48
Rachel Newton and Mairearad Green are both well-known and highly respected members of the Scottish folk music scene and have moved in similar circles for the last decade or so, both creating distinctive and often boundary-pushing folk music which often touches on their shared Gaelic heritage. The fact that they are also cousins made it all the more likely that they would, at some point, come together to make an album as a duo. But the familial bond which underpins Anna Bhàn is more than just a partnership of convenience: the album is dedicated to (and, in part, based on the life of) their shared great-great-grandmother. Anna lived on the highland peninsula of Coigach at a time when the landscape and people’s relationship to it was changing at an unprecedented rate. This was particularly true of Scotland, where the Highland Clearances forced many rural working people – mainly tenant farmers and their families – away from their land in the name of agricultural improvement.
This alone would make Anna Bhàn’s life worth documenting, but on top of this, she had a very specific and frankly astonishing part to play in the story of the Clearances. In 1852/53, the Coigach area was earmarked for clearance, and a sheriff was sent with an eviction notice. Anna Bhàn, along with a group of other Coigach residents – mostly women – stripped the official and burned his paperwork before sending him packing on his boat. The Coigach resistance was one of a small handful of successful attempts to fight back against landlords and has only recently gained wider recognition for its social and historical importance.
Green and Newton are the ideal custodians of this heritage, not only because of their genealogical links to the area but also because of their deep connection with Gaelic musical traditions. Green plays accordion, Highland pipes, small pipes and piano, while Newton is an accomplished harpist (and plays viola here). They piece together historical tidbits of tune and spoken word combined with an experimental approach to songcraft that rests on the evocative and sometimes uneasy drone of Green’s pipes and Newton’s adroit, expressive harp playing. The tracks range from biographical studies to wild, impressionistic landscape pieces. In the former camp are the title track – a seemingly simple lyric that recounts events from Anna’s daily life with plainspoken joy and an irresistible melody – and Lady Stafford, which kindles with a quiet, justified resentment against the landowning classes and features beautiful passages of harp and piano.
1852, with its aching melody, is a simple love song to a patch of land, and also somehow a psychologically complex exploration of the attachment people can feel to a place. The instrumental Ceit Bheag is more sombre in tone, with Green’s pipes leading the way with a quiet anger and a strange kind of propulsiveness. Another instrumental, The Burning of the Writs, is marked by passages of defiance, wit and joy, the quick interchange of pipes and harp blustering up beautifully against the background drone. Not Today, Nor Tomorrow focuses on that sense of defiance first with verse borrowed from Gaelic-language poet Lisa MacDonald and then with a repurposed quotation from an unnamed Coigach resident from Anna’s time.
This is an album that has a lot to say on a subject that has previously been somewhat glossed over by history, and the duo go about it in sometimes unexpected but always effective ways. Achnahaird records Green and Newton’s uncle in a domestic setting, talking about the clearances. Not only is this important oral history, it also serves to ground the album in a distinct space; not only a geographical sense of place but a very recognisable living space, somewhere people talk naturally and comfortably. These details all help to bring home the very real, very human aspects of the history.
Elsewhere, historical details are eschewed in favour of the impressionistic sweep of the music, though these pieces are no less important: The Wick Fishermen, for example, is a multifaceted and ever-changing thing, by turns calm and skittish, which allows both musicians to play to their strengths. Am Banais, the album’s only completely traditional song, has a wild and undaunted feel to it, while closing track Tha Sinn an Seo is almost preternaturally redolent of the highland landscape, the pipes calling to mind images of mountain and loch without ever resorting to cliche. This is the key to Anna Bhàn’s strength: it’s not about nostalgia, and it’s more than just a simple document of a time long gone. It is history in the very living sense of the word, ripe and ardent, and not afraid to look forward.
Anna Bhàn (4th October 2024) Self Released
