Norman Kennedy

Norman Kennedy is a native of Aberdeen, Scotland. His family had lived for centuries in the area, where his people had been seafarers. During World War II, he was sent to live with family in Methlick, Aberdeenshire, where his relatives were living a traditional, largely self-sufficient life. He learned to harvest food and make cheese and wine. He left school at 16 and began weaving. “The hard times forced people to fall back on their skills,” he said. “The thing is, the lucky ones were the ones who had something to fall back on. The ones who had forgotten them literally went under.”

During the 1950s, Kennedy spent several weeks each year on the isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, becoming familiar with local customs and the Gaelic language. In 1965, he was invited to perform at the Newport Folk festival in a program on the origins of the American ballad tradition. The next year he returned to the United States, at the invitation of Ralph Rinzler, to collect textiles and other folk crafts for the Country Roads Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kennedy ran the spinning and weaving shed at Colonial Williamsburg for four years. “The old ways were easier because people had to find the least complicated ways to do things out of necessity,” he told an interviewer.

He moved to the U.S. in 1965 and traveled extensively, performing, teaching and conducting workshops in Canada and Great Britain. He also began singing with a group of country dancers and spent a great deal of time with Jeannie Robertson and other neighbors who were singers and storytellers.

In the early 1970s, Kennedy became active in a local Gaelic club, and in 1974, he started the Marshfield School of Weaving in Vermont. “You can tell stories, you can recite them, you can sing them," he said. "These songs are my roots; they're older and more important than I am.

“This style of weaving is from generations past when people were much closer to the truths about what life's about. Too many people weaving nowadays are totally late twentieth century. Folks get really excited about computerized looms and things like that, but I think those who are fascinated by machinery are giving their responsibility to the machine. I'm interested in seeing what people are doing, but much of the new stuff has no taste; it's like bread without salt. The old stuff is salty and tasty.”