The BOSP Songsters

Aimee Leonard, Emily Turton and Sarah Jane Gibbon, also known as the Song Shop Trio, were successfully appointed as our three project leaders in 2008, allowing them to fulfil their dream of reinvigorating Orkney's song heritage.  After an exhaustive round of funding applications in 2008, Orkney Singers was successful in gaining a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund which allowed them to fulfil their dream of reinvigorating Orkney's song heritage and employ Aimee, Emily and Sarah Jane.

Aimee:  Workshop Leader/Song Developer, with responsiblity for leading the workshops during the SongShares.  Before teaching a SongShare workshop a newly rediscovered song, she spent considerable time in modernising and rearranging the song for the modern ear. 

Emily: Musical Administrator/Vocal Coach,  responsible for all the necessary but ultimately rather less interesting stuff, such as preparing and printing out the words for each workshop and creating and distributing the posters.  She also had responsiblity for notating each song - turning a fragment of song recording into a paper format so allowing anybody (able to read music) to pick it up and sing/play/learn it.

Sarah Jane: History/Archive Researcher.  She spent a lot of time searching for songs in the archives of the Orkney Library and Archive as well as being responsible for sourcing and collecting nearly forgotten songs from other avenues.  She wrote all the song biographies found on this site for each song taught at the workshops, which can be found in the 'Songs' pages on this site.

You may know them as the Song Shop Trio, who have performed all across Orkney. 

Sarah Jane catalogued all existing songs found during the project with Emily notating the songs reworked and collected by Aimee, as well as some others found during the project. The search for songs took place at the Orkney Library & Archive, the School of Scottish Studies, Cecil Sharpe House, and the BBC archive, with Sarah Jane entering details of all songs found in the Big Orkney Song Collection database - a comprehensive catalogue listing all the material found during the project.