Background
She was born in Loanhead, near Edinburgh, and adopted by Allan and Christina MacIver, natives of Broker, Isle of Lewis.
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Ishbel MacAskill
Edit ProfileEducation
When she was 12, she moved with her family to Stornoway, the Island"s capital, where she attended the Nicolson Institute.
Career
She moved to Glasgow for secretarial studies at Stow College and worked for British Rail before marrying Bill MacAskill, a native of Lochinver, Sutherland, in 1964. lieutenant was not until the age of 38 that MacAskill first sang in public, at a fringe event at the 1979 National Mod. Musician and producer Noel Eadie heard her perform, which lead to the first of her several albums.
In 1999 she featured as a guest artist on Transatlantic Sessions 2.
In 2003 she represented Scotland at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, District of Columbia and appeared at the World Festival of Island Cultures in South of Korea. In May and June 2006, she toured Australia leading workshops and concerts in Gaelic song in part as the guest of the Australian Gaelic Singers leading a Gaelic Song Masterclass and two concerts in Sydney.
She appeared on the Transatlantic Sessions television series, and also played the part of the shop assistant Nora in the popular 1990s Gaelic language soap opera Machair on Scottish. She died in 2011, aged 70, after a fall in the kitchen of her home in Inverness.
A memorial concert was held in Inverness on 16 June 2011.
Her husband Bill MacAskill died aged 81, 7 months to the day after Ishbel.
