Biography

Calum Kennedy was born in Orasay in the southern part of Lochs district, Lewis, in 1928. His father was Murdo Kennedy and his mother was Seonag Buachaille, from Gravir. There were nine children in the family, six boys and three girls.

After leaving school, Calum worked for a short time in the shipyards on the River Clyde. He spent a short time as an accountant and about three years in the Army.

In 1953 he married Anna Gillies from Staffin in the Isle of Skye, whom he had met at a local mòd in Glasgow. They made their home in Elderslie, near Glasgow, and had five daughters – Fiona, Kirsteen, Morag, Morven, and Deirdre. Anna died suddenly in 1974 and this had a big impact on Calum. Several years passed before he sang again. In 1987 he married Christina Williamson, who was also a singer, and they had one daughter, Eilidh. The marriage ended in divorce in 1999.

After taking part in the Mòd in Dunoon in 1954, Calum won the Gold Medal at the Mòd in Aberdeen the following year. The Queen Mother was in attendance to present the awards to him and to Joan MacKenzie, who won the Ladies' Gold Medal.

In 1957, Calum won first place in an international competition in Moscow, where over five hundred singers from around the world took part. Among them was Richard Harris, the Irishman who later gained fame as an actor. Nikita Khrushchev, then leader of Russia, presented him with his prize in the Bolshoi Theatre.

In a programme on the Scottish Home Service on the BBC in 1958, he talked about the international competition:

"In the Gold Medal competitions there were four hundred from all countries each singing in their own language. The competition lasted eleven days and was heard by twelve adjudicators drawn from different countries. Forty of us went into the final and at this stage I noticed that most of them had orchestral accompaniment of some sort. I decided then that I too would have somebody to accompany me on to the stage and I am very grateful to John McFadyen of the College of Piping who played Over the Sea to Skye as I went on-stage, and to Bobby Macleod, Tobermory, and his band who accompanied me in some of the songs I sang. They looked really magnificent in tartan, playing our Scottish dance music.

There was one very amusing incident after I had been awarded the Gold Medal – one of the audience approached me and was very indignant that I had not sung to the accompaniment of the pipes as well as to the Bobby MacLeod Band. In mid Russia, by the way, their songs are rather like our own "big" songs, and they have no dearth of bards. Just as Duncan Bàn MacIntyre is one of our favourite bards in the Highlands, Pushkin is theirs."

It might be said that Calum was the first full-time Gaelic singer, although he did not sing only in Gaelic.

In the early sixties he toured throughout the Highland towns but also spent weeks in theatres in bigger towns. He was often seen on television, and it seems he made the first live programme on Grampian Television. He made many programmes such as Calum's Ceilidh and Round at Calum's. Besides being a singer, Calum was a businessman and had connections with a company which ran theatres such as the Tivoli in Aberdeen and the Palace in Dundee.

After his health declined, Calum spent his final years in a care home in Aberdeenshire, close to the home of Fiona, his eldest daughter. He died on 15 April 2006.