weee are Lucy and Suzzy

Last Friday I went to a folk music concert, I did. I headed up to the Freight to hear Suzzy Roche, old favorite from the days she was in a group with her sisters, now touring with her daughter instead. "Hi," the latter said from the stage, "I'm Lucy Wainwright Roche." "And I'm her mother," added the former. I don't know how much stage work they've done as a duo, but they have put out two albums together. I didn't have those, but I do now.

Suzzy was always the most flamboyant of the Roches, and her clothing still is. In what I guess is still a typical look for her, she was wearing tennis shoes over black leggings, along with a lot of other stuff not convenient to describe. Her voice has only graveled a little with age. But her song-writing has sobered, mostly, and there was a lot of serious quiet stuff here, good stuff for a folk concert.

Lucy, more conventionally folky in jeans with a shirt-tail hanging out, has a high light voice like her Aunt Terre's, though not as stratospheric. Her songwriting too suggests the same mode. The two made interesting vocal harmonies together, sometimes abandoning the melody entirely for descant and harmony. Some of this could be heard in the two covers of songs I actually know, "Both Sides Now" and the Beatles' "For No One." (There was another cover that made everyone laugh except me: since I didn't know the song I didn't get the joke.)

One other person there I knew, Rachel H.