Note from Kay Meek Arts Centre:
COVID-19 Update, March 12, 2020 - The BC Government has restricted gatherings of more than 250 people. This will impact some events at Kay Meek Arts Centre. Ticket holders for impacted events will be contacted directly. We appreciate your patience and understanding.
Dervish, Kay Meek Arts Centre, Sunday, March 15, 7:30 p.m. For more information visit, kaymeek.com/events/dervish.
A singer may stumble, succumb or stop. But a song – if it has some mix of magic, melancholy and melody – wanders over land and through time.
The story of Irish folk music mirrors the stories of the Irish songs.
They ramble. They escape. The cross oceans and slip beyond prison walls. It’s right there in the lyrics: “Off to reap the corn and leave where I was born.”
“To live poor I could not endure .Like others of my station, to America I sailed away and left this Irish nation.”
The songs, explains Dervish lead singer Cathy Jordan, are “part of our DNA.”
She grew up with them. Her parents didn’t play musical instruments but they sang. And when their relations from the United States would visit there would be food and drink “and music for hours and hours and hours on end,” she recalls. “I always feel close to my parents and neighbours and to that time when we always used to sing together and life was a very happy place.”
For her siblings, the music they sang was recreation.
“For me it was everything. Anything else I did was secondary,”
And after nearly 30 years with Dervish, the band decided to reach into their collective memory bank. The result was their album The Great Irish Songbook, a 13-track tribute to the tradition they draw from.
“It’s like having a hit record,” Jordan exclaims. “Everybody knows the songs and can sing along to the choruses.”
There’s “She Moved through the Fair,” “The Rambling Irishman,” and “There’s Whiskey in the Jar.”
“It was a mammoth task to try and whittle the great songs down to what would fit on an album,” Jordan notes.
In choosing songs, the band had one rule: all of the songs had to be at least 50 years old. It was an ironclad rule that they broke only once, Jordan reports.
“When David Gray tells you he wants to sing that song on your album, you don’t argue,” she explains.
Recording the album, which also features guest appearances by Steve Earle, Imelda May and Rhiannon Giddens among others, was a painstaking process, Jordan says.
Besides his customary duties, producer Graham Henderson had to co-ordinate artists, agents, time zones and touring schedules.
“A project like this takes an awful lot of perseverance and patience,” she says.
There’s also a challenge in figuring how to perform a song like “Whiskey in the Jar” that’s been performed by everyone from Seamus Ennis to Burl Ives to Metallica.
“It’s a fine line between what people are familiar with . . . and yet, you want to breathe new life into it and make it sound your own,” Jordan notes. “That line was delicate to tread.”
Aside from an appearance by Jamey Johnson, who brings a country twang to “The Fields of Athenry,” the guest artists perform more like lifelong members of the band.
“It sounds like a body of work,” Jordan says.
The album features an outstanding version of “The May Morning Dew,” featuring Giddens.
The tunes all carry a history. But for Jordan, the strongest association is with “Donal Og,” a story of a sailor and the young girl who imagines their life together.
The centuries-old tune is a prayer from a pregnant lover who slowly realizes how alone she is.
“So many women down through the years have suffered similar abandonment and been sent to the workhouse because of shame they might have brought on their families,” Jordan says. “The man got off scot-free.”
The history is tragic. But for Jordan, it also shows resilience.
Thinking back to those celebration nights with family and neighbours, Jordan remembers singing “Donal Og.”
“None of them were complete without a hearing of that song,” she says.
Speaking from Kingston, Ont., Jordan describes meeting a Maori man who grew up in New Zealand singing “Molly Malone.”
“A good song is sung, and these songs were sung and sung and sung,” Jordan says. “It’s incredible how far these songs have travelled.”
