Marjory Kennedy-Fraser

Marjory Kennedy-Fraser (1 October 1857 – 22 November 1930) was a Scottish singer, composer and music teacher and supporter of women’s suffrage and pacifism. According to Ray Perman, Kennedy-Fraser “made a career of collecting Gaelic songs in the Hebrides and singing her own Anglicized versions of them.” Biography Marjory Kennedy was born in Perth to a well-known Scottish singer, David Kennedy and his second wife, Elizabeth Fraser. As a child she used to accompany her father on his tours in Scotland and abroad, playing the piano while he sang. Various of her siblings were also professional musicians, and three of them —Lizzie (soprano), Kate (contralto) and James (baritone) — died in the fire that burnt down the Théâtre municipal of Nice, France, in 1881. Her youngest sister Jessie married the pianist and teacher Tobias Matthay. Their father David Kennedy died aged 61 in 1886 in Ontario, Canada, while on a tour. She became an extra-academical student at the University of Edinburgh school of Music, gathering a collection of Breton and Gaelic folksongs from 1882 onwards, which were later published. In 1887, she married her mother’s younger cousin, the mathematician Alexander Yule Fras