Music
Sarah Jane Scouten
Woodend Tennis Club, Glasgow
Rob Adams
THREE STARS
It was quite a homecoming for Sarah Jane Scouten. The singer, guitarist and fiddler from tiny Bowen Island in British Columbia has a Glaswegian mother and a number of cousins in Glasgow who turned out to hear and encourage her as she sang and played the music that's partly in her blood (mum's a Scottish country dance caller) and partly, it seems, an act of rebellion.
Having taken up guitar at the age of twelve, Scouten (it's pronounced like boy scout with an added 'en') followed her passion for Appalachian music by taking herself off to a festival in Virginia from where she emerged with a fiddle and no job, having gone without consulting her boss. So she kind of had to make music work, although it sounds as if the troubadour life was her destination from the moment she started to sing round kitchen tables.
Her time in Virginia was well spent and she has the rustic rhythm and scrape that puts a groove under songs such as bluegrass staple Red Rockin' Chair, which began as a fiddle fingerpicking number but switched to bowing as it picked up momentum.
Scouten's own songs can address serious social issues, love gone wrong or nothing at all, such as the endearingly daft one she wrote on a previous visit to Scotland when she couldn't sleep. She sings in a tone that's girlish but still gets her point and emotions across. Her guitar picking, while simple, carries her voice with a bluesy, rootsy charm and her onstage personality, which can be scatty and then some, won her a new set of friends to go with her family in Jordanhill.
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