Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #128 (February/March 2007).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Cathie Ryan

Folk Meets the Orchestra

by Kerry Dexter

Tish Hinojosa figured out guitar chords with her friends at school in San Antonio and learned Mexican folk songs on summer visits to her grandparents across the border. While her family was stationed at a military post in Germany, Beth Nielsen Chapman borrowed her dad's guitar to figure out songs and never gave it back. Donnell Leahy's dad taught his young son tunes on the fiddle at their family farm in northern Ontario. Eddi Reader's mother and aunt got the young girl singing along on folk songs of their native Scotland as she grew up in Glasgow. As a kid, Cathie Ryan learned songs and tunes from her grandmother, who pushed back the chairs in the kitchen and picked up her fiddle to play and to sing as part of the fun when her grandchildren came over to visit her in Ireland. That intimate, personal sort of sharing in the kitchen, on the back porch, around the campfire, in the pub, the bar, and the club is at the heart of folk music, a music that keeps the feeling of being handed around in circles of friends and family even when it moves to the stage. But in recent years, folk music has also been showing up in the context of orchestral series and symphony concerts, leading to collaborations and juxtapositions that have made for interesting times for artists on both classical and folk sides of the conversation.

"It was really interesting, and wild!" said singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer, who is based in Indiana and has presented her work with orchestras in Bloomington and Lafayette. "I think of a performance as kind of a passionate three-way conversation: I put out something of myself, the listener joins the conversation with me, and when it's really good, something else joins the conversation. That can happen on all kinds of levels, and to have that happen on such an enormous level, wow!"

It's certainly true that having dozens of classically trained musicians behind the band and an audience of thousands in front is a bit of a different situation for most folk musicians from their usual run of clubs and festivals. There are procedural and practical details as well as musical ones to figure out in order to work together in presenting the music. But even before that, there are often stereotypes on all sides to break down. Here, folk musicians find that the quality and power of the music itself works to their favor. "What we do isn't pop music, like sometimes you have in pops concerts," said Joanie Madden, whistle and flute player and bandleader of Cherish the Ladies. "It's real music. It's music of the people." Fiddler Donnell Leahy pointed out that "in a lot of people's minds there's been this big gap: the classical musician was thought of as oh, boring, stuffy, and the fiddle player was this hick, this hillbilly. It's been wonderful to communicate with the classical world, because people start to understand that both worlds are great, that to play in each takes talent, and time, and effort."

[cover #128]