One useful spin‐off from the Lomax Collection (see Reference Review passim) is a series of personal portraits that permit in‐depth consideration of the work of important (in most cases seminal) performers. The latest of these from Rounder Records are discs of Margaret Barry and Jeannie Robertson, by common consent mistresses in their own contexts.
The Barry disc is absorbing for content and important as a set of examples of the singer’s banjo playing technique. The sources from which she drew her repertoire include art songs (often learned from recordings of Count John McCormack) such as Joseph Campbell’s My Lagan Love, Herbert Hughes’s She moved through the fair, and The bard of Armagh. Her sources also encompass a wide selection of traditional Irish material: anyone who is familiar with Irish folk music mainly from listening to the Dubliners and the Clancy brothers may well discover that ballads such as Her mantle so green, Eileen McMahon, and The flower of sweet Strabane belong to a quite different world. Add to all this two or three hilarious songs (for instance, The Blarney stone and Moses ritooral‐i‐ay) with echoes of the music hall, and you get an all‐round picture of the diversity of the Irish tradition.
Margaret Barry’s banjo technique is particularly interesting. In song after song, she will sing the melody to an accompaniment of chords played as arpeggios ‐ not because she cannot play the tunes; she clearly demonstrates the contrary by strumming the air now and then between verses. The result (intentional, I am sure) is to throw the emphasis on the words rather than on the tunes. Margaret Barry knows all about the primacy of the texts in folk song performance.
So also does Jeannie Robertson. Jeannie had an incomparable voice and a repertoire drawn mainly from the big ballads ‐ the “muckle sangs” ‐ that form a solid core for the Scottish folk song tradition. She was “discovered” in 1953 by Hamish Henderson of the School of Scottish Studies. She had, of course, been singing all her life and came from a long line of Robertsons and Stewarts, all of them music makers. Her mother Maria, had a considerable corpus of songs that is central to Jeannie’s repertoire, and later to the repertoire of Jeannie’s daughter , Lizzie Higgins. (Her father, and Jeannie’s husband, Donald Higgins, was an accomplished and prize‐winning piper.) The songs Jeannie sang were broadly representative of the traditions of the travelling people, sometimes called tinkers, though they rather resent the label.
Henderson encouraged Jeannie to extend her spheres of performance. He persuaded her to sing in the emerging folk clubs of the 1960s and 1970s, and she also became a familiar figure at major folk festivals. When she was not singing, she would often as not be the centre of a gathering where she yarned away, sprinkling her reminiscenses and gossip with old folk tales ‐ she was a first‐rate storyteller. Jeannie was appointed MBE in 1968. She died in 1975 in her native Aberdeen still the undisputed “Queen o’ the muckle sangs”. During her lifetime there had been a handful of published records, and she had taped at some length for the School of Scottish Studies. The Lomax compilation is rounder than any other, not least because 14 of the 18 tracks, including five of Jeannie in conversation with Alan Lomax, are of previously unreleased material. Her spoken comments bring out subtle insights about the songs and their contexts.
There is much to be said for Rounder’s decision to issue the Barry and Robertson discs simultaneously. Margeret Barry’s disc also carries insightful conversations with Lomax. On Jeannie Robertson’s disc, the big ballads are interspersed with a few scraps and fragments and some gentler, less demanding songs. In performance these latter were essential to relieve the tensions her “muckle sangs” built in the audience. Both women had wondrous voices, both were at ease in any company, and, although both had majestic and authoritative presence, both were completely unstuffy and a delight to know informally.
It is very satisfying to have these discs as reminders of two practised virtuosi at work. As with previous Lomax releases, the discs are complemented with informative booklets that contain useful background, sumptuous illustrations, and the texts of songs and interviews.
