Lydia MacDonald

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1923, to an Welsh-born mother and Italian father, Lydia went to Italy in 1939 on what was intended to be a family holiday, Obliged to remain in Italy and complete her education in Rome due to the outbreak of War she befriended several young leaders of the emerging Italian jazz scene, including Armando Trovajoli, Piero Umiliani and (especially) Piero Piccioni with whose Orchestra 013 she participated as principal vocalist. During Rome's liberation by the allies in 1944, she broadcast on both the British and American Forces networks. Returning home to Scotland immediately after the War she was soon spotted and auditioned by bandleader Ted Heath who recruited her as his first female vocalist and thereby one of the first female popular singers to perform before mass peacetime audiences between 1946 and 1949. After leaving the Heath band, exhausted by its very heavy touring schedule, she moved to Rome in 1950 where she reconnected with the musician friends she had made in the War years. Soon, as a bilingual singer and lyricist, she found herself in demand to contribute the blossoming Italian film industry, collaborating throughout the 1950s/60s and early 70s with the leading composers and arrangers of the day, including Piero Piccioni, Ennio Morricone, Piero Umiliani, Armando Trovajoli and numerous others. This was notable for its cultural significance; by contrast with the rich flow of Italian immigrants to Scotland in the early and mid 20th Century, there was minimal migration the other way, so Lydia's move from Scotland to Italy to build a career is all the more notable for that. In the early 1970s, she returned to Edinburgh to retire where she remained until she passed away in 1998