"What's the matter, Kate, what's the matter, woman?"
Margaret MacArthur, folklorist, singer, teacher, performer. We didn't know one another very well, but I enjoyed every conversation I had with her in the first years of the aughts. I once had ice cream in Manhattan with her and the Kossoy Sisters and two other friends after a folk festival. Seeing her there, with her lace and flowery old-fashioned dress and long white hair, was like seeing a great blue heron walking to the subway. But she was a woman of the world--grew up outside Chicago, lived in the Southwest, moved all over the US and only settled in Vermont in the 1950s when she and her husband were raising their kids. She just dressed like The Source Singer that we all have in our imaginations, who lives on a mountaintop somewhere miles from any town and bakes all her own bread.
She died in 2006. Something or other is always calling her back to my mind. If it's not the songs I've learned from her, then it's sure to be someone else knowing stuff they could only have learned from her, or a view through mountains that reminds me of "Reynardine" the way she sang it. If it's not that, then it's some funny little rhyme or short song that doesn't quite fit anywhere else. She has a lot of them on "Vermont Ballads and Broadsides."
There's a FB post going around with a link to Margaret MacArthur's performance at the Library of Congress. One hour and four minutes of solo concert. She sings, she chats, she talks about her own informants and she plays the "MacArthur harp" (a novelty harp-zither from the early 1900s which is generally called by her name these days) and mountain dulcimer. Skip over the ponderous introductions and go straight to Margaret talking to the audience.
She died in 2006. Something or other is always calling her back to my mind. If it's not the songs I've learned from her, then it's sure to be someone else knowing stuff they could only have learned from her, or a view through mountains that reminds me of "Reynardine" the way she sang it. If it's not that, then it's some funny little rhyme or short song that doesn't quite fit anywhere else. She has a lot of them on "Vermont Ballads and Broadsides."
There's a FB post going around with a link to Margaret MacArthur's performance at the Library of Congress. One hour and four minutes of solo concert. She sings, she chats, she talks about her own informants and she plays the "MacArthur harp" (a novelty harp-zither from the early 1900s which is generally called by her name these days) and mountain dulcimer. Skip over the ponderous introductions and go straight to Margaret talking to the audience.