Mary Ann Kennedy

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #139 (December 2008/January/February 2009).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Mary Ann Kennedy

With Head, Heart, and Heroes

by Kerry Dexter

Music has taken Mary Ann Kennedy from playing at festivals in France to filming a documentary in the Kalahari Desert to teaching at Alasdair Fraser's Valley of the Moon fiddle camps in California. At the heart of it all, though, are the music and language of Kennedy's native Scotland. These aspects have come together in her latest project, a recording called Mary Ann Kennedy & Na Seoid. On it, Kennedy joins with seven up-and-coming male singers to offer 11 songs in Scots Gaelic.

"It used to frustrate me -- it still does -- that there wasn't this natural, big, open, lovely direct singing, singers like those in previous generations who just opened their mouths and sang, and it just lifted you," she said. She went on to conjecture, "Singing wasn't being taught in school any more. It wasn't part of everyday life; it wasn't part of people's entertainment, because of the radio and the telly and all that. There was no role model for young guys to think it was okay to sing. It had got in a pretty dire stage."

The Gaelic language itself is now spoken by less than one percent of people in Scotland. "But then, when I was at that National Mod Festival a couple of years ago, I heard families and young pals talking Gaelic to each other in the street, and I became aware that there had been something of a sea change, that there were a whole bunch of new lads, singers, who were really confident in their approach to the language; it was part of their everyday life. I thought, 'Something's definitely happening here.' " When she had the opportunity to put together a project for Blas, a Gaelic-oriented music festival celebrated across the Highlands, she knew just what she'd do.

[cover #138]