Folk with edge: Sarah McQuaid: Walking into White

Time of changing seasons, a turn of light, a lift in the air, time of telling stories...

Sarah McQuaid tells her stories through word and melody rhythm and tone and timbre. For her fourth recording, which she has called Walking Into White, she found inspiration from sources as different as the landscape of Yellowstone, the flight of jackdaws, a pattern used for ringing church bells, and stories she has been reading to her children.

The title song, a story which spins out in McQuaid’s imagination into an elegant and spare mediation on the nature of trust, began with an image of two children walking across moorland and being caught in a fog. She drew this from a story by Arthur Ransome which she came across in one of his tales, part of a series she’d been reading to her children each night at bedtime. It seemed to her, she says in her liner notes, “like a parable for life... so much so that I decided to make it the title track of this album.”

All this is framed in McQuaid’s distinctive alto and her DADGAD guitar playing. That’s a tuning which often contributes to Celtic music’s haunting aspect and one of which McQuaid is a master. Throughout the album, these elements anchor adventures both in story and in the way the music is presented.

Traveling from her base in Cornwall, England to Cornwall, New York to work for the first time with producers Adam Pierce (who is McQuaid’s cousin) and Jeremy Backofen, who had not worked in the folk genre before, McQuaid and her road manger and sound engineer Martin Stansbury created a collection which weaves in rhythms and sonic placements you might not expect from and artist known as a folk musician. All the while, though, they stayed true to the spirit and ideas of the songs while creating an album that fits in as a natural next step in McQuaid’s musical progress

On her tours supporting the album (at this writing at the beginning of October, she’s in the midst of a US run; she regularly tours internationally). McQuaid has been devoting the first half of her concerts to playing music from the album as it is sequenced, moving from Low Winter Sun, in which her guitar rings in a pattern drawn from the peal church bells to frame atmospheric and enigmatic lyrics that suggest the beginning of a journey, to a sparse and distinctive take of Ewan MacColl’s classic love song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.

Between those two Where the Wind Decides to Blow and The Tide find McQuaid taking furtherinspiration from images in Ransome’s stories to explore ideas of uncertainty, persistence, trust, and reading signs. There’s a lot going on both lyrically and musically, though the songs themselves are rather short, at three verses with a twice repeated chorus for Where the Wind Decides to Blow and six verses for The Tide. The singer raises as many questions as she answers. The idea of walking through and with uncertainty to find trust and connection comes up again in the song Yellowstone, which was in part inspired by conversations McQuaid had with her ten year old son. All of this leaves plenty of room for listeners to explore, and material upon which to reflect.

That is true of each of the songs on Walking Into White, actually, including Sweetness and Pain, an a capella song whose three verses are spaced through the rest of the music at intervals, making a sort of recurring theme and comment which works both in word and melody. There’s also a very fine instrumental called I Am Grateful For What I Have.

Jackdaws Rising came about when McQuaid was playing music one evening with her friends Pete Coleman and Claire Hines. They got to playing an instrumental the pair had written and they suggested that if she wanted to write words to go along...

She was up to that challenge, and it went a step -- okay, several steps -- further when it came to recording the piece, which in lyric is dark and light, falling and rising. So are the percussion choices, with stamps and handclaps and rhythms which might seem out of time but actually work perfectly to express the energy of the lyric.

McQuaid’s voice is in varying ways the center of things through the recording, and that comes full circle as she draws things to a close with the hymn Canticle of the Sun and that take on The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. It’s thoughtful journey Sarah McQuaid leads on Walking Into White, one filled with interest, surprise, and challenge, as she creates music well worth repeated listening.

You may also wish to see
Buildings, songs, England: Sarah McQuaid at Perceptive Travel
Ireland's Music: Cara Dillon: A Thousand Hearts
Cathie Ryan: Through Wind and Rain

Photograph of Sarah McQuaid by Phil Nicholl

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Music Road trip in New York state

The Hudson River Valley and the Adirondack mountain area of New York state have long been a places where people of different cultures traded, traveled, and settled. That’s an idea that Dan Berggren, Chris Shaw, and John Kirk draw on for their recording North River, North Woods. Their traditional and original music includes French Canadian, Irish, Swedish, Danish, and old time music among its sources and subjects. It’s a lively mix that includes and connects the many musics which have met in the area.

Sara Milonovich’s music has taken her to many places, but she calls the Hudson River Valley home, and her solo album, Daisycutter, reflects that. Milonovich is a fiddle player and a singer. Daisy cutter is a fine Americana album, and there’s more about it here.

Milonovich has worked with folk icon Pete Seeger. Top notch blues woman Rory Block guests on North River North Woods. They call the Hudson Valley home, too, and their legendary work is well worth your time.



This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I originally partnered up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’d find there. The Library is closed now, but I think you will still find the journeys through music interesting.

A tip of the hat to some of my favorite musicians of western New York is in order, too : The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra

For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins


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Music Road: Music road trip New York City: Irish Musicians

Music Road: pride of new york

Music Road: Music of Maine: Lissa Schneckenburger

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here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this.Thank you.

Daisycutter: Sara Milonovich

Sara Milonovich
Daisycutter

It’s an interesting journey Sara Milonovich takes listeners on through the course of Daisycutter, beginning with a look at the sometimes harsh realties of Country Life all the way to a finishing set of lively tunes from the Adirondacks, Louisiana, and Italy. Milonovich is a top notch fiddle player. You may have heard her on Pete Seeger’s Grammy winning At 89 album, and on the road backing Richard Shindell and Cathie Ryan, or perhaps in her duo appearances with guitarist Greg Anderson.

She is also a very fine singer -- think power matched with conversational tone, a bit like country singer Suzy Bogguss -- and both fiddle and voice come to the fore on this varied set of tunes and songs. There are timely as well as timeless touches of political commentary in Insanity Street and Under the Weather, and a timeless take on Eliza Gilkyson’s bittersweet love song Last Dance. Northern Cross is a darker ballad, while Pleasant Valley Sunday lets the sun shine in with its bouncy Carole King by way of The Monkees look at suburban life. The tunes are equally well done, drawing for the most part on Milonovich’s time in Celtic music and her background growing up in New York state. There’s a tune for her road weary car, called Fiona’s Breakdown, and a set called No Sweat Helene, which pairs two Quebecois tunes with a original written for guitarist John Doyle, who joins in for that tune and several other cuts as well. Anderson plays all sorts of stringed instruments across many of the cuts, too, and John Kirk, Natalie Haas, Lloyd Maines and Eliza Gilkyson are among those who also sit in now and again. That’s a powerful support group, and Milonovich shows she’s well up to it

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Music Road: Liz Carroll & John Doyle: Double Play

Music Road: Cathie Ryan: Songwriter

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Harvest Time: Native American Music

As autumn turns toward winter in the northern hemisphere, harvest time is celebrated, and in North America, stories of history involving contact between Native Americans and European settlers are told. Many of those stories, over time, have come to have more fiction than truth in the details, but the peoples did connect with each other in many different ways. As they still do.

Louie Gonnie, a visual artist and musician of the Dine (Navajo) people of the American southwest, sings of fire, water, wind, and earth in Elements.The songs are in the Dine language. With rhythm and sound, pitch and harmony, his ideas come through clearly, though, and in the liner notes there are words in English which reflect his thoughts as expressed in songs including Dawn of Fire, Earthbound, and Winter’s Breath.

Johnny Whitehorse offers a percussive groove laced beat in a selection of song honoring his name, framed around the connection between man and horse, and the life the two live out beyond the edges of places where people gather. Warriors dance around a ghostly drum, and then ride off into the distance, wild ponies race, and the iron horse of the railroad comes to the west in Whitehorse’s vision. Tribal drum and Native flute meet in stories of a west gone by in >his self titled album,in songs including Indian Pony, Last Ride of Cochise, and Riders of Snowy River. Whitegorse is a character created by Robert Mirabal, who comes from Taos Pueblo.

Joanne Shenandoah, who was of the Oneida-Iroquois Confederacy of New York state, and Michael Bucher, who is Cherokee, join together for a project that in many ways traces the troubled history of Native American connection with the laws and lives of those have come later to North America. It is also in part a tribute to three musicians who walked that ground several decades ago, only to experience blacklisting and hostility: Johnny Cash, Peter LaFarge, and Floyd Westerman. There are songs by each of those men on the recording, which is called Bitter Tears Sacred Ground. There are several very fine originals by both Shenandoah and Butcher, as well. In what may be the balance point of the album, Shenandoah sings The Star Spangled Banner -- yes, the one you’re thinking of -- as almost a lullabye, and a lament. Whether you know or care anything about the history of all the varied Native tribes or not, it’s likely you will be drawn to listen to this album all the way through, and to come out with both answers and questions when you’re done.

That may be true, though for different reasons, when you listen to Kelvin Mockingbird’s recording Sacred Fire, as well. Mockingbird grew up on a Navajo reserve in Arizona, which, he says, taught him respect for space, spirit, and time. He was drawn into playing the flute by a dream. This album features songs of quiet reflection, with titles including Wind Child, The Flames Within, and The Healing of Hand, with emotion which translates readily through melody, with no words needed.

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R Carlos Nakai: Talisman

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Music Road: work of autumn: music

Image by Debby Chatzi from Pixabay

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.