Mike from myvillage.com perfectly sums up the treat we have in store for you this Saturday!
Kyle Carey
A New Hampshire native, Carey spent her early years in the Alaskan Bush, absorbing the Yupik language and song before taking up a scholarship in Cape Breton to study traditional Gaelic and Cape Breton fiddle styles. From there, the songs already gestating, she travelled to the Isle of Skye, studying under traditional Scottish singer Christine Primrose to learn the pronunciation and tone of traditional Gaelic song as well as tracing the roots of Appalachian music.
All of which feeds into her self-released debut album, Monongah, both musically and in the subjects of the songs themselves. Accompanied by fiddle, banjo and mandolin, she opens with the title track, a song set in the present but inspired by Louise McNeill’s poem about the 1907 mining disaster on West Virginia’s Monongahela River, the poet also providing the inspiration for the equally Appalachian styled Devil At Your Back’s catalogue of bad luck symbols.
Indeed, Carey’s album comes with a strong literary bedrock veined with American history. Island, a short story by Cape Breton author Alistair MacLeod, provides the basis for The Star Above Rankin’s Point’s poignant memories of a lighthouse keeper’s son while the jauntily fingerpicked bluegrass Resurrection takes its cue from Nikki Giovanni’s poem about the creation from a female perspective. Adopting a similar approach, the fiddle-scraped John Hardy’s Wife takes the old trad song and considers how his other half felt about being married to a ramblin’ gamblin’ failed outlaw while, harking to another trad evergreen, dreamy reverie Orange Blossom has its narrator seeing the train as an escape back to the carefree days of her childhood.
If she’s not drawing on stories written by others, she’s weaving her own. The gently dappled Virginia may echo The Help in its tale of coloured maids employed by wealthy southerners to raise their kids, but here, sung in the voice of a young boy, it would appear the nurturing had a considerable element of sexual awakening to it.
She should probably consider a sideline in publishing short stories herself if Adenine is anything to go by, an allegory about the illusion of faith and the lie of glory as spun through the Southern gothic tale of a Rattlesnake Baptist preacher’s son, sold as a revival tent attraction ‘with the venom in his veins’ after his father dies of snakebite. It’s so good, she sings it twice, the second version separated from the first by a mournful fiddle solo and featuring a different melody, simple guitar and fiddle arrangement and guitarist Neil Fitzgibbon providing harmonies
And, just in case you’re wondering where all that Gaelic comes in, Let Them Be All is a double tracked a capella rework of a gospel ballad given Scottish and Irish flavours and, with sprightly fiddle and banjo, Gaol ise Gaol I is a refrain-based love song in Scottish Gaelic.
Recorded in Ireland and produced by Donogh Hennessy with musicians that include Aoife Clancy from Cherish the Ladies on harmonies, Cape Breton fiddler Rosie MacKenzie and Lunasa’s Trevor Hutchinson on double bass providing masterful support behind her pure, soothing voice, Carey calls her marriage of Celtic and Appalachian, Gaelic-Americana. She may not have actually invented the genre, but she’s certainly one of its finest exponents.
Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker
She’s supported tonight by Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker, who hail from Sussex and Evesham respectively, she providing well-enunciated clear vocals and recorder and he pretty much everything else, and are steeped in the folk traditions of English songwriting with influences drawn from, among others, Sandy Denny, Richard and Linda Thompson, Nick Drake, Bert Jansch and June Tabor. Featuring self-penned material, Clarke released her critically acclaimed debut, One Light Gone, three years ago with Walker playing guitars and arranging the strings, but the first jointly-billed album, Seas Are Deep, was a collection of familiar traditional numbers, among them Silver Dagger, Lily Of The West, Reynardine and Black Is The Colour, alongside the Walker-penned acoustic guitar instrumental title track. Then last year, came Homemade Heartache, a four track EP which, on Just Travelling and Every Tear Means Change, introduced an American folk element to their sound while the fabulous slow waltzing title track sounded like a lost Denny classic.
Their appearance precedes the July release of Fire & Fortune, their second album and their first for Navigator Records, on which they mix traditional and original numbers (most of melancholic tenor) to sublime effect. Among the former, you’ll find Green Grow The Laurels, My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose, When A Knight Won His Spurs, a spectral woodwind arrangement of The Month Of January and Sussex ballad The Seasons, given a medieval tone but with a mournful jazz saxophone.
Breathing new life into old chestnuts warrants acclaim alone, but Clarke’s own songs are icing on the cake with the emotionally fragile After Me, a forlorn No Such Certainty, the lilting Celtic-tinged A Pauper And A Poet and the magnificent sparse Morricone-esque title track with its slow march drum beat, Spanish guitar and choral backing particular stand-outs. They’ll be previewing numbers tonight, an early opportunity to get in step with an act that’s assured a place in the year-end folk album best ofs, Saturday May 11, 8pm. £5. Ort Café, Balsall Heath
