Kitty MacLeod, the doyenne of Scots Gaelic singers and one of the first to bring the music's traditional style to the attention of an international audience, died on May 7th aged 85.
In the notes to an album reissued last year, the folklore collector Alan Lomax described her as being "generally regarded as the finest stylist among Gaelic folk singers".
For many years, she virtually turned her back on the commercial music industry, which she believed to have been exploitative towards both the music and the people who performed it. However, her much-broadcast, early recordings on Parlophone from before the second World War, and the memory of concert appearances in her heyday, ensured that she retained an enormous amount of professional and public respect.
From being an outstanding singer within her own linguistic community, Kitty MacLeod moved to a wider stage, partly as a result of the single event that subsequently grew into the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
In 1951, as a response to the perceived elitism of the festival itself, Hamish Henderson and the late Norman Buchan organised the People's Festival Ceilidhs, which provided a showcase for more popular forms of Scottish culture.
Singing with her sister, Marietta, who had trained as an actress and worked with the Unity Theatre, Kitty MacLeod took the opening session by storm.
Audiences hitherto familiar with only the more stylised forms of Gaelic song, almost invariably with piano accompaniment, were exposed to the raw musical meat of the Hebridean tradition.
Her wider reputation continued to grow, and the songs she sang that night were included on a fine Columbia Masterworks recording entitled The Highlands and the Lowlands.
Kitty MacLeod was born at Kasauli, a hill station on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, near the British army headquarters at Simla. Her mother had gone to India shortly before the start of the first World War to be with her husband, then serving with the Seaforth Highlanders. He was captured at the siege of Kut, in Mesopotamia, and was pronounced "missing in action, believed dead".
Mrs MacLeod took her baby daughter back to the Isle of Lewis. Two years later, her husband turned up in a military hospital in Alexandria, unable to speak his own name. He was brought back to Britain, and his faculties were restored after his daughter visited his bedside.
The family settled in Lewis, where music was an important part of their lives, in what was then a largely monolingual society.
Kitty MacCleod won a scholarship to Edinburgh University, where she was an outstandingly brilliant student in the early 1930s. She developed her Gaelic interests under the great Celtic scholar, Dr W.J. Watson, and won the Elizabeth Hamilton prize for the best woman student in philosophy. All the time, she was singing, and, in 1936 at Inverness, she won the gold medal of the National Mod, the premier Gaelic music festival.
At this time, Gaelic music, as far as the wider Scottish society was concerned, was largely perceived through the arrangements and translations of distinguished non-Gaels like Marjorie Kennedy Fraser and Sir Hugh Roberton. Except through the radio, there was little contact with the true music of the Gaelic-speaking communities in which Kitty MacLeod had grown up. She was also an avid collector, and in 1938 visited the island of Barra to learn many of the songs with which she later became identified.
Film buffs will recognise her from two cameo appearances as a Gaelic singer. In the early 1940s, she featured in a picture about the work of Hebridean women during wartime, The Western Isles.
In 1953, she and Marietta sang some show-stopping mouth music in Rob Roy: A Highland Rogue. This led to screen tests for the part of Flora MacDonald in a David Niven film, Bonnie Prince Charlie, but the producers decided that they needed another big name - Margaret Leighton - rather than an authentic Gael. The film bombed.
In her professional life outside music, Kitty MacLeod was a teacher in Manchester, the Gorbals in Glasgow, and, latterly, East Lothian.
After retirement in 1974, she became one of the prime movers in creating the United States's own National Gaelic Mod. As her recordings became accessible once again, her reputation was further enhanced.
Her death marks the end of a fascinating era within a fragile, but immensely rich, minority culture.
She is survived by her second husband, Dr Ernest Gregson.
Kitty MacLeod: born 1914; died May, 2000