Stellar Songsters “From Away” Make Merry At MERA

Mar 21, 2013

Lovers of folk music packed the MERA school house in McDonalds Corners on March 9 to welcome two exceptional singer/songwriters who are making waves in the folk/roots traditions both here and abroad.

P.E.I. songstress Catherine MacLellan took to the stage first and impressed the crowd with her sultry, sensitive voice, pensive lyrics and strong acoustic playing. Guitar virtuoso Chris Gauthier joined her on stage and more than held his own with his deft guitar soloing and spot on harmonies. The two played a beefy set of MacLellan’s mid-tempo newer original tunes, which she joked was perhaps due to an inherited short term memory from her uncle. Tunes like her opener, “Frost in the Hollows” demonstrated both her deep sensual and seemingly effortless vocal gifts and her solid and strong finger picking, with the latter providing the rhythmic foundation to many of her songs. The duo’s beautifully balanced and timed harmonies lead one to believe that these two have been playing side by side for a long while.

Blame it perhaps on the whiteout winters on PEI, but MacLellan's songs have a unique, nest-like coziness that fully envelopes the listener and lovingly lulls them along on a dreamy musical trip that is simultaneously wondrous and thought provoking. In one new song, yet to be named, she speaks of her “love/hate relationship with winter”. In it MacLellan wonders “if bears can sleep through these long snowy days, it’s only fair that we can do the same.” Her song, “Trickle Down Rain”, one that she wrote after seven straight weeks of PEI rain had a soft, lazy feel, a mood that seems to bring her and her listeners comfort. MacLellan has that rare ability to get up close and very personal with her audience and she spoke at length of what inspires her: her now deceased grandmother Louella from Manitoba, who loved curling but not so much little babies, and who inspired her to write one plucky, old style bluegrass tune in which MacLellan sang, “The last time I saw her she was smiling; looked like she had one last game to play.”

For her finale MacLellan thrilled the crowd with a version of her father Gene MacLellan’s famed Canadian hit “Snowbird”.

Jonathan Byrd, the flat-pickin’ son of a Baptist preacher man, is a seventh generation flat picker who hails from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and his star has long been on the rise. Byrd seems to have a soft spot for Canada and recorded his last three musical offerings here. He delighted the MERA crowd with a selection of his original musical yarns, with which he has toured all over North America and Europe. Byrd is a natural storyteller and was introduced by Danny Sullivan of Shakey Acres as a songster who writes “some of the best songs going.” Byrd jumped head long into his set with “I was an Oak Tree” a slow, sweet lament that has come to exemplify his triple treat talents as a poet, accomplished picker and soulful singer. Byrd has one of those southern, honest, pure and poetic voices that cuts right to the heart and can easily change mood depending on what kind of tale he is in the mood to tell.

At MERA he told it all. In “I Saw a Coyote” he sang tenderly of one fellow down on his luck who “hugged the brush and ran the ridge, dropped down and headed for the bridge, quiet as the rising moon...with a barbed wire scar across the face, fading like a midnight mile.”

Chris Bartos, who accompanied Byrd admirably on guitar, violin and mandolin, masterfully assisted him in setting the mood with some very well played special effects. Bartos mirrored this sombre tale to perfection with his exquisite fiddle soloing.

Some of Byrd's lighter side shone through in his southern-flavored, farmyard favorite “Chicken Wire”, a toe-tappin' ditty about a beloved little hen that needs a little fencing in. Byrd let out his earthier, gospel North Carolina roots with his a capella tune “Poor Johnny”, which tells of a poor soul who drowns in the lake. The song had the crowd belting out the chorus in time with his hand claps.

Like MacLellan, Byrd also let the crowd in on some of his personal life; his marriage to a Jewish woman from New York and his immediate need to explain in his first love letter to her his love for pig meat. With that he launched into “White Oak Wood”, a tune that tells of the requirement for that particular type of wood to cook one 300lb pig. He spoke of his love for Texas “ the well spring of song writing” that inspired “River Run Dry”, a tune he co-wrote with Toronto singer/songwriter Corin Raymond in Grafton, Ontario following their tour of the southern states.

Before he closed the show, Byrd reminded the audience of his great love for this country and recited Gabrielle Roy’s quote on the back of our $20 bill, a quote that he said remains his “favorite thing on any money in the world”. He read to the crowd. “Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?” No, definitely not this stellar North Carolina songster.