved or rebellious attitude, and country singers like to project an edge of toughness or underlying hurt. But Fiona Kennedy’s voice is unfailingly sweet and lyrical, not so different from the voice in that YouTube clip of herself singing with her father Calum. It’s a sweetness and sincerity of sound that I feel is traceable to the Gaelic song tradition. You can hear it in the sound of many Gaelic singers, and it is captivating.
One of the songs Kennedy cowrote for her CD came to her while volunteering in Africa for F.R.O.M Scotland (Famine Relief of Malawi). It’s called “Weaver of Dreams,” inspired by a description of Calum Kennedy in an old review he once showed Fiona, and incorporates thoughts about the life of opera singer Maria Callas.
Fiona is a major supporter of F.R.O.M Scotland as well as other community-oriented projects. For 30 years, she has helped VSA, the Volunteer Service Agency of Aberdeen. She’s particularly enthused about their “Sing, Sing, Sing” program, in which hundreds of ordinary workers learn, rehearse and perform songs for a contest, raising huge sums to benefit mental health patients.
Fiona Kennedy’s tireless engagements include an O.B.E. awarded by the Queen, services as one of Aberdeenshire’s Deputy Lord-Lieutenants, appearances on TV, film, musical theater, at the G8 Summit and in performance for all the NATO ambassadors in Brussels. And yet, she maintains her roots in family, Gaelic song, the songs of Robert Burns, and community service.
The list of her achievements is long and getting longer. “I don’t ever stop, I don’t ever intend to stop,” Fiona says. “Music is a great driving force, that thread woven from my birth. It connects in every way with every thing.”