Niamh Parsons -- One of "Those" Voices

Parsons celebrated her birthday this year by singing on one of the many nights of a midwinter American tour with Arcady.

"I've been with Arcady since shortly after I recorded the first Loose Connections album. I joined in July 1992, but Frances Black was booked to tour with them in America, so I didn't officially join until October of '92."

For Parsons the experience of being a singer in a band of veteran Irish instrumental superstars has proven to be less work than she anticipated. For one thing, she only gets to sing in-between the continual sets of blistering jigs, reels and stately waltzes.

"I'm enjoying it tremendously but it's very little work, it seems. I only get to sing eight songs a night. I prefer to sing more.

"With the Loose Connections I'm standing all the time, I'm at the mike all the time, and most of the songs are mine. Though I do take a break and let the band play by themselves sometimes, like the instrumental `Take It Away Boys' on the album. They do about five or six sets like that, which are all off the wall sets," Parsons muses. "But most of the time it's me up there doing a mix of traditional and contemporary."

Somehow the pressure of being a singer in two highly successful touring bands doesn't seem to phase her. In fact, as she enthuses about the plans for her next Loose Connections album, one gets the idea that she's loving every minute of it. "This spring we are working on a new demo and then it's off to tour in Scandinavia, England, and Scotland. The band that's on the Loosely Connected [Green Linnet (U.S.); Greentrax (U.K.)] album was put together to do that recording and to do a couple of gigs, but that was it. We have never toured together since. The current band still includes my husband Dee, and the piper John McSherry, who's spectacular. John's very busy on his own, he's just recorded with Al Stewart and he has an album coming out with his family. So John's not always available. We also have another guy named Al Kerry, who's a great piano accordion player."

Like so many of her contemporaries, such as Mary Black, Maura O'Connell and Dolores Keane (all of whom served as lead singer at one time in Arcady's parent band, DeDannan), Parsons really enjoys performing a mix of traditional Celtic music and songs that are written by contemporary writers. "Dee is also writing a lot of songs. He wrote `Little Big Time' and `Play a Merry Jig' on the last album. So the things we do with the Loose Connections are a mixture of Dee's songs and traditional, which he marries well to the contemporary material. Dee's a rocker, purely, so we're an interesting match and a good team. We definitely plan to come to America as soon as we can. I love doing traditional music and I will always do it, but I'm also doing a Tom Waits song, and I'd love to do some of Richard Thompson's songs. They all start sounding traditional because we add acoustic guitars and pipes to them."

Of the songs Parsons sings with both Arcady and The Loose Connections, the one that best fuses contemporary lyrics to a melody that evokes a timeless sense of Celtic longing is Mick McConnell's "Tinkerman's Daughter." The song tells the story of a caravan of traveling people who make camp on a farmer's land. The farmer is enamored with "the red headed Ann," the daughter of one of the tinkers, and he trades a horse to the father for the girl's hand in marriage. Though she tries valiantly to live this strange, new, settled, life, the longing for the road proves to be stronger. She flees one winter's day, leaving the farmer bitter and broken, swearing to shoot any tinker who comes on his land again.

It is one of those stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks kind of songs that always manage to bring an attentive hush to a room as soon as it plays on the radio. For Parsons, it has become her signature piece, in much the same way that "Annachie Gordon" was for Mary Black so many years ago.

"The day I got the album deal [for Loosely Connected] I was at the Edinburgh Festival and had the pleasure of meeting Cathal McConnell from Boys of the Lough, who heard me sing. He sang me this song, one verse of it, in my ear. I was completely smitten with it, by the air and the words. He said, `Now you go find that song yourself.' I found a gal named Di Henderson who recorded it, I learned it instantly and started singing it over the next couple of months. Just before we did the album I said I wanted to do that one first because it was the strongest piece I had. I found Mick McConnell and asked if he'd mind if I recorded it and he said, `No, not at all, in fact I'm recording it for my own album'."

But the story of the song doesn't end there, as Parsons found out after she met McConnell. The source material proved to be nearly as interesting as the song. "I eventually got to meet Mickey. He comes from a family of four boys, three of them are journalists, all of them are musicians. He's written songs since 1969, thousands of them, and his album Peter Pan and Me is absolutely brilliant. Mickey's a Northerner, he has great insight into Ireland and what he did was he found a man named Sigerson Clifford. Clifford is a poet who died around 10 years ago. We are doing a song he wrote on the new Arcady called the `Boys of Barr na Sraide.' In the middle of one of his books is a poem called `The Red Headed Ann.' Mickey McConnell took that poem, kept the story and wrote a song from it. He never uses even a line from the poem but he used that story to write a whole new song. But Sigerson Clifford's story continues, to say that a tinker comes on the farmer's land many years later and as he threatened, the farmer kills the tinker. When he has shot him dead he discovered that it was his son by the Red Headed Ann. He kills himself and the ghost of the tinkerman's daughter is seen walking along the road. That was so heavy it couldn't be put into the song but that's how the story really ends," Parsons admitted with a laugh.

"I'm delighted with the voice that I have, but when you get a song like that, you have to sing it with all heart and all feeling. It's been a hard thing to evoke, that feeling, every single night. It takes everything out of me every time I sing it. But it is such a wonderful song."

Niamh Parsons
Loosely Connected
Green Linnet GLCD 3094 (1995)
Greentrax 052

Something of a mix here from a versatile Irish singer who has performed in North America as part of the band Arcady but who also has an established solo career. With traditional roots and eclectic tastes like Mary Black, and a sometimes-dusky voice reminiscent of Dolores Keane, Niamh Parsons is comfortable and capable with both traditional and contemporary songs. On this not-quite-new CD (which was first released in the U.K. in 1992) she slips between old and new, electric and acoustic, and if the title implies that the connections are loose, the seams are tight. Parsons can handle whispered ballads or near-pop with equal skill.

There are a lot of sad and sometimes stark pieces on this disc, which is about evenly split between traditional and contemporary material. Quiet pieces include an a capella version of the eerie ballad "Lover's Ghost," describing a final postmortem visit, and the delicate piano-backed "Tinkerman's Daughter," a modern song about a forced marriage that's as chilling and bleak as the cold winter hills of its setting. There's some light-hearted rock, framed by a garage-band fuzzy guitar sound on "Play a Merry Jig," or percussive and horn-backed on "Little Big Time," an affectionate kicker that Parsons' bass player and husband, Dee Moore, wrote for their daughter. In the middle are folk/soft rock arrangements of old songs like the emigration ballad "North Amerikay" and Moore's contemporary lament "Don't Give Your Heart Away," sung as a duet with Brian Kennedy. Her jazz-influenced band the Loose Connections really lets fly on an uilleann pipe-led instrumental track called "Man of Aran" and provide capable backup everywhere.

Tom Nelligan (Waltham, MA)

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