The island of Barra lies off the North West coast of Scotland in the Outer Hebrides and has been a MacNeil stronghold since it was given to the clan in 1427. Apart from when, in 1838, the 40th Chief of the MacNeils, a certain Roderick, sold it to a Colonel Gordon, who promptly expelled most of the MacNeils. And replaced them with sheep.
Fortunately not all the MacNeils were expelled and, when the island was bought back by the 45th Chief of the clan, a certain Robert, 99 years later, the remaining islanders were still largely Gaelic-speaking and still singing Gaelic songs that had been passed down over the generations.
However, despite the island’s majestic beauty, by 1951, when native islander Flora MacNeil recorded this track, the younger islanders were still drifting away to find work on the mainland or overseas.
So perhaps it’s not surprising – given the island’s history of forced mass expulsions and the voluntary emigration of its younger folk - that Flora’s version of ’The Sister’s Lament’ is both a thing of magical beauty and heartbreaking sadness at exactly the same time.
In fact ‘The Sister’s Lament’ is a song sung by a girl who hasn’t been forcibly expelled from the island - instead she’s been stolen by fairies and incarcerated underground, but her lament is heard above by her sister. The song was also almost certainly first sung before the great forced expulsion of 1838. But by 1951, in the hands of Flora MacNeil, it seems to have transcended that story of fairy kidnap and become a mesmorising metaphor for life on the island over the previous 150 years or so.
Recorded 1951 by roving folk-song collector, Alan Lomax (see ABON 0012).
Available on the hard-to-find but well-worth-the-effort CD, ‘The Alan Lomax Sampler’, in which Flora’s surname is spelt incorrectly as McNeill: Amazon
She looks very like my mother, who was a year older and also brought up singing Gaelic songs, although she was from Sutherland rather than the Western Isles (Barra isn’t really north-western by the way, being the same latitude as Mallaig on the coast).
The title is “Phi’thrag a phiuthar” and a translation of the lyric is –
“Would you not pity me, o sister?
Would you not pity me my mourning tonight?
My little hut
Without a bent rope or a wisp of thatch
Water from the peaks in a stream down through it
But that’s not the cause of my sorrow”
The reference to the hut not having a “wisp of thatch” dates the words of the song to the eighteenth century; some say the original lament was for a violent death rather than a fairy abduction. Lovely tune, whatever its origin.
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