Grass-weaving and Psalm-singing
South Uist
courtesy Rural Housing Scotland
Angus MacPhee was born in 1916 in Nettlehole, near Glasgow, but his crofting family returned home to South Uist in the Outer Hebrides a few years later. As a young boy he loved working with horses and was good at music and singing; he also learnt how to make ropes, horse-harnesses, and other useful things from the abundant marram grass that was to be found on the island. Although as a young child he was brought up in an English-speaking community, he was fluent in Gaelic. In 1939, when he was called up to serve in the army, MacPhee joined the Lovat Scouts, riding on horseback to join them at Beaufort Castle, not far from Inverness. He was garrisoned in the Faroe Islands during World War II and became mentally unwell; he was consequently sent home to the croft, where his family found him to be unusually quiet, sullen and self-absorbed. He was moved to an asylum on the mainland, and from there he was taken to a hospital near Inverness, in which he spent most of the rest of his life. During those many years he seldom spoke.
MacPhee was admitted to the farm ward of the hospital; he tended animals, laboured on the land, and was considered to be a steady and hard worker. During free time he would wander around the grounds searching for materials such as grass, beech leaves, and scraps of sheep’s wool caught on barbed wire, using them to create clothing, hats, caps, boots, and harnesses, which he liked to hide under bushes. He never talked about why he made them. Eventually, when it was decided to return as many psychiatric patients as possible to their communities, MacPhee was moved to South Uist, where he lived in a nursing home a fairly short drive away from his remaining family. During a visit, the psychiatrist Joyce Laing, who discovered his singular work, showed him a photograph of a favourite horse, and to her surprise, MacPhee spoke to her briefly about it. She began to hope that he might eventually tell her his life story, but he never did. It is likely, though, that his illness may have been precipitated by enforced absence from croft, home, and family, and that he used his creative and expressive variation of a traditional craft as a means of achieving mental and emotional balance. Only a few of his weavings, made in the 1970s and 1980s, have survived, and they are now too fragile to be moved. Not exactly art, craft, or therapy, these unique objects are symbols of endurance, wit, and imagination.
Further north in the Hebrides, in a small number of churches, an unusual form of music, one that weaves together song, tradition, and community, can still be heard. A ‘precentor’ sings the opening lines of a psalm to the congregation, which gradually joins in, each member improvising the tune in a different way, with individual flourishes, tempos and rhythms, before they all return, as one, to the same note. This is Gaelic psalm-singing, once practised in Free Presbyterian churches throughout Scotland, but now mainly to be found in the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis and Harris. The roots of this tradition go back to 1659, when psalms were first translated into Gaelic by Presbyterian ministers disobedient to the Scottish episcopal church, which discouraged the native language; their melodies were derived from the English psalter, but Scottish and Irish Gaelic sean-nós, a highly embellished form of a capella singing that encourages free vocal expression, became a major influence and made Gaelic psalm-singing unique in British religious music. In every other style, from liturgical hymns in grand churches to informal singing in small chapels, voices come together in structured harmony, but Gaelic psalm-singing, always unaccompanied, embraces improvisation and individuality.
There are parallels to Gaelic psalm-singing in other parts of the world; the simultaneous variation of a single melody line, known as ‘heterophony’, can be found, for instance, in Ottoman and Arabic music, and it has some similarities with Coptic choral singing and American gospel. Its syncretic combination of ecclesiastical conservatism with improvisational elements of folk music finds echoes in American ‘sacred harp singing’, but it has a unique mood or tone, which is both lonesome and transcendent. As Noel Meek has written in an interesting article in ‘The Wire’, the beautiful and bleak sound of Gaelic psalm-singing is often compared to the Hebridean landscape and the rolling waves of the Atlantic Ocean, but it is also infused with a sense of history, lament and protest: it is ‘the music of a people who have survived the ages in a harsh climate and under the rule of others, but still hold proudly to a form of music unlike any other’.
For further exploration:
A free download of Roger Hutchinson’s intriguing book on Angus MacPhee:
A short film on Angus MacPhee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VUCVAuWDk
Noel Meek’s article in ‘The Wire’, with musical examples: https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/the-portal/noel-meek-explores-the-sights-and-sounds-of-gaelic-psalm-singing
A later article on Gaelic psalm-singing in ‘The Guardian’: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/27/vertical-connection-to-god-the-euphoria-of-gaelic-psalm-singing
The croft house on South Uist in which Angus MacPhee lived