Kate McGarrigle

Kate McGarrigle, who died in January.

The McGarrigle Sisters had their breakthrough as performers with Kate and Anna McGarrigle. That’s still most people’s favourite album, certainly it’s mine.

Sentimental, adolescent, breathy, hoky, they say.  Sure, I say, but who cares.  Here’s ‘Gentle Annie’ from The McGarrigle Hour.

The sisters made very few rules for themselves: if they liked a song, they sang it, and if it didn’t happen to be a folksong, too bad.  So they sang all sorts of things, musical hall songs, French-Canadian popular songs, even cabaret, and perennials from writers like Stephen Foster: “Gentle Annie” dates from1856. They were raised singing some of this repertory, and they tried to recreate that family-round-the-piano atmosphere in their delivery and arrangements and in whole albums like The McGarrigle Hour. On that CD they’re joined by, amongst others their friends Linda Ronstadt and Emmy-Lou Harris, Kate’s children Martha and Rufus Wainwright and Kate’s ex-husband, Loudon Wainwright. So the songs of their childhood became the songs of their present and the family of origin became the family in the present, broken-but-intact.

In their repertory, it’s as if the big shift of the 1960s never happened. When the electric guitar replaced the piano a whole inheritance was redefined. You can study it in collections of popular songs published right up to the 1960s by publishers like Allan’s. These might contain: English airs from the early 19th century, music hall songs from the 1890s, songs from the shows, popular songs from the world wars and the depression, the crooner repertory, a few standard ‘classical’ pieces like “Handel’s Largo”.  Some people of my age can remember singing these around a piano, but we are already dwindling. It’s this experience the McGarrigles evoked with a more-or-less complete absence of protective irony.

But was it so terrific, this circle around the piano? Hell no. There’s an excruciating scene in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll which brings out the petty tyrannies, the contending egos and the rifts in all that togetherness. How many people of my age even, when you get down to it, actually had this experience, with intact families – domestic harmony? Not all that many, not all that often.

Not often, either, in my own broken families. But for me the circle round the piano, a repertory that taps into the past, a place where near-enough was plenty good-enough,  – that’s still an image of happiness. Kate and Anna McGarrigle spoke to that yearning in many of us, and now Kate has gone.