Manran and The McDades: moving tradition forward

The range of Celtic tradition and new dimensions for its present and future: all that is part of the work of the musicians of The McDades, based in Alberta in Canada and Maran, based in Glasgow, Scotland.

It’s always g balance to draw inspiration from music of a tradition, play song and tune handed on and handed down, while putting your own mark on it, at the same time staying true to this spirit of those who have handed it on.

Another way to do that, one that arises naturally from loving and being immersed in traditional styles, is creating new music which respects and draws on tradition, while placing one’s own voice within its story.

Manran and The McDades, in differing yet related ways, are really good at this. The tradition, in the case of both bands, is mainly music of Scotland, with touches of other influences of several places and sorts now and again.

Manran: Urar

Manran has been part of the Scottish traditional music scene for elven years at this writing. Known for high energy trad rock that has listeners up on their feet as often as not, the seven member group is also well skilled at interpreting and creating quieter, more reflective pieceso.

Both these aspects of the band’s music arepresented in their album Urar. That’s a word in Gaelic which means flourishing. That well suits the character of the music on offer.

The material is largely written or arranged by members of the band, with each artist contributing to the project. Founding member of Manran Gary Innes plays accordion. Ewen Henderson is on fiddle, Highland bagpipes, vocals, piano, and synths. Ross Sanders handles bass guitar and Moog. Ryan Murphy is on uillean pipes whistle, and flute. Mark Scobie adds in drums, Aidan Moodie brings in guitar and backing vocal, and Kim Carnie is on vocals.

Kim and Aidan are the most recent members of the band, having both joined in 2019. Urar is the first Manran recording on which both of them appear. They joined up to create the song Crow Flies, which they co-wrote over distance during lockdown. The substance of the song is about supporting one another during uncertain times and being willing to take risks.

Those are ideas which recur in varied ways across the music on Urar, in tune and in song and in Gaelic and in English. Each of the band members knows well how to create and to collaborate in telling stories through music.

There is Manran’s trademark high energy present as part of such storytelling.

While that may at first seem an unlikely way to treat a song of grieving those lost at sea, the song Ailean proves an excellent way to appreciate this aspect of the band’s creativity. The Black Tower set, comprising a tune written by Ewen paired with a piece based on ancient legend and geography written by Mischa MacPherson, offers another way to appreciate how well these artists use instrument and voice both tell story..

The tunes are equally engaging. In addition to that first tune in The Black Tower set, listen out especially for the reel Creamery Cross, named by Ryan for a place near his mother’s home in County Clare in Ireland, and for The Loop, a set of three tunes, one from Ryan, one from Gary, and another from piper Peter Morrison of the Peatbog Fairies.

There is a set of Puirt, a song in Gaelic about a ridiculous pair of trousers, a tune in tribute to a favourite surf beach, a Gaelic song from a poem by Ewen honoring the tradition fo planting saplings for those who are gone too young, a song in English celebrating connection across distance, and other musical adventures to explore..

To draw things to a close, the band chose Griogal Chride. This is lament dating to 1570. Again it shows the fine way Manran works as a band to honour music and story, briging together ideas they’ve been sharing across the music on the album, with excellent playing and a memorable lead vocal from KIm.

The McDades: The Empress

The McDades well know how to honour story through their music, too.

The heart of the band are brothers Jeremiah McDade, whose instruments are whistles, guitar, bansuri, saxophone, and and vocals, and Solon McDade who is on bass and vocals, and sister Shannon Johnson, whose instruments are fiddle and voice. Alongside the siblings are musical friends Andy Hillhouse on guitar and vocals and Eric Breton cajon, darbouka, and other percussion.

The McDades are known for being based in Celtic tradition and for drawing on other styles on genres for inspiration and exploration.

That’s true of what they offer on The Empress.

You will find, for example, a lively version of the traditional song Willie Reilly.. It finds Shannon telling the tale about star crossed lovers and a man’s day in court with her lead vocals, alongside creative and fast paced percussion and instrumental backing.

The energy continues and picks up pace a bit with the original tune The Oak, Ivy and Ash, which may well have you up and dancing, or at least, tapping your feet as you listen.

Sundown, written by fellow Canadian Gordon Lightfoot, is a classic of contemporary folk song. It stands up well to treatment by the McDades which both honours that aspect of the song and intersperses the verses with breaks which include jazz flavored saxophone lines.

Blues and jazz come into play as The McDades offer a haunting cover of Plain Gold Ring, which was written in the 1950s by Jack Hammer. They head back into Celtic direction at first with the title track The Empress, but if you want to name other genres The McDades include in their music, you will find several of those in the tune as well.

About that title, The Empress? There are reasons behind the choice.

The heart of the band is the collaboration among Jeremiah, Solon, and Shannon. In the tarot, The Empress is the third card, meant to represent power and productivity of the subconscious, and said to open doors for creative and artistic energy. The band points out in press material about the album that they were drawn to these ideas, to the symbolism of the number 3, and to connections to the ideas of creativity growth, and expression.

With both of these albums, you will find stories directly and indirectly drawn from earlier times. You will find instrumental creations and collaborations as complex as any you’ll find in classical or jazz. Engaging and expressive singing carries the stories and traditions forward as well.

Manran and The McDades each offer material for inspiration, reflection and celebration -- musical journeys well worth the taking.

You may also wish to see
Urar was produced by Calum MacCrimmon. You will know him as a member of Breabach
Ewen Henderson has a solo album out Steall/Torrent.
Kim Carnie is also lead singer withe the band Staran. Learn about Staran’s debut album Kim has a solo album out soon as well, bout which more to come.
An earlier album from The McDades, Bloom
Shannon Johnson has produced many of Maria Dunn’s albums, including the Juno winning Joyful Banner Blazing. Jeremiah and Solon play on this and other of Maria’s albums as well.

If you enjoy what you’ve been reading here, a way to support more of it:

Canada's music: Maria Dunn

Emigration, immigration. The choice or circumstance that brings one to make a living and a life in a country not one’s native place. How to live, what to learn, what to keep from home, what to let go, what to change. These are ideas debated by lawmakers, in community gatherings, in churches, in homes, and in the thoughts of those who travel. In the ideas of artists, too: in her album Piece By Piece Maria Dunn distills voices and ideas and thoughts on these ideas and on the lives of those who live them out day by day

Dunn, who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, has often looked to the intersections of history and social justice as inspiration for her songs, The music on Piece by Piece draws on material Dunn came by in interviews with women who worked at a clothing factory in Edmonton over its ninety three years history, from 1911 to 2004. The women came from countries across the globe, from eastern Europe, from Viet Nam, from Italy, from Ukraine, from China, from rural Alberta and other places in Canada.

Pray for my safety on the journey
I’ll send word from the other side

-- from the song I Cannot Tell You (the whole story)

click on the album cover image or the text link to hear samples of the music

As Dunn weaves their stories, we hear of a woman who wrote to her World War II soldier in Italian while those on the line helped her learn English and a union leader,originally from Ukraine who went to Toronto to confront company board members. There’s a song of hope and resilience based on a lullabye a woman from Viet Nam sang during an interview and a song called Speed Up, which with words and music captures the rhythms of the workday and the thoughts of women whose hands and minds did the work of making clothing, and another called Blue Lung, which finds a woman thinking about one of the consequences of such work.

There is connection, there's distance, the family, there's friendship and weathering all sorts of change in these stories,. There’s a song of called Farewell, occasioned by the thoughts of those who’d worked together for years when they learned that their factory would be closing.

“Day by day and side by side, our common ground ensured, we stitched together more than just the work,” Dunn sings.

Dunn has a gift for both words and melody, shown on these songs in the ways she adds flavors of the sounds of different countries while maintaining a through line of song and story bringing together these elements in much the way the women from different countries worked side by side in the factory. Dunn is herself an immigrant to Canada, “though my situation was very different -- I was born in Scotland, and my family emigrated to Canada when I was a baby, and my father had a good job,” she says. “Still, I think that has helped me understand their feelings and their stories.”

Dunn, who plays guitar and accordion as well in addition to singing, has an inviting storyteller’s way with her voice, and her melodies tell engaging stories on their own. She’s well supported here by producer Shannon Johnson, who plays violin, and other gifted folk who sit on sitar, bass, cello, and other instruments in spare yet atmospheric backing.

You may also wish to see
music of Canada
sounds of Cape Breton
Maria Dunn’s web site

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Music and Landscape

Love happy, love sad, love enigmatic. faithful love, love lost -- all those

aspects of life find their ways in to the music of songwriter Gordon Lightfoot. Lightfoot. who grew up in southern Ontario, in Canada, often draws on the vast and varied landscapes of his native country in his songs as well.

If you’re thinking, who is Gordon Light foot anyway? chances are you know his music, even if you don’t his name. Sundown, If You Could Read My Mind, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, For Lovin’ Me, Cotton Jenny: those are but a few of his five decade and counting songwriting career.

Those are all songs well worth your listening.

Songwriters are often more eloquent in their evocation of land and history than those who set out to describe such things in prose and poetry, and it is to Gordon Lightfoot’s songs based in landscape that I most often return. A few favorites:

Whether you have kin and friends in Alberta, or even know where it is for that matter (it is in the plains and Rocky Mountains of Canada’s west). the travelers tale of leaving the city and going back to well loved places and people in Alberta Bound will connect.

Early Morning Rain is a traveler's tale of another sort, of a wanderer looking for a way on. “You can’t jump a jet plane like you can a freight train” is to me one of the best lines ever written, catching as it does wanderlust, sorrow, past, future, and change all in the space of a dozen words. Ian and Sylvia, who brought Light foot’s work to a wider audience in the 1960s, have done fine cover of it too.

The joy of travel and how love and landscape frame the moments of our lives at times is part of what you’ll hear in Christian Island (Georgian Bay).

Then there’s Canadian Railroad Trilogy. The story of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, meant to be used in a film about the continent spanning railroad, it is a song in which the railroad, the dreams it was meant to carry and does still, the people who laid the track and the lands they knew and where they are remembered, from the blue Rockies to the “green dark forests too silent to be real” live on.

you may also wish to see
Scotland's music: Karine Polwart
Celebrating Canada and Newfoundland: The Once
music of Canada

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Winter's grace

Wishing you grace and peace, and music, this winter season, and the joys of connection and solitude both.

You may like to see

listening to Christmas: Celtic artists tell their favorite winter holiday music

Advent: music and journey

candle in the window

best music, 2012

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Songs of the real west: Ian Tyson: Raven Singer

Charles Goodnight’s Grave, Rio Colorado, Song in a Dream, Winterkill, The Circle is Through -- the titles of the songs on Ian Tyson’s recording Raven Singer evoke the rugged landscapes of the North American west, and the complex challenges of lives lived out through their mountains and plains.

That perspective is bone deep for Tyson, a man who says music and horses have always been his loves. He is a rancher in Alberta as well as a writer and musician, a man who has twice risen to legendary status in music, first as half of the duo Ian and Sylvia during the folk revival days and in more recent times as a cowboy poet in song of the real west.

On Raven Singer, Tyson continues that latter role with stories that go back to his early days and early running mates when he first learned guitar, in the song Blackberry Susan, all the way to recovering from a broken relationship in distant lands in Under African Skies. Charles Goodnight’s Graves draws you to the current windswept stillness of the west and to the ghosts of history that play out along its ways, while Rio Colorado heads into the call of landscape and how it might make a space heal old wounds. There’s also a moving revisit to a song from the past with The Circle is Through, which Tyson first recorded twenty years ago in a duet with country singer Suzy Bogguss.

Tyson’s voice is weathered now, the result of a battle a few years ago with a sound
system at a tough outdoor performance and a virus that followed. For a time Tyson thought he might not sing again, but the drive and the poetry remained, and the voice, though changed, works still. It is a weathered voice, indeed, and it suits the songs and stories. Should you need to lean in a bit to hear the words and follow those stories, that’s not a bad thing.

you may also wish to see

from Ian and Sylvia’s folk song revival days, Four Strong Winds

western music from Tish Hinojosa and Robert Mirabal
road trip music: New Mexico

a conversation with Ian Tyson

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Music of Canada

As part of celebrating five years of walking with you along the music road, I am building a series of resource pages about the primary subjects you’ll find here, to help you find your way around and learn more. Main areas you’ll find here at music road have to do with singers and songwriters, Americana music, the music of Ireland, Scotland, and Canada, and creative practice and inspiration


The Maritimes, the Laurentians, the Shield, the prairies, the far north, the rockies, the pacific coast: Canada is a country of great geographic diversity and its people are diverse as well.


a quick introduction to the diversity of Canadian music
holiday gift list: music of Canada
this was first written as a holiday gift guide, and has proved to be an article visitors often seek out

the artists

Ian Tyson cowboy poet of Alberta and the rocky mountain west
Ian Tyson: Yellowhead to Yellowstone

in the folk revival era, Tyson was also part of the duo Ian and Sylvia
Matt & Shannon & Ian & Sylvia


from Alberta, the Canadian Celtic band
The McDades

celebrating Canada from the Maritimes to the plains
Stan Rogers: songwriter of work, change, & sea

legendary storyteller in song Gordon Lightfoot

master Cape Breton fiddler
Natalie MacMaster
Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia in the Maritimes, has a strong heritage from Scotland, a heritage that is informed and touched by land, water, location, and interaction with other musics.

rising Cape Breton fiddler Rachel Davis
Scotland & Cape Breton: tradition and innovation


Cape Breton music from a new generation: The Cottars

The Barra MacNeils are a family group from Cape Breton whose harmonies on traditional songs and original songwriting about their home land have gained them fans for more than two decades
The Barra MacNeils: Album

Leahy, also a family based group whose high energy ensemble work showcases the music of their native Ontario. They’ve toured with another Ontario native, Shania Twain

Leahy: Live in Gatineau
Shania Twain: Why Not?

Eileen McGann, whose music includes traditional music from her Irish Canadian roots and original songs of Canada, inlcuding several on her holiday album
Trilogy: 2000 Years of Christmas

the land

songs of place: Canada
Cape Breton Radio Live take 02
The Celtic Colours Festival


These are just a few of the articles about Canadian music you will find here along the music road, and there will be more to come. If you should not see your favorite Canadian artist here, there’s a search box to the right...your suggestions are welcome, too

Also, many musicians from Scotland and Ireland include music from Canadian artists and the traditions of Canada in their work. Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas, The Unusual Suspects, and Manus McGuire are a few of those you’ll find along the music road.

-->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.

Music and landscape

The land has such a presence in music, especially the sort of music we find here along the music road. It can be anchor or destination, part of the journey, image in memory, a place of hope, a place of dreams -- and sometimes, all of those at once.


The Barra MacNeils, for example, sing of history and present day in their home place of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Julie Fowlis often turns to songs set in the landscapes of her native Hebrides, in Scotland.
Carrie Newcomer finds inspiration in geodes, common rocks in the landscape where she lives in Indiana.














two quiet mountain landscapes:
the Canadian Rockies and the Mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland


you may also wish to see

Delicious Baby's Photo Friday, where travelers offer new insights to the world each Friday

thinking about Cape Breton: music and landscape
Irish music, Irish landscape

-->Your support for the work,here at Music Road is welcome and needed.
Here is one way to offer that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

Ian Tyson: Yellowhead to Yellowstone

Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories

The landscape of western north American speaks with a voice of mountain, high deserts, plains and arroyo, river, waterfalls, and dry gulches, towering pine and persistent scrub, blue sky and snow sky, horse, and wolf, and eagle, wide open spaces and walled in canyons, and always, ever changing light. Ian Tyson is a writer and singer who has always understood that landscape and its inhabitants, and translated that understanding into song and story. So he does on his latest release, Yellowhead to Yellowstone.

He opens with the title track, a story framed in the journey of a wolf from Alberta to Montana, and the ideas of finding a new life while remembering the old, going forward with loss and accepting changes, deciding what to pass on and what to leave behind. It’s a unique and powerful song, and perhaps the heartbeat of the album. Ross Knox is a story song of western history, also about people living with change and distance, and so, you might say, is the more personal song Lioness. Loss and change, and connection, and trust, regret and forgiveness and plenty of room to think about all that, are hallmarks of Tyson’s thinking here through ten songs.

Those hallmarks have been present through his five decade career, a time which has songs including Four Strong Winds, Summer Wages, Eighteen Inches of Rain, Someday Soon, and Navajo Rug as just a few of its mileposts. Tyson’s voice is different here, weathered a bit by surviving struggles with virus and and strain. It suits the songs, though, and it’s still Ian Tyson, no mistake about that. He will turn seventy six in September, and mark more than five decades of work as a musician. It will be a well deserved celebration. Yellowhead to Yellowstone adds to the reasons.

-->our congratulations to Ian, who has been nominated for solo artist of the year at the Canadian Folk Awards, which will be given out in Gatineau, Quebec, on 21 November

you may also want to see

Gift: A Tribute to Ian Tyson

Music Road: covering dylan: Ian & Sylvia

Music Road: now playing:Matt & Shannon & Ian & Sylvia

Music Road: Tish Hinojosa: Our Little Planet

now playing: The McDades: Bloom

Bloom
Stretching, bending, pushing, pulling, dancing, and having a thoroughly good time with it all, the McDades take folk music on a joyous excursion that's both on the edge of the genre and right at the center.

That's not so unusual when you consider that among the five members of the band they bring influences and training from classical, folk, jazz, French-Canadian, and English-Canadian music to the mix. Add to that that three of the band, brothers Jeremiah and Solon McDade and sister Shannon Johnson, grew up playing together with their parents in a family band. Add to that, that the three of them did that growing up in Edmonton, Alberta, a place where the west, the singer-songwriter tradition, and country music cross paths, and add to that the fourth and fifth members of the band, Andy Hillhouse and Francois Taillefer, bring their own backgrounds across a range of music.

What's outstanding about this is how they all collaborate on a driving, high-stepping vibe that begins with the instrumental The Whistle Blower and keeps on going through ten cuts. The McDades recently won a Juno, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy, for this album, and it's easy to understand why. Most of the music is original and it's all quite in the spirit of the title and the cover graphic, a vibrant and varied gift of songs and tunes. The instrumentals are as engaging as the songs, with intricate and natural interweaving of melody and back line. Notable tracks include Ma Bonne Dame, Pull the Anchor, and Smuggler's Cove.

I'd add that if you have the chance to see The McDades live, take it. I watched them have a lively and fun time with several thousand Scottish school kids in Glasgow, and if they can handle that audience, imagine what they can do elsewhere.

The McDades have often worked with another outstanding Alberta based musician, Maria Dunn. Learn a bit about Maria Dunn's work by following that link

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Voices: Donal Clancy

The guitar is a relatively new instrument in traditional Irish music, and that's one of the things Donal Clancy enjoys about it. The tunes on his solo album Close to Home
are ones that he's been playing for years, "ones that I can't even really remember learning," he said. They were melodies he at first heard on the pipes or the fiddle or the whistle though, and found a way into them through guitar. "There's a lot of music for fiddle, or pipes, or whatever, in Irish music, so those people are always wanting to find something new, something that hasn't been recorded before," he said. "With guitar, all your tunes are there."

Those tunes include the slow air An Buachaill Caol Dubh/ The Dark Slender Boy, the hornpipe Kitty's Wedding, and the jig Helvic Head. Helvic Head is in southeastern Ireland, near where Clancy grew up in the Gaeltacht area of An Rinn. He was not born in Ireland though. "I was born in Alberta, in Calgary," he said. "My father was a musician and he was doing some work out there. We lived there for a couple of years, and then moved to New Hampshire, and then to Ireland when I was seven."

Donal's father is Liam Clancy. "He was one of the Clancy Brothers, who were kind of innovators of Irish music in the sixties"Donal said. "They blended the old Irish folk song with what they were hearing in America at the time from the likes of the Kingston trio, and put a beat behind it, and add guitar and bass and banjo to some of the old traditional songs." That take on the updating of tradition went over well on both sides of the Atlantic and paved the way for many popular groups and singers. Donal found music on his own though. Though his cousins include well respected singers Robbie O'Connell and Aoife Clancy. none of Donal's brothers and sisters play. "We were never pushed into it," he said. "So they went off and did other things. I don't think I ever had the thought of doing anything else."

When the family moved back to Ireland, Donal started learning the tin whistle, and then picked up the mandolin, but by the time he was about eleven, guitar had claimed his attention. "Most of my friends were in to music, so it was handy, we'd get together and play and try out things," he said. "It appealed to me, what you could do with the guitar in Irish music. You could be very creative. One chord change could change the whole mood of the tune. I was very interested in the possibilities of that, what you could do rather than just playing tunes, how you could add rhythmic accompaniment or harmonic colors."

That's an interest he has continued. He played in the trio Clancy, O'Connell, Clancy, with his dad Liam and his cousin Robbie "and it was great to see how they worked, you know, the veteran musicians, nothing could surprise them,"he recalled. He was one of the founders of the traditional band Danu, and also worked for some years with top Irish American group Solas, whose members have included Seamus Egan, John Williams, John Doyle, and Winifred Horan. "They're a hard working band with a lot of rehearsal, arrangements that are fairly complicated," he said, "and it was good because I'd never really done much preparation for a tour. It was great too because the band was held in high regard by the fans and it's exciting doing shows like that, with the audiences really into it." He continued to have his share of that experience in other circumstances, too: he joined fiddler Eileen Ivers' band for a time, and then, as he was thinking of making a change from that, he got the call that his old band Danu needed a guitarist. "It was like coming home again, bringing it all back home," he said, laughing.

He's still a mainstay of Danu, and at breaks in their schedule has done recording and road work with top artists including Kevin Crawford, Cherish the Ladies, Aoife Clancy, The Chieftains, Niall Vallely, and Cathie Ryan. All that may explain why it has taken him a while to get to making an album of his own: Close to Home is his solo debut. It might also help explain why he chose a rather quiet way to do it.

"I went about it the old fashioned way," he said, "went into a studio for a couple of days and played. Most of the tunes I just put down, left then the way I played them on the day, and I probably will never play them exactly the same way again." The result is thoughtful stories well told, clarity of tone and touch, and new light on old tunes. "I like to think about the mood of the piece, to have that come through, rather than make the tune fit my playing," he said. "No flashiness or anything like that, the arrangements are kind of straightforward, a relaxed and laid back tempo. I wanted to make a very traditional Irish sounding recording" As to what's next? "I have a bunch of tunes written," he said, "but I'm not sure I'd call them so traditionally Irish. You'll have to wait until the next record to find out what they sound like!"


listen to excerpts of the music on Close to Home

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creative practice: silence

Silence has so much presence in creative practice. At times, it's the light which illuminates; at other times it's a place of rest; sometimes it is welcoming, sometimes just plain inscrutable.