Celtic Women Sing!
by Steve Winick

On the shelves of every record shop are innumerable compilations featuring Celtic women's voices. Often, though, the best way to hear a performer's talents is through listening to a whole album of her singing. There is no shortage of formidable women I could feature here, so this is more or less a random selection, showing many different approaches to traditional singing.

Susan McKeown has spent the last decade or so becoming one of the foremost singers in Irish music. As a solo artist, with Lindsay Horner, and with her group The Chanting House, she has commanded the attention of audiences and recorded some excellent albums along the way. Her latest project, Lowlands [Green Linnet GL1205 (2000)], applies her extraordinary vocal gifts to traditional Irish, English, and Scottish songs, and adds hints of musics from around the world. It is a direct followup to her 1998 release Bushes and Briars, but goes even further toward a working synthesis of Irish and world sounds. The album declares its intentions immediately; it opens with an arrangement of "An Nighean Dubh," a Scottish Gaelic island song, that uses instruments as varied as the African kora and the balkan kaval alongside the typically Celtic flute, whistle, and fiddle, adding a touch of jazz in the bass and clarinet playing. Other songs bring in an even more eclectic range of sounds; "Slán agus Beannacht" is clearly influenced by flamenco, but also uses Eilís Egan's accordion to keep it Irish, while "The Lowlands of Holland" uses Chinese erhu and American banjo together to evoke the strangeness of the Holland landscape described in the song (I mean, tea and sugar cane? In Holland?). Tablas give "Bonny Greenwoodside" an essentially Indian sound, while an appropriately Middle-Eastern feeling is evoked by "Lord Baker," the classic ballad about an English lord and his Turkish bride.

McKeown is equally at home with more standard Irish arrangements. Songs like "The Hare's Lament" and "To Fair London Town" sound like updates on the Planxty sound and remind me of the first time I saw McKeown singing "Raggle-Taggle Gypsies" back in 1990. McKeown's uniquely passionate voice is given its fullest expression on the sparsely arranged songs "Johnny Coughlin" and "The Snows They Melt the Soonest." Her beautiful singing brings out the essential strangeness and mystery of these two enigmatic masterpieces. Lowlands is certainly another step in McKeown's evolution as an artist. More importantly, it's one of the best — and most unusual — Irish albums released in 2000.

There are five more recordings reviewed in this article in Dirty Linen #93 (Apr/May '01).