Mary Jane spoke with Fiona in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1998.

FIONA RITCHIE: Mary Jane Lamond sings exclusively in Scots Gaelic and she's Canadian. Tell us about that?

MARY JANE LAMOND: Make it sound like I'm a total freak! Well, I guess it's partly because my grandparents were Gaelic speakers. I am, I think, a fifth generation Canadian.

I'm terrible at genealogies, I can't remember. But I guess I sing them because I like them. It's partly a roots thing, and partly that I grew up hearing the language. I just really fell in love with songs.

FIONA RITCHIE: And your grandparents were from Cape Breton?

MARY JANE LAMOND: That's right. My family came over way back in the 1820s. They came from North Uist, but originally, I guess, from Skye.

FIONA RITCHIE: This would be a good place to just cover a little bit of the history of Nova Scotia and to explain why there are all these Highland Scots there.

MARY JANE LAMOND: Well, I'm talking to you, and you have a Scottish accent, so I know that you know! So now I have to think about your listeners who maybe don't know. Well, this is the history of Canada and of Scotland, I guess.

You know, after the Battle of Culloden, and the break down of the clan system, many people left. I think the earlier immigrants who came to Nova Scotia probably left of their own free will, but they were economically forced out and probably very much encouraged to leave. So tens of thousands of Scottish Gaelic speakers came to Nova Scotia between the 1790s and the 1830s.

Up until that time, they say it was the largest human migration in the history of the world, this migration from Scotland to North America or from the Outer Hebrides, from the Highlands of Scotland.

So, people came to this isolated part of Canada, the East Coast of Canada and more particularly the East Coast of Nova Scotia. And because Cape Breton was isolated from the rest of Canada, even then, we've maintained the culture here.

So we have fiddle tunes as they probably were when they were brought over, and milling songs, waulking songs as they would call them in Scotland, and Gaelic speakers and really, it's a Gaeltachtd that we have here!

More of the Mary Jane Lamond interview