A journey home…

CHRISTINE PRIMROSE is one of the great voices in traditional Gaelic singing. PETER URPETH looks at Christine’s contribution, and welcomes a new recording with Brian Ó hEadhra

AN TURAS, the latest release on the Anam Label featuring label proprietor Brian Ó hEadhra and Christine Primrose, is a meeting not only of two fine traditional singers and musicians, but two strands of the Gaelic culture – the Irish and the Scottish.

The CD, claims the sleeve note, is designed around the informal format of a house ceilidh, and the two lead performers are joined by Fiona Mackenzie when the chorus needs a fuller sound than just a single voice.

In general terms the songs chosen by both performers are well-known classics from the tradition, and all are performed with a real depth of feeling. Personally speaking, Brian’s voice has been something of a revelation to me since he came to Lewis to take a stint at the helm of Ness art centre, Taigh Dhonnchaidh.

In that role he served to animate a considerable amount of music within the community, often letting his own skills remain in the shadows. Of course, his musicianship was known to a wide audience through the band Anam, and it is clear that he knows this stuff from the inside. Like Christine, he knows what it is that makes a fine traditional singer – understatement, letting the song sing itself and breathe its own words.

On this CD his voice glides through the magnificently melismatic sean-nós refrains. For Christine, too, this is a far more informal and intimate setting than her previous CD. The disc includes a range of great songs from the tradition, both in its north and south Hebridean incarnations, with the likes of ‘Seathan’ (an ancient song with its roots in the very ancient Irish connections of Mingulay and Barra), and ‘An Till Mi Tuilleadh a Leòdhas’, by Uilleam MacCoinnich, the great Bard Baile of Point and, after emigration, Fort William, Ontario.

‘Seathan’ is a song of journeying and longing, and the fact that it has become more widely known and sung in recent years is not only something to do with Flora McNeill’s marvellous exposition of its verses, but also to the fact that there is definitely a growing reawakening of contacts between the two cultures.

Small at present, certainly, but profound enough in its own right to be a point of hope. Perhaps the troubled times Gaelic has experienced could face a brighter future by exploiting this aspect of the culture with vigour and commitment. The two singers make a good partnership, and remind us all that the music they approach from different latitudes, is, essentially, the same music.

The last time Christine Primrose released a CD, some three years ago, this writer had the chance to conduct a lengthy interview with this fine Gaelic traditional singer in her Isle of Skye home.

At that time, weary of hurling expressions of wonderment too freely around the music press, I omitted to make one observation which I was convinced of then, and remain so to this day. That was that the opening few bars of that CD, from the unaccompanied traditional Gaelic song  ‘Ceann Traigh Ghruinneart’ (‘The Head of Gruinart Sands’), is surely one of the finest, purely musical, sounds to have been recorded.

Maybe the spell that these bars cast is something to do with the undoubtedly fine production values of that historic label. Or, more likely, it is to do with the timing of the recording. At that time, after a lengthy period of studio silence, Christine Primrose was singing at the height of her powers, and that recording captured that fact as if carving it in stone.

Christine’s voice in those few bars is an utterly sonorous joy underpinned by an air of such certainty and confidence that one would never believe that the tradition of Gaelic song had gone through lean, often marginalised times.

But when we talked in her small cottage adjacent to the campus of the Gaelic college on Skye, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, it was very quickly apparent that the concept of conformity or divergence from any notion of a ‘tradition’ is essentially an extraneous consideration when it comes to her art.

“What does the word ‘traditional’ mean to me? Not much, really,” says Christine, “it’s just the label that’s given to the kind of stuff that I do, it’s just that somebody somewhere said this is traditional Gaelic song and that’s it. Most people who are genuine about what they do musically just want to perform and get on with it. It’s other people who want to give them labels and you’ve got to be careful that you don’t become part of that.”

While Christine does admit to being frustrated by the critical tendency to seek out and impose such blanketing and troubled descriptions as ‘traditional’ on singers and musicians she does find some usefulness for the term:

“There are people,” says Christine, “who have got a style of singing that is mostly like a vocal exercise, a musical vocal exercise, and they happen to sing in Gaelic. I definitely want to differentiate between that and what I do. Just because you sing in Gaelic that does not mean you are a traditional singer. That’s where the word comes in handy and is handy to use. There’s room for both, but some people, some musicians and singers, get a bit confused about who they want to be.”

Such confusion could never be levelled at Christine Primrose, a singer whose emergence as one of Gaeldom’s pre-eminent voices is the result of a remarkable voyage of self discovery and of self in relationship to music. From an early stage our discussion is dominated not by considerations of the Gaelic tradition of song and her place in it, but of her compelling gift of music and of her profound need to sing.

Although she has sung for as long as her memory can recall, Christine’s true emergence did not occur until the late 1970s when, a few years after the death of her husband, she started attending and singing at the folk clubs in the then burgeoning Glasgow folk scene. Interest in her singing grew rapidly.

“When I was young, singing was just something that I did. I’ve never been really aware of any time when I consciously said, I am going to be a singer.  It is just something that I know that I have to do. It is something that I know is in me and when you’ve got this gift and you don’t use it, it can manifest itself in very negative ways.

“I find that if I’m not singing, if I’m not singing in public, I get very much on edge. I was like that for years and it took me awhile to realise that that is what it was. I need to use this gift that is inside me. I need to express it. I find that it is still the same. If I don’t go out there and sing on a fairly regular basis I get unsettled within myself and feel sort of off-balance.  Singing is the most intimate and immediate form of musical expression.”

Her success in singing to non-Gaels, and in terms of her recorded output, also owes much to the fact that Christine Primrose has always placed great importance on the strength of melody in a song. While some may argue that a defining hallmark of traditional Gaelic song is the predominance of the Bardachd, the words and poetic strength of a song, over the melody, Christine Primrose has always held that strong melody is the starting point of a great song and that without that strength of melody, no matter how good the words, the song will not be worth singing.

“The Gael, like a lot of peoples, are not the best in terms of working out or showing their own emotions. That is why the songs, especially the love songs, are so powerful because it was a channel for their pent-up emotion.

“We’re talking about an era when people wouldn’t be kissing in public or anything like that but they were still human beings, they were very similar to us and they had the same emotions towards each other and all this energy was channelled into these gorgeous love songs and that was a way of expressing that emotion.

“But that is also why modern day writing is not so powerful because we can channel these emotions, we don’t have these pent up emotions toward other people now. It is just the way society is now. Some new songs are beautiful but they don’t have that depth to them.”

In 1978, Christine was singing regularly at festivals, and she travelled to Ireland as part of the Poets Tour. There she was struck by the support the Irish people offered to their own local singers and musicians. It was a turning point in her career and one which led to considerable insight into the factors in her own upbringing (in the village of Carloway on the west side of Lewis) that may have led to feelings of uncertainty and an early lack of confidence that held her back from going forth into the world and presenting the music of the Gael to non-Gaelic speakers.

Whether such feelings are purely personal and rooted in her own upbringing, or are a wider part of the unique psychological make-up of the Gael (if such a thing can be said to exist), is a matter for debate:

“I remember being profoundly moved the first time I went to Ireland as I could not believe how the Irish people were so supportive of their own people, and so openly encouraging. I’m not saying that the Gael is not encouraging toward a fellow Gael, it is just that the Irish do it so openly, so nicely and so positively.

“You know, there would be people singing and playing in a gathering and an Irish person would be singing or playing and their own people would be giving them this sort of gentle and genuine support. That affected me very deeply because I felt that it was such a pleasure to sing under those circumstances. You felt as though you could get on with singing the song instead of fighting through the barrier of the ‘oh well, let’s see how good you are’ kind of attitude that I find is very common in Gaeldom.

“I don’t think they mean to do it, but when you get a crowd of Gaels together you can just feel it, they are very unforgiving at times!  Being encouraged is still a very difficult one. They want you to do well but they won’t encourage you to do well, which is a very strange thing to deal with.  People of my parents generation still cannot really understand that I sing Gaelic to the non-Gael.

“I remember being asked by a few people, although it is not so common now to be asked this, but I would be asked ‘You won’t be singing Gaelic to them?’ You know it’s all right within our small group within the village scene but it was very much ‘you’re singing Gaelic to these people, they don’t have a word of Gaelic? How can you do that? They won’t understand a word you are singing?’”

White it may be tempting to single out some of the personal tragedy that Christine has experienced in her life, losing her husband at a tragically early age, as a primary source of a lion’s share of the emotional authority and depth with which she now sings, it is plain that her voyage has been an internal journey, a process of deep self-awareness and of accumulated insight:

“My life went on a different road and that was just the way it was meant to be. There is no point in saying how different would it be if he was still alive. There’s no point in saying that. I am a great believer in destiny and that is just how it was meant to be.

“I think that if you are aware of what you are singing, or if you are an aware person, you experience a lot just because of that sheer fact. Life gives you lots of experiences and some of them are worse than others. I find, though, that when you are singing you have got to be in control of the emotion all the time because if you allow a deep personal emotion to come into it you’ve lost it. Its finding that balance to put a song across with enough emotion.

“I also think this is the only way to do it. If you are singing a song you can be aware of where the vibration of the note is taking you, you’re opening yourself up to it and that is exactly what happens.  Now, you can go into another dimension and think, oh I lost my husband and I know exactly what this women is thinking in this song.

“I always feel that these songs are only ours for a wee while. They were written at very stressful times within that person’s life and really they were written because it was a cathartic experience for themselves.  Some thing they had to do and we have always got to remember that when we are dealing with that kind of emotion.  We are really just a vehicle for that person’s emotion and we have to respect that.

“I’m closer now to singing the way I’ve always wanted to sing,” continues Christine. “Where my voice is sitting within me now is something I’ve been striving to achieve for years. In the past, I would achieve it maybe every so often, but I was always left with a feeling of frustration that I wasn’t singing the way that I wanted to sing. And I would think, ‘I could sing that song so much better’, and yet I was not able to achieve that and that was so frustrating within myself. I started sustaining that maybe two years ago and then I started to feel, gosh, this is where I’ve wanted my voice to sit ever since I started singing.”

An Turas is out now on Anam Music. Brian Ó hEadhra and Christine Primrose will launch the CD at Hootananny, Inverness, on Thursday 23 October 2003 at 8pm, with guest musicians and singers.

© Peter Urpeth, 2003