Sings the Songs of John McCormack

Kenneth McKellar was born and brought up in Paisley where his father owned a grocery shop. Although there were no musicians at home, the McKellar family nevertheless loved music and often listened to opera on the gramophone. "There wasn't much Scottish music at home," he recalls. It simply wasn't being recorded. My father was very keen on Gilbert and Sullivan, Caruso and Gigli and I lapped all that up. "

As a child of three or four he sat for hours absorbed in the power of the great singers like Peter Dawson, Paul Robeson, Norman Allin and Richard Tauber. I thought Peter Dawson, the Australian baritone, was wonderful," he said. "He had the kind of voice that could be identified within the first four bars."

He recalls his parents taking him to a concert in St.Andrew's Hall in Glasgow where he was enthralled by the Italian tenor, Beniamino Gigli. "I still have not heard better more beautiful singing from anyone," he said. Kenneth attended Aberdeen University and it was here, while he was studying for a Science degree which was meant to lead on to a career in Scottish Forestry, that he joined the student choir and showed for the first time that he had a special talent for singing. "The Director of Music told me I should think seriously about singing," he said. "So he gave me lessons. We did Mozart's Requiem; the B Minor Mass; Messiah, of course; The Creation; the St Matthew Passion; and he coached me for a Caird Scholarship which I won." Later, the Caird Scholarship would take him to the Royal College of Music in London for four years.

Outdoor Life
But his great joy in those early years lay in a life outdoors in the forests and rushing rivers of the Highlands. During the war years, much of Scotland's forest reserves had been depleted to the point of exhaustion and he was keen to help restore them. After graduation he joined the Scottish Forestry Commission and took part in a research and survey programme of the woodlands of the British Isles. "I travelled on horseback up and down all over the country," he said, "Aberfoyle, Dundee, Deeside and Birkhall, from Forfar over to Skipness, drawing up plans for regeneration with Sitka Spruce, Larch, Scots Pines. We put in hundreds of thousands of trees. Over the years I've seen those trees grow to maturity; I've seen them felled and another crop grown and harvested as well. In Carradale I used to lodge with a wonderful old maid, Miss Tina Patterson at Portree. She had the most marvellous store of folk tales and a great grasp of Scottish history. It was all so real, so vivid to her that sometimes it seemed as if she actually had been there. 'Aah,' she'd say wistfully, William. Wallace! I was awful vexed to hear what they did to him in London.' That's where I picked up my love of Scottish folk lore. I attended Gaelic classes at night and learned the songs of the Hebrides, from Mrs Carson who ran the Campbeltown Gaelic Choir. She had studied with Marjory Kennedy Fraser, the concert singer who had been an enthusiastic advocate of Gaelic culture and a great collector of songs at the beginning of the century. There are people who say Marjory debased the Gaelic oral tradition by writing those Hebridean songs down. But I say thank God she did. It's largely thanks to her that we have those songs today."