Get the latest gossip
Quinie: Forefowk, Mind Me review – collecting songs on horseback, this Scottish musician is alive with ideas
With folk songs gathered from a gallop across Argyll, Josie Vallely’s album is a resonant tribute to her ancestral land
Travellers’ songs sung in Scots are the focus of Josie Vallely, a gutsy, Glasgow-based artist performing as Quinie(pronounced “q-why-nee”; “young woman” in the Doric dialect), whose third album acknowledges ancestors watching over her. It includes traditional singers Lizzie Higgins, Jeannie Robertson and Sheila Stewart, whose rawness drones, speaks and soars over these 11 varied tracks, mixing tunes from fiddles, Gaelic sean-nós singing, and canntaireachd (the vocal mimicry of pipe music). Quinie’s cappellas are especially powerful: her take on Matt Armour’s 1982 ballad, Generations of Change, is no-nonsense and moving, in which a grandmother recounts her father’s life, the “lang holidays” with her grandchildren, and how “the weakness of age makes room for the young”.
Or read this on The Guardian