There is always a healthy smattering of American acts at Celtic Connections, in addition to the obligatory allocation for the Transatlantic Sessions, Iris DeMent and Pieta Brown made for a very welcome addition to the programme. Iris DeMent said at the start of her set that when the Festival organisers invited her she ‘thought nobody would turn up on a Monday night’. She was genuinely delighted to be proved wrong standing in front of a good-sized, appreciative audience, many of whom knew her music.
The evening opened with singer/guitarist Pieta Brown, who happens to be Iris DeMent’s stepdaughter (Iris is married to folk singer Greg Brown). She was joined from the off by two characters from closer to home, both very familiar on Celtic Connections stages, with the Transatlantic Sessions and otherwise. At the end of her first number Bring Me, taken from her most recent album Freeway, Pieta said that she had “come all the way from Ohio to play with Mike McGoldrick and John McCusker“. Throughout, they played their usual flute/whistle and fiddle combination with Mike also playing tenor guitar. Pieta’s vocals hold a striking intimacy and warmth, accentuated by the spaciousness in the arrangements and a slower pace than that of her contemporaries which brings a focus to her singing. The effect at times can be to hear her voice as another instrument in the broader soundscape, rather than necessarily hearing every word or line, and Mike and John’s sparse, sympathetic accompaniment supported Pieta’s approach perfectly.
Ask For More, another song from Freeway, came next, building slowly and emerging with a film-like open prairie quality – an outtake from Paris, Texas maybe: “just hold me now through the eye of the storm, and then I won’t …ask for more”. She introduced one number by describing how seeing the film Coal Miner’s Daughter at a young age had been the start of a deep admiration for Loretta Lynn and her music. In My Mind I Was Talking To Loretta Lynn makes the connection between contemporary issues in women’s lives and the challenges that Loretta documented in her biography. On In The Light, a song Pieta recorded in collaboration with Calexico, John’s fiddle and Mike’s whistle conjure the ebb and flow of the waves as Pieta draws an analogy between the magic of the light and being close to someone despite being separated by distance or time. It came as no surprise when Pieta talked about growing up in a remote, rural area, with no running water – that background seemed to imbue her whole delightful performance with a strong atmospheric sense of wide-open places.
Despite only releasing five albums since her 1992 debut album Infamous Angel, it was clear from the enthusiastic welcome that her fans cherish the opportunity see her perform live. Iris played the first few numbers solo, sitting at the piano, starting with Mornin’ Glory, an achingly beautiful and, like many of Iris’s songs, disarmingly simple, about the ephemeral nature of morning sunlight on flowers in a garden. She introduced Sing The Delta, the title track from her most recent (2012) album of original material, by describing writing it in the context of her mother dying and Pieta going on a trip to the area that Iris’ family came from. It’s a nostalgic autobiographical song – “It’s where my people on both sides, going back eked out a living farmin’ and fillin’ cotton sacks” – sung in an understated, reflective way. Iris’s told us about her most recent album, The Trackless Woods (reviewed here). She had been lent a book by a friend of poems by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and was about, after a long interval, to return it unread when she thought she should at least read the poems so she could answer her friend if asked for an opinion about the book. Like A White Stone was the first poem Iris read and, deeply drawn to the words on the page, she instantly began composing a melody to go with the poem. It was striking listening to the song live how well suited the poet’s words are to Iris’s vocal and musical style.
Iris reached back to Infamous Angel for These Hills, the first number with her new backing band. Switching from piano to guitar, she was unexpectedly joined on stage by Mike McGoldrick and John McCusker for most of the rest of the show. Iris said when she learned that they were playing with Pieta, she didn’t want to lose out on the opportunity of having them play with her. That they hadn’t played together before was clear when Iris said that Mike’s uillean pipes were an instrument she hadn’t come across but immediately liked, and with good reason as the fiddle and pipes subtly echoed the melancholy in These Hills. The Night I Learned How Not To Pray was preceded by Iris talking about growing up in a religious family, where music was an essential aspect, to the extent that her mother would say: “we ain’t going to that church if they don’t play good music”. The music self-evidently carried on for Iris but, as the song title suggests, religion didn’t, the lyric telling of a harrowing childhood tragedy which leads to the questioning of religious views.
From the audience response to the opening lines, it was apparent that Our Town is probably Iris’s best-known song. It was also the first song she ever wrote at the age of 25. ‘Our Town’ has stood up well, with the subject matter of decimated mid-West towns no less relevant today, and its catchy chorus inevitably eliciting broad audience participation. Iris returned to the piano for another connection, this time a Russian one, with the evocative The Cherry Orchard, based on the Chekhov play of the same name and written after Iris had taken a Russian Literature class. For the last few numbers, Iris returned to solo piano. The show coincided with Martin Luther King Day, and Iris used that opportunity to play How Long about the reality of how poverty impacts on people’s lives in the U.S. She introduced the song by saying that ‘250,000 people die annually from the effects of poverty and in a moral world that would be called a crisis’, going on the dedicate it to ‘people who want to lift up everybody, not just the 1%’. A powerful, heartfelt new song, Iris left us in no doubt that something should change, including the line: “Justice falls down like water”. Iris DeMent gave a profoundly satisfying performance at the crossroads of country, folk and gospel, playing intricate melodies and singing in an edgy, versatile voice that sounds alluringly rooted in the past.