A new book has been published of pipe tunes by tragic piper Calum Campbell of Benbecula – the grandfather lost when three generations of one family died in the terrible storm of 2005.
The book is being launched at the Royal National Mod in Oban today. (wed)
Murdina and Archie MacPherson and their two children all perished, as did Murdina’s father, Mr Campbell, when their cars were swept into sea. It is thought that they left Mr and Mrs MacPherson’s home in South Uist for fear of it being flooded during the January storm, but never made it to safety.
Mr Campbell, who was 67, was well known as a piper and piping instructor and had also composed some tunes.
The sheer number of them, though, did not become clear until his son Niall embarked on the difficult task of sorting through his father’s effects.
These tunes have now been put together in a new book from Lewis-based publishers Acair, working with various members of Mr Campbell’s family and staff from the National Piping Centre in Glasgow, in particular Roddy MacLeod MBE.
Ceòl Chaluim – The Pipe Music of Calum Campbell of Benbecula, is a fitting tribute to a Hebridean who contributed so much to the music of this part of the world.
Mr MacLeod hailed it as a “very welcome addition to the published repertoire of pipe music” and said that he had been unaware of just how much music Mr Campbell had written until staff at The Piping Centre began typesetting it.
The same was true of Mr Campbell’s family. In his introduction to the book, Niall Campbell said he would find pipe tunes in “boxes and folders, drawers and cupboards”.
He said: “Some of them I was aware of, others I had never heard before.”
He found 60 or 70 of his father’s tunes in various stages of completion and took them to the Piping Centre where Mr MacLeod agreed that 50 of them were complete tunes by Calum Campbell while the rest were second, third and even fourth parts to pre-existing tunes.
Calum Campbell’s sister Catriona Garbutt and her daughter Marion had an integral role in proofing the music.
Mr Campbell was a Hebridean piper out of a long tradition and many of his tunes commemorated local events and personalities. Most famous of them was Hercules the Bear, composed in 1980 about the animal that escaped while filming a TV advert.