songs deal with the sea, but, of course, many of them may not originally be Barra songs. Nevertheless the old songs were preserved more in the southernmost islands of Barra and South Uist possibly because the Reformed Church tended to discourage music elsewhere." Music career Following her father's death, a 14-year old Flora left school to work in the island's telephone exchange to help provide for her family. In 1949, the Post Office offered her a position in Edinburgh, where she immediately moved. Word of MacNeil's talents as a Gaelic singer had already preceded her and she was embraced by Edinburgh Communist poets and folk song promoters Hugh MacDiarmid, Hamish Henderson and Sorley MacLean. With their assistance, she found a public platform in the burgeoning round of Edinburgh ceilidhs and concerts that marked the first stirrings of the British folk revival. Sorley MacLean and Hamish Henderson also arranged for American musicologist Alan Lomax to meet MacNeil and record her singing. When Lomax first arrived in Scotland in June 1951, he later recalled, "It was in Edinburgh one June night in the house of Sorley MacLean, a poet, that Scotland really took hold of me. A blue-eyed girl from the Hebrides was singing." The girl was Flora MacNeil and the song was Cairistiona. Henderson also invited MacNeil to perform at the 1951 Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh. The ceilidh brought Scottish traditional music to a large public stage for the first time inside Edinburgh's Oddfellows Hall and continued long afterwards at St. Columba's Church Hall in August 1951. The Scottish Gàidhealtachd was represented at by Flora MacNeil, fellow Barra native Calum Johnston, and John Burgess. The music was recorded live at the scene by Alan Lomax. During the Ceilidh, two Scottish Gaelic songs about the Jacobite rising of 1745 were performed onstage. Barra-native Calum Johnston, who was "keen to show his own admiration for [the] poet and for the Highlanders who fought for Charlie", delivered a passionate rendition of Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair's Òran Eile don Phrionnsa ("Another Song to the Prince"). Flora MacNeil then performed, Mo rùn geal òg, Christine Ferguson's lament for her husband, William Chisholm of Strathglass, who fell as part of the Jacobite Army while bearing the standard of Clan Chisholm at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Following the performance of several Border ballads and Scottish Traveller songs, Henderson announced that the concert goers were, "due back