root salad Lamond & MacIsaac
Take one Gaelic singer and one fiddler/ step dancer, stir well… Sarah Coxson talks to a fine Canadian duo.
M
ary Jane Lamond and Wendy MacIsaac will be familiar to connoisseurs of Celtic traditions and those of Nova Scotia in
particular. Both renowned interpreters and standard bearers of Cape Breton music, Mary Jane has spent much of her adult life championing Gaelic language and culture and Wendy is a leading traditional fiddler.
Mary Jane is a fine Scots Gaelic singer, first thrust into the limelight in the ’90s as the vocalist on Top Ten Canadian chart hit Sleepy Maggie with fiddling firebrand Ashley MacIsaac (Wendy’s first cousin). She played in MacIsaac’s band for some years before branching out on her own and touring internationally.
Wendy is a thoroughbred Cape Breton fiddler and step-dancer hailing originally from an area within a stone’s throw of all the other MacIsaacs (and Rankins). Having her first ‘big gig’ break with the touring sensation Cape Breton Summertime Revue, she met Mary Jane in the ’90s and has also toured all over the world in Lam- ond’s band, and as a solo performer, with The Rankin Family and her own trad super- group Beolach.
Whilst their friendship and musical collaboration goes back many years, it’s only with the release of Seinn that they have focused on duo work. The album strikes a natural balance between both of their musical sensibilities. It has a light touch about it, contrasting Mary Jane’s haunting vocal softness and strength with the upbeat joy of Wendy’s fiddling.
Wendy’s own immersion in that tradi- tion is life-long, steeped in the heritage of the region’s Highland settlers – picking up by osmosis the tunes and tones of her Gaelic-speaking grandfather as he whis- tled his way through the day and picking up the rhythms and steps of the percussive dancing. At 12, she began learning to play the fiddle when the fiddling tradition was on the cusp of a revival. “Just a couple of years prior to me starting, there was a doc- umentary made called The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler. When I started, there was a group of people the same age that all started at the same time.”
As well as learning technique and
style, Wendy also learned stamina and drive through playing for the regular ceilidhs in local dance halls – leather-soled shoes beating out the rhythms on wooden floors. She remembers the accuracy and pulse of those steps, concerned that younger dancers have lost the skill… and appropriate footwear!
“I kind of think this is going to be my mission in life. I want to buy out a closing
bowling alley of all their shoes and bring them to dances so people can rent them out… so that at least there’ll be leather- soled shoes again! Ha ha! Imagine! ‘All the size nines in this set!’”
Meanwhile, Mary Jane’s love for Gael- ic traditions and songs of Cape Breton were one step removed. Born in Ontario herself, her parents were born, and her grandparents lived, in Nova Scotia.
“I was very attracted to having this culture in my life… and spent a lot of time looking forward to the summer when we’d go back. Our parents always called it ‘going home’. On my father’s side, my grandparents were Gaelic speakers. I didn’t learn to speak Gaelic as a child but it was around a lot. One thing I always asso- ciate with it is people laughing! It was very attractive.”
The pull led her to move back to Nova Scotia in her mid 20s, where she joined a Gaelic choir. “Through that, I got to go to this Milling Frolic, a singing gathering, waulking. It was an epiphany. I wanted to be able to sit at that table and sing those songs. I loved this idea that there was this culture where people would drive for miles and miles and miles just to get together to sing!”
So she enrolled on a Gaelic language course, and then took a degree in Celtic Studies and began to dedicate her time to learning songs from North Shore Gaelic
source singers – who were as surprised to find a young woman in army boots and sec- ondhand clothes trying to learn the songs as she was happy to be in their presence: “These singers were famous, recorded by ethnomusicologists, played at Newport Folk Festival! I was thrilled to be there.”
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Mary Jane’s first album introduced her to Ashley MacIsaac… from which point it all took off. “It was kind of insane. I had sung for some parish concerts, the Antigo- nish Games, things like that, and then I got a call from Harbourfront in Toronto. I went from hardly doing any shows to standing in front of 2500 people. That’s when I rang Wendy up to ask her if she wanted to join me!”
far cry from the community musicmaking they had both been so drawn to, over the years they have always managed to balance the intensive international touring with grass roots activity. Wendy teaches fiddle and step dancing to the next generation – “a nice completion of the circle as I’m now teaching the daughter of the guy who taught me how to dance who in turn was taught by my mum!” – and Mary Jane is involved in a number of Gaelic culture projects. “I don’t like the word ‘activist’ though. It lacks joy, sounds like a moral obligation. I’m passionate about Gaelic. I’m a Gaelic geek.”
maryjaneandwendy.com F 23 f
Photo: Riley Smith
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