Celtic Connections: Scots Women
Glasgow City Halls - 03/02/24
Twenty years ago the Scots Women show at Celtic Connections not only filled venues but went on tour and spun off a popular album as well. Twenty years is reckoned to be a generation so it seemed like the time was right to revive the show with some of the original contributors and some of the new voices that have emerged since the original.
The whole company took to the stage at the start of the show for a slightly raggedy reading of Matt Armour’s classic, the appropriately titled ‘Generations of Change’. The song did, however, give an early hearing to the individual voices we were going to be hearing over the course of the evening. First up was former Young Trad winner Clare Hastings with a sweet Shetland lullaby accompanied by a small house band of Gnoss’s Graham Rorie (fiddle and mandolin) and Aidan Moodie (guitar), with pianist Dan Brown. The band provided spare and sympathetic accompaniment throughout, doing well to follow the idiosyncrasies of singers who are used to performing unaccompanied, and pulling the timing around rather than having to be in lock step with a backing.
In among the chestnuts like ‘The Shearin’s No For You’, ‘Follow the Heron’ (curiously the only song by a female writer featured) and ‘Now Westlin Winds’ there were one or two surprises, not least Corrina Hewat’s witty setting of poet Sidney Goodsir Smith’s ‘Aa My Life’, all rippling harp and harmonics. Chestnut though Ewan MacColl’s ‘Song of the Fish-Gutters’ may be, it was brought to sparkling life in an entirely original arrangement by the family trio, Tripple, deploying vocables and imaginative harmonies.
Of the individual voices veteran Sheena Wellington showed that the passage of the years has done little to diminish her power as a singer as demonstrated on another setting of a Scottish poet, William Soutar in this instance. Elspeth Cowie likewise was well on point with her take on the ballad ‘Alison Cross’, a favourite of Lizzie Higgins, a clear influence on Natalie Chalmers who at times seemed to be channelling the late Traveller singer.
The closing songs, ‘Happy We’ve Been Aathegither’ and Sheila Stewart’s ‘The Parting Glass’ reminded us of the significant figures from the first shows who are no longer with us. As Sheena Wellington pointed out, the emergence since that time of younger women confident in their tradition is a fitting legacy of that older generation.