In September 1971, Shelagh McDonald released her second studio album, Stargazer. A sonic sensation that blended intimate acoustic arrangements with lush, cinematic production, the record was a hit with fans and critics, and the perfect follow-up to her highly acclaimed debut, Album.
At the time, prominent music journalists like Karl Dallas in Melody Maker were championing the Scottish singer-songwriter, calling her the logical successor to Sandy Denny and comparing her status and crystalline vocals to folk icons like Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez.
View this post on InstagramWith her latest album featuring an elite backing ensemble from the era’s folk-rock scene, including Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, and Danny Thompson, it seemed as though her future in rock music was set. She was on her way to becoming one of the most promising stars in the folk scene.
That is until April 1972, when the 24-year-old singer reportedly walked out of her London flat, locked the door, and vanished without a trace. Her producer, Sandy Robertson, who was helping her record her third album at the time, later recalled, “I never heard from Shelagh ever again. I tried to call her around that time, but the number was cut off. She just vanished.”
As rumors swirled and the public filled the silence with stories and assumptions, the years ticked by. It actually wouldn’t be until 2005, 33 years later, that McDonald would blip back on the radar. After getting wind of newspaper articles exploring her disappearance, with The Independent, Glasgow Herald, and Scottish Daily Mail all running similar articles, McDonald decided to tell her own story.
Years later, in 2013, that story was published as a first-person essay in The Guardian.
“A bad trip was the catalyst for unexpected change,” McDonald wrote. “I took LSD at a party, expecting the effects to be short-term, but ended up losing three or four days. I remember wandering across London, experiencing terrifying hallucinations, then being helped on to a plane with no clue where I was going. On landing, I recognized Glasgow and my parents’ stern faces. They’d never approved of me becoming a singer; perhaps this is what they’d always expected.”
After the incident, she lived with her parents before marrying a bookseller and embarking on a nomadic lifestyle that would eventually lead her to live in tents through Scotland.
“We found it increasingly difficult to pay the rent and in the end decided to jack it all in and live in a tent,” she shared. “We planned to do it for only a few months, but before long we were carrying everything we owned on our backs across Scotland, setting up camp in woodlands.”
She added, “I missed my old life, but it seemed forever out of reach.”
The distance between McDonald and her old life eventually began to narrow. After her partner died in 2012, she reconnected with friends from her musical past and began considering a return to music.
On Jan. 16, 2013, McDonald made her first official public appearance in more than 40 years, joining The False Beards as a guest at the Green Note in Camden, London. She performed previously unrecorded material as well as her version of the traditional song “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme.”
Later that year, McDonald released Parnassus Revisited, her first album of new recordings in more than four decades, with American Songwriter writing, “Her comeback wasn’t a massive success, but it did put a well-deserved punctuation mark on what should have been a more acclaimed career.”
McDonald’s disappearance remains one of the more remarkable stories in British folk rock: A bright singer hailed as the next Sandy Denny vanishes at 24, lives outside the music world for more than three decades, and eventually returns to discover that people never stopped listening to the records she left behind.
Related: ’70s Rocker, Discovered by Deep Purple, Was Murdered 39 Years Ago—and His Killer Walked Free
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