Singout!
22nd September 2007

Emerged: Emily Smith and the past and future of Scottish song.(Interview)
By Rob Weir

Emily Smith puts down her accordion, having just polished off a set of lively tunes in which she jousted Phil Cunningham-like with fiddler Jamie McClennan and guest guitarist Matt Heaton. With minimal fanfare she steps up to the mic, tilts her head slightly, and eases her way into a Robert Burns song, "As I Was Wand'ring." Smith has enough bower in her lungs to freeze the downward trajectory of a dropped bowling ball, but that's not the approach to take with lyrics such as "I could not get sleeping till dawn, for weeping/The tears trickled down like the hail and the rain/ Had I not got weeping, my heart would have broken/For oh, love forsaken is a tormenting pain."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When Smith gets to that third verse, an astonished hush hangs across the University of Hartford auditorium where she's performing. It's as if it collectively dawned on us: she's not singing the song; she's letting the song sing her. Her lower tones infuse the lyrics with honest emotion, the quiet spaces intensifying the drama, and her voice building gently but boldly, as if a rain shower was about to turn to hail. Like a seasoned vet who knows when to change the mood, Smith graciously accepts her applause, re-straps the accordion and launches into a spirited waltz/jig/reel set in which McClennan (who is also her husband) holds court, hunched over his fiddle his leg swinging back to set the foot-stomping backbeat, and sashaying like one of his idols, Darrell Scott.

In an age when American Idol high-level rants and garish costuming masquerades as singing and performance, I've just witnessed the difference between craft and raw material ... between history and histrionics. Smith's poise, proficiency and maturity are skills that are even remarkable when one considers that she's only twenty-five and just five years removed from a BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician award. But, then again, there are many surprising things about Ms. Smith, some of which she shared with me as we met at a Northampton cafe several hours before her Hartford show.

Let's start with the fact that her career trajectory isn't exactly out of the "How to be a Folksinger" handbook. Think "Scottish song" and certain images rush to mind: Hebridean Gaelic songs, staccato-heavy mouth music, Perthshire ballads, Doric dialect songs from the Northeast, the song-poems of Robert Burns.... But Smith comes from Dumfries-Galloway, an area with active Scottish country dance bands, but one which even lifelong residents admit has a shallower song well than other regions. It's often ignored by tourists, and those who venture there tend to do as yours truly did: pop into Dumfries (pop. 31,000) to see the house where Robert Burns lived from 1791 to his death in 1796, then hightail it north to Glasgow to hear music. Smith confesses, "When I first went to college I tried to find songs from my home area and I couldn't find any."

Smith managed to unearth some and has devoted herself to resurrecting forgotten Dumfries songs, but that quest also began in an unusual way. Many Scottish singers boast of having learned songs from their grannies or at the side of an elderly pub singer. Not Smith; her entree into traditional music occurred because her mother and aunt ran a dance studio. "The dance academy is where I first heard traditional music," recalls Smith. "My mother taught all sort of dances, from jazz, tap, and modern to traditional Scottish Highland dancing. My mom, my sister, my two brothers were always dancing, but for me it was just for fun and 1 never thought of competing or playing traditional music."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Smith's foray into performance occurred after a series of epiphanies. She started piano lessons at age seven and was forced to stick with it for seven years. "I learned discipline and technique," she remembers, "but the classical material didn't do anything for me. When I was 14, my parents (Sam and Alison) surprised me with a piano accordion for my birthday and said maybe I would enjoy traditional music instead." They had the uncommon wisdom to let nature rather than nurture take its course. Smith laughs at what happened next: "I was determined not to have accordion lessons after all that piano. 1 had one and got on well [with the teacher] ... and ended up going for the next four years! I wanted to connect with music, and traditional music seemed like the music of the people. For me, pop music seemed far away, like classical and jazz. I was surrounded by ceilidhs and dance bands plus Keith Dickson, my teacher, gave me tapes. Even my high school physics teacher had a ceilidh band."

Smith is now best known for the purity of her voice and the command she brings to vocals, but her first musical inspirations were the instrumentals played by The Boys of the Lough, Aly Bain, and Phil Cunningham. As for vocals. Smith notes. "Galloway is close to Ireland, so when I was a teen I was far more aware of the singing in Irish bands such as Dervish." In another detour from the conventional paths to traditional music, Smith credits the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama for making her into a truly Scottish performer. "When I went there, my knowledge of Scottish tradition was very small. 1 had experienced the instrumental side of things in ceilidh bands and I was confident with tunes, but the only singers I ever heard were on CDs. There were no local folk clubs where I grew up, but now I found myself in Glasgow, where there were all these young people who were as passionate about traditional music as I and many had been singing in folk clubs since they were ten. I took a group singing class with Alisor McMoreland and when I heard her sing 'Skipping Barefoot through the Heather' that was it. It was so Scottish it made me feel patriotic. I realized that Scotland had this big wealth of songs, but I didn't know how to find them. I learned how through teachers, archivists, and librarians, which is why I'm careful to source all the songs I sing. The Academy made me aware of my heritage. It didn't teach it per se, or insist on playing it a certain way; it's more like a rich library of what's available."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Smith's output has certainly done the Academy proud. In addition to the BBC award, she also has two superb albums to her credit: A Day Like Today (2002) and A Different Life (2005), the latter featuring vocal dexterity that set critical tongues a wagging. She's also maintained an academic's discipline and has shown that Dumfriesshire isn't as devoid of a singing tradition as most have thought. "Lowlands of Holland" is a well known song in both English and Irish, but Smith unearthed a lesser known version in Robert Ford's Vagabond Songs (1899). "The story is much the same," notes Smith, "but this version tells of a young man from Galloway, so I had to have that one. Ford didn't include a melody so I wrote one." To hear her sing it live is truly a sublime experience a delicate tune, a sad tale, and an emotive voice that transports the listener much as the lass whose thoughts lie across the sea.

Smith has several other Dumfriesshire songs in her repertoire in fact, one of her finals recitals at the Academy was devoted entirely to local songs such as "Fair Helen of Kirkconnel"--but the one that sounds the most traditional isn't: Smith's own "Edward of Morton," a tragic tale of a servant sentenced to death for resisting the amorous advances of the castle mistress. Smith recalls, "My dad first told me the tale of Edward of Morton, which he heard at a local heritage society meeting. I also found a fragment of the story in an old book. When I was in my honors year at college I needed something strong for my song-writing portfolio. I've been around Morton Castle my whole life and I walked the dog by the walls and imagined the earl and Lady Morton inside the walls. Maybe my song's not purely Scottish, but I wrote it the way I speak. For the album Jamie played the fiddle and we both felt the song had a powerful and strong feel to it," hence they added a bold arrangement.

As Smith gains confidence as a performer she's also holding fast to another lesson she says she learned at the Academy: "Folk music is passed on the oral tradition so inevitably it gets changed along the way. No matter how pure you try to be, it ends up being your own interpretation." Smith respects tradition and has expanded our knowledge of it, but she's by no means married to it. Take for instance, "Strong Winds of August," a song so melancholy that one would swear the grasses mentioned in the lyrics are laden with tears not dew. It too-sounds ancient, but that's because its themes are timeless. Smith actually picked it up in New Zealand from a Scottish ex-pat named Bob MCNeill and decided to add a cello part on the album, which gives it resonant depth. (A college friend, sarah Murray, did the honors.) By contrast, the band's version of the Child Ballad "The Lochmaben Piper" has decided bluegrass coloring. Smith originally got the tune from a book, but the wild qualities of the present tune owe a debt to American melody-making. "Emily and I are huge bluegrass fans," admits McLennan. "We listen to Tim O'Brien, Darrell Scott, and Alison Krauss all the time. Especially Krauss; Emily adores her."

Well what else would one expect a New Zealander playing in a Scottish trio to say? McClennan is the musical fire to Smith's control. He has a wry sense of humor and puts one in mind of the sort who'd at least contemplate selling his soul for fancy fiddle licks. His own musical path is as serendipitous as Smith's. He was a cofounder of Crannog, for a time New Zealand's premier Celtic band, though most of its members now live in Ireland. McClennan also left his home in Hamilton, New Zealand, in 1999, because, "I wanted to play more music and there simply wasn't enough opportunity to do so." He landed in Glasgow about the time Smith was a student there, but typical of how things happen for them, their relationship didn't begin over prattles or porridge; they met in Prague. (Of course!)

Smith and McClennan prefer to go on feelings and fortune rather than imposing preconceived notions or time-bound standards upon their music. "We try to be the best we can be, but feeling and technique need to go hand in hand," says Smith, adding the admission, "I've never been one to sit down and practice four or five hours a day. It took a long time for people to see me as a singer and not just an accordion player, so I spend more time choosing songs and the instrumental sets are usually Jamie's compositions. I guess we just drifted into that pattern."

One pattern they've not "drifted" into is being predictable. When asked about the contemporary feel to their arrangement of to "It Fell About Martinmas" Smith says, "We didn't try to make it sound poppy. I found the words in an old book [Ord's Bothy Songs and Ballads] but it had no melody so I made one up and played an accordion line. I took it to band practice with the idea that I wanted it to be upbeat and it just got improved." In fact, Smith admits that she often ends up writing melodies for old songs only to be told much later of an existing tune. This mix of old and new suits her well, with the newer material getting more play these days. A Day Like Today, Smith's debut album, had just one original song--the title track--which expanded to four on A Different Life. Her next album, slated for release in September of 2007, will include more songs she's written. "Most of the new songs aren't traditional at all But they're still folk songs," she promises, Smith credits "growing in confidence" as the reason for branching out. "When I first started I tried to write traditional way as that felt comfortable to me. In the past few years people started asking me to take part in songwriting workshops, which was odd at first because didn't call myself a songwriter." Moving from Glasgow back to Dumfriesshire also aided the songwriting process. "I'm not one of those who can write a song in the back of a van," Smith asserts. "I need to be the right mood and in the right place. I moved back to the countryside, where I'm more creative. I feel hemmed in by cities."

Both her singing style and her penchant for country life often draw comparisons to Kate Rusby. Smith's response? "My pacing is a bit faster, but Kate's spectacular and a friend, so it doesn't bother me to be compared to her. I guess it's inevitable. We're both singers with similar material and we're similar in personality as well. Kate and I are both keen on our homes and our families, and we both have a sense of place. This is true of Karine Polwart as well."

When I caught up with them in April, Smith and McClennan were midway through their first U.S. tour, an abbreviated visit confined to Pennsylvania, New England, and upstate New York. Towards the end of our interview I asked Smith about another label that often gets attached to her: emerging artist. "I guess I 'emerged' from nowhere in 2002 when I won the Young Traditional Musician of the Year award. One of the things I learned from that honor was that you have to keep raising the bar to stay in the game." When pressed both she and McClennan admit that the 'emerging artist' tag "can be frustrating." After all, in addition to her stellar solo work, Smith has also been part of the Scottish Women recording sessions and concert series, and is a member of the wonderfully named traveling folk orchestra Unusual Suspects. Smith shrugs, "We're not very well known in North America so we're 'emerging' over here, but we're pretty well known in Denmark and Germany. We've been playing music fulltime for five years. That's not very long in the scheme of things, but sometimes it feels that way."

As we wrapped things up Smith spoke again of how "proud" she was to be an ambassador not just of Dumfries music, but of Scottish culture. "I admit, every time I hear the pipes it gives me a surge of nostalgia for Scotland. I don't think we speak highly enough of the little Country." She's certainly doing her part to advance Alba's glories and to renew interest in her own littler corner of it And anyone lucky enough to catch one of her live shows will instantly put a lid on that 'emerging artist' can of nonsense. I asked Emily if there was a title for the new album. "Not yet," she replied. "Any ideas?" "How about Emerged?" I suggested. She giggled and retorted, "You can say that, but I doubt if I can." Consider it said.