Thomas James Fraser (20 March 1927 – 6 January 1978) was a
Scottish fisherman and
Country and Western and
rhythm and blues
Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated within African American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predomina ...
musician from
Shetland
Shetland (until 1975 spelled Zetland), also called the Shetland Islands, is an archipelago in Scotland lying between Orkney, the Faroe Islands, and Norway, marking the northernmost region of the United Kingdom. The islands lie about to the ...
.
Fraser was born in on the isle of
Burra. He never released any recordings during his lifetime and rarely played live before paying audiences. He made a number of recordings on a
reel to reel tape recorder, which family members circulated after his death. In the late 1990s some of these tapes were transferred to
CD.
In 2002 Nel Records put out a small pressing of ''Long Gone Lonesome Blues'' a selection of some of the original tapes. Two more CDs followed (''You & My Old Guitar'' (2003) and ''Treasure Untold'' (2005)), and a yearly Thomas Fraser memorial festival was begun in Shetland in 2002. A fourth CD of previously unreleased material, ''That Far Away Land'', was released in November 2008. The following month, BBC Scotland aired a 30-minute documentary on the life of Thomas Fraser entitled ''Shetland Lone Star''. A DVD featuring this programme and highlights of the annual Thomas Fraser Festival was released in October 2009. The
National Theatre of Scotland also toured Scotland during October with a full theatrical production on the life of Thomas Fraser, entitled ''Long Gone Lonesome''. The production was revived for a 2012 tour of the United States of America. A fifth CD of unreleased material is due out in November 2010.
Death
He died from complications of a sailing incident on 6 January 1978.
References
External links
*
Article on Fraser
1927 births
1978 deaths
People from Shetland
Shetland music
Scottish country musicians
British rhythm and blues musicians
20th-century Scottish musicians
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