Connie Dover
The Highlands to the Prairie
by T.J. McGrath

"I need to have complete control over what I do with my life or I'll be miserable," Connie Dover said with a laugh. "And music is my life," she added. With four solo albums to her credit, six Narada compilations featuring her songs, seven albums with other artists, and three releases with her Kansas City band Scartaglen, Dover can afford to be choosy about her direction in life.

And choosy she is. Dover is a woman with a mission. She studiously researches folk music throughout the British Isles, Ireland, and America, and then records her own interpretations and arrangements with the help of producer and Celtic "whiz kid" Phil Cunningham. Her voice, described as "pure as an angel's sigh," is a singular experience and not one to be easily forgotten. And her folk music scholarship is impeccable.

Finding the right sort of material to sing is no easy task. There is a certain methodical process to Dover's acquisition of album material, however. While roaming the famed libraries and rare book collections of Oxford University as an undergraduate in 1984, she carefully tracked down such noteworthy tomes as Peter Kennedy's Folk Songs of Britain and Ireland and James Hogg's Jacobite Relics in pursuit of song fragments of potential use. Copying down lyrics and notating melodies, she assembled songs in her notebooks and journals for an album's worth of possible Celtic melodies. Even today, you might well find her hunkered over a stack of musty folk song inscriptions at the Buffalo Bill Historical Society in Cody, Wyoming. "Lots of American frontier songs actually originated in Scotland and Ireland," she said. "The twin forms of music have very similar melodies and words." She takes her academic expeditions into Celtic folklore and song craft quite seriously because she wants to get it right "the first time."

And this zest for fine-tuning her songs is part of who she is: a dedicated folk song scholar. How many folk artists do you know who are able to carry off songs in English, French, and Gaelic? But if you think that wraps up who she is as a musician, you're wrong. She is also an excellent singer /songwriter with many songs (sometimes lyrics, sometimes music, sometimes both) to her credit. One of her own compositions, "Who Will Comfort Me?" (from her third solo album) was nominated for the distinguished 2000 Native American Music Award. Not bad for a performer with two Emmy wins; an AFIM Indie Music Award; appearances on Prairie Home Companion, NPR's Weekend Edition, and Fiona Ritchie's Thistle & Shamrock radio shows; and dozens of rave press reviews.

Born among the quiet foothills of Arkansas but reared along the wide prairies of Missouri, Dover was smitten with traditional folk music at the early age of 15. Being of English, Cherokee, Mexican, and Scots-Irish descent helped her appreciate a wide variety of musical forms, so it wasn't unnatural for her to fall in love with traditional music. Hearing Celtic music on progressive radio stations out of Kansas City was a major revelation, and she soon began to follow new musical trends. Her first exposure to electric-folk brought her to the singing of Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span on their classic album, Parcel of Rogues. Maddy Prior, she said, demonstrated that you can update classic folk sings and give them a new vibrancy and urgency.

Listening to other musicians in her area convinced her that she had enough talent to perform onstage. She first found work at age 17 with the Western swing band Denver Locke, and she enjoyed her first years with the band. Not wanting to restrict herself to just one musical genre and anxious to learn more about folk "roots," Dover took a big step. Convinced that she had to go to "the source" for Celtic inspiration, she studied at Oxford University in her junior year, with the sole intention of gathering a repertoire of authentic folk songs from the British Isles. Upon her return she joined Scartaglen.

Looking back on her formative years with Scartaglen, Dover said, "If you were a musician living in Kansas City in the 1980s and interested in traditional Irish music, you were bound to meet the other four people who played it." Anxious to branch out on her own and overflowing with a collection of songs she wanted for a solo album, Dover contacted Phil Cunningham, a musician and producer she had long admired. When Cunningham suggested that she record her first album in Scotland, Dover packed her bags.

This is an excerpt from issue #92.
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