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Daisy Chapman
... eldest daughter of Mary (née Gill) and John Birnie, was born on the 12th of May 1912, in the same bedroom in which her mother had been born, in the farm croft of Broadleys o' New Pitsligo. It had been her grandparents' place and, when they moved on, her parents took it over. Later they moved to the small croft of Quarry Head where Daisy was brought up. Her given name was Maggie Birnie but she was always known as Daisy. Quarry Head is a few miles inland from the small fishing village of Rosehearty on the northernmost tip of north east Scotland - the Buchan area of Aberdeenshire. Daisy went to the local Glass Law School at New Aberdour, and left when she had just turned 14.
Her mother Mary Gill and grandmother Granny Gill were both good singers and could diddle tunes and she inherited many of her older songs from them. Daisy's great grandmother was a Forbes of Castle Newe in Strathdon, who ran off and married the gardener on the estate by the name of Gill. Her father's family, the Birnies, had come over from Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s. Singing and making music were a normal part of life on the croft at Quarry Head and there would often be musical gatherings with neighbours. Daisy started singing at a young age and also played piano, and her father and elder brother Charlie (who died 24 January 2000 in his 90th year) played fiddle. Sometimes there would be dancing in the kitchen to the horn gramophone. With her father and brother on fiddle and with Daisy on piano they had a family band that played for local barn dances around Rosehearty.
The Buchan area has its own rich dialect referred to in the area as the Doric - a regional dialect of Scots, itself a dialect (or a language in its own right as some would argue) descended from the northern form of Anglo-Saxon. Like many Doric speakers, Daisy was easily able to switch from the broad Scots into plainer Scottish English without difficulty, depending on the company she was in.
When she was 17 she married William Chapman, a farmer's son from the neighbouring farm of Ironhill. They took on a small farm in North Ladiesford near Boyndlie, south of Rosehearty, for a number of years. Later they moved to North Broadleys, but Daisy's health deteriorated after nearly three decades of farm work, and they moved to Aberdeen in the early 1950s where William took a job working for Wm Wiseley, who operated steam lorries in the city. He later worked on the railways. First they stayed at 19 Union Street and then moved to 478 George Street. They had no surviving children, but had "a happy married life ... a few years in Aberdeen together" before William died, quite young, in 1959.
As seems to be so frequently the case, she had learned her songs from her mother and grandmother as a girl, but more or less stopped once she was married. She began singing again after her husband's death - at kirk functions, pensioners' concerts and the like - and in the mid-'60s came to the notice of song collector Peter Hall who was himself a singer and a founder member in 1958 of the Aberdeen Folksong Club, who introduced her to the world of clubs, concerts, festivals, recordings - and long-distance travel. Aberdeen was of course, already famous for its traditional singers: Jeannie Robertson and the extended traveller families of Robertsons, Stewarts and Higgins had been discovered by Hamish Henderson, the Edinburgh folklorist, in 1953. Throughout the 1960s and beyond, the folksong club ran the annual Aberdeen Folk Festival which featured an afternoon concert with local traditional singers. Daisy Chapman made a great impression with her debut appearance at the October 1967 concert hosted by Peter Hall - singing alongside such famous traditional singers as Jeannie Robertson and her daughter Lizzie Higgins; the great bothy ballad singer Jimmy McBeath; another traveller singer Blind Robin Hutchison; a retired farm worker and bothy singer, Rob Watt; and Jeannie's husband Donald Higgins on pipes, whistle and mouthorgan.
Having made such an impression at the 1967 Aberdeen Festival, Daisy was invited as a guest to the August 1968 Blairgowrie Festival, run by the newly formed TMSA (Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland) founded after the Blairgowrie Festival in 1966. Daisy travelled down from Aberdeen with Cameron and Jane Turriff of Fetterangus and was again in company at the festival with Jeannie and Lizzie, Jimmy McBeath and Rob Watt. There she also met Willie Scott, singer and border shepherd, with whom she struck up a lasting friendship that was to lead in the next couple of years to tours of English festivals including Loughborough and Cambridge.
No commercial recordings were ever made of Daisy's singing. Often singers are at their best in live performance and fortunately some excellent singing was captured from her performances at the Aberdeen Festival in 1967 and 1968 (recorded by Peter Shepheard) and by Rod Stradling who recorded her at the Blairgowrie Festival in 1969 and later in London in 1970. The earliest recordings are from the Peter Hall archive recorded in Aberdeen in 1965 and 1966, and Hamish Henderson and Arthur Argo recorded her at the Blairgowrie Festival in 1968 for the School of Scottish Studies. We have had access to all these recordings for this CD.
In the early 1970s, possibly due to the somewhat hectic life she was now leading, she suffered a heart attack, followed by a heart bypass operation in 1976, and from that time on she never again sang in public. She continued to live at 478 George Street in Aberdeen for many years until, in 1991 she moved to Letham Park Nursing Home, Portlethen where she died on 27 March 1997 at the age of nearly 85............details from the Musical Traditions Website: http://www.mustrad.org.uk
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