JULIE FOWLIS
Friday, 8 p.m.
St. James Hall
Presented by the Rogue Folk Club
Tickets $25 from roguefolk.bc.ca
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How do you say, "Everybody dance now" in Scottish Gaelic? Well, translation isn't an exact science, but it might be something like "gabh òran" which means, "give us a song!" and is a call to bring on a lively fiddle number that you can dance to. Julie Fowlis is a young Scottish singer from the windswept islands of the Hebrides who "plays a bit o' the penny whistle" and knows how to answer that call, in Gaelic no less. She's dropping in to Vancouver this week to give us a few songs from her new album, Cuilidh, meaning "treasure trove." She and her husband, Irish fiddle player Eamon Doorley, are embarking on tour of North America, spreading the gospel of Gaelic wherever they go.
There are a lot of acts out there doing traditional music from the British Isles, but Julie Fowlis is the cream of the crop. BBC Radio 2 called her "Folk Singer of the Year" for 2008, and she was also voted Gaelic Singer of the Year 2007 at the Scots Traditional Music Awards. She comes from North Uist, a small, isolated town -- one of the few places in the world where Scottish Gaelic is still spoken in the streets. Fowlis feels a responsibility to keep using the language in her music. "Gaelic is a minority language -- it's under threat -- so sometimes when I'm singing I have a weight on my shoulders."
Scottish Gaelic is spoken by a total of 60,000 people, a mere one per cent of the Scottish population. "It was my mother's native tongue," says Fowlis, "but it used to be looked down on and it wasn't even recognized as an official language in Scotland until 2005. So people who spoke it couldn't get services, like court translation, in their own language." That has changed now, and Gaelic is enjoying a bit of a renaissance. "They've just launched www.mygaelic.com, the first Gaelic social networking site in Scotland," says Fowlis enthusiastically. "It's like Gaelic Facebook. Young people can go on there and talk to their friends in Gaelic."
In the absence of court translators, one of the ways Scottish Gaelic has been preserved is through "waulking songs," which, as Fowlis explains, are "songs of work." Fowlis performs music that comes from the area she grew up in, and it is music that spans the centuries. "We know that people back then sang to accompany all the work they did," she says, "the rhythms depended on work you were doing, whether it was slow and steady, or faster paced. It could be from every part of life -- anything from churning butter to milking cattle, to using a spinning wheel." Fowlis says that while the tradition of singing while you work has largely disappeared in the Hebrides, the songs remain part of a common vocabulary.
Fowlis is a multi-instrumentalist, but bagpipes are her first love. She picked them up while still in elementary school. "I attended a tiny school, and my teacher happened to be an amazing traditional singer of songs," says Fowlis, adding "I still go back to her now and she gives me songs."
Fowlis takes these early Scottish songs and presents them with her own light and lilting voice. The effect, provided you don't understand Gaelic well enough to know that she's singing about shearing sheep, is other-worldly and uplifting. It's the kind of music that can make your day -- so it's interesting to note that she became a performer almost by accident. One pivotal year her mother got sick, and Fowlis says, "My whole perception of myself and my life changed in that year. I handed in my resignation for my job -- and I gave myself a year to go into performing. There was never any grand plan -- I just fell into it." It's been a freefall that has lasted over five years now, and thankfully shows no signs of letting up.
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