FERGIE MacDonald is remembering the evening in Flodigarry where he and his band were playing for a dance. During a break the king of ceilidh, as MacDonald is known to Gaelic music fans around the world, saw a woman bearing down on him very determinedly, frowning. What, he wondered, might he have done to offend her.

“So you’re Fergie,” the woman said in a broad American accent and started to prod and poke the object of her apparent disgruntlement. “And you’re real.”

The man whose button accordion playing put ceilidh dance music on the cultural map’s reputation often precedes him thanks to his friend Phil Cunningham’s serial updating of audiences with Fergie news on his tours with fiddler Aly Bain. Such are the exploits that Cunningham describes and the Fergie lines he gives voice to that people can easily be confused as to whether these are fact or fiction.

They may be a combination of the two, although any man well into his seventies who can create headlines in national newspapers for defying a music curfew in Paisley, as Fergie did during the National Mòd in 2013, is clearly a bit of a character. What’s not in dispute, though, is that Fergie is about to play a central role in a double anniversary as this year mark’s his sixtieth year in music - and Cunningham’s twenty-fifth year of doing Fergie impersonations.

“I hear whispers of things that might happen to celebrate the occasion,” he says down the line from his home in Argyll. “But I’m not supposed to know.” Having been the guest of honour at Cunningham and Bain’s Le Grand Anniversaire concert, marking their thirty year partnership, at Celtic Connections in January, Fergie has already taken one special bow in 2016 and he’s about to take another as the first subject of the Gaelic version of Desert Island Discs. He’ll also be treading the red carpet at the world premiere of the remade Whisky Galore at Edinburgh International Film Festival next month.

His first foray into film elicits a typical Fergie tale. He and the outstanding Aberdeenshire fiddler Paul Anderson are the band at a wedding on Barra, where the SS Politician with its golden cargo was washed up on the rocks in 1941, and their make-up involves, according to Fergie, an industrial quantity of Brylcreem.

“It was great fun and I was really pleased to be asked because there are all these young box players out there who could have done the job,” he says before adding that the hair oil that was applied to his still plentiful locks “took away my good looks!”

He may be nudging his eightieth year but Fergie keeps up to date with the young music scene. As the man who defined ceilidh music by gigging all over the Highlands and Islands from the mid 1950s – and got banned more than once by the BBC or his trouble – he’s delighted and not a little proud to see youthful bands such as Trail West and Skerryvore taking the music into the popular arena. He’s also honoured to have been invited to play at Tiree Festival this year.

“I’m a bit surprised in a way because there’ll be all these young people, throwing their arms up in the air and having a ball and old Fergie’ll turn up and play as a guest,” he says.

He shouldn’t really be surprised at being a hero because he’s forever meeting people during the round of gigs that keep him busy who are the offspring, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of people at whose weddings he played. The many tunes he has composed – and continues to compose – are taken up by musicians and bands across the world, and not just accordion-led bands.

His Jig Runrig has been recorded over a hundred times and featured in the tune set that won the Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band first place at the World Pipe Band Championships. It’s also in the less formal Red Hot Chilli Pipers’ repertoire and will be included in a new book due out soon of Fergie tunes set for the bagpipes. Not a bad achievement, he says, for a box player.

Having survived major heart surgery in 2011 – his surgeon was also rewarded with a tune – Fergie values life dearly, although in conversion a laugh is rarely far away.

He does have one bugbear that he insists is for ceilidh music’s benefit rather than his own, and that’s a lack of formal recognition by the UK honours system. He himself has apparently been nominated six times but never made the final selection.

“I sometimes wonder if the people who make these decisions see ceilidh music as another Jacobite rebellion because the great Scottish country dance bandleaders – Jim MacLeod, Jimmy Shand, you name them – all won honours. It upsets me, but then I look at the Download charts from a couple of years ago and you have No. 1 – The Shinty Referee by Fergie MacDonald and No. 2 - Rihanna. That’s amazing. You couldn’t make that up!”