For the Saturday night of a festival championing the Americana music genre, this concert had quite a high count of Scottish place-names.
The Ithica-born singer-songwriter Anna Coogan is quite the Scotophile, opening her set with a largely self-composed Raggle Taggle Gypsies variant that took in Glasgow and the River Clyde.
Among her own often frankly observed songs, which she delivered with a convincing rootsy yodel that spoke little of her opera training, she included a fine new setting of the late Scottish folk guru Norman Buchan's poetic telling of the Auchengeich mining disaster.
With their roots in Nova Scotia, Toronto-based Brenley MacEachern and Lisa MacIsaac - aka Madison Violet - are used to referencing places such Inverness and Kincardine, although they're not the ones we're familiar with. Family connections in such towns play a big part in their highly literate songs and an ice-breaking line in between-song story-telling finds an easy blend of tragedy and rambunctiousness.
They hold little back in their singing, as MacEachern's sultry rasp dovetails with MacIsaac's sweeter tones to create a kind of bluegrass-old-time sensibility with rock 'n' roll attitude that packs power as well as disarming honesty. They mix and match accompaniments from an array of fiddle, mandolin and guitars, all played with proficiency, even if MacEachern's resonator tenor guitar developed a rogue G string with attendant mirth. The occasional false start didn't hinder their entertaining and, where appropriate, very personal soulful momentum and their appropriations of Paul Simon and Nirvana songs only added to the fun their easy-going dispositions effortlessly generated.
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