folk music concert: The Gothard Sisters

I first heard of the Gothard Sisters on the concert calendar from the Freight and Salvage. It described their music as having folk, Celtic, classical, and new age influence, and, though the latter two influences turned out to be homeopathic in quantity, the list intrigued me enough that I looked the group up on YouTube. And the first two tracks I tried happened to be these:





And that was it: I said, I have to hear this group.

The concert turned out as good as I expected, especially the older material, because though they've been around for some time (though never at the Freight before), their performing quality has increased markedly in the last few years.

The repertoire was about half instrumentals (at least mostly original compositions) in an Irish dance tune vein, some of them accompanied by actual Irish step dancing at which all three sisters are accomplished; a quarter original songs, including the above "Meet Me at Dawn"; and a quarter cover songs, from the standard English/Celtic folk catalog ("Scarborough Fair," "The Wild Rover," "Wild Mountain Thyme") and for dessert a couple more contemporary numbers (John Denver's "Country Roads," Disney's "Touch the Sky").

The sisters, all late 20s/early 30s, hail from the Seattle suburbs (Edmonds, to be precise). In the instrumental pieces they all played on a wide battery, but in the songs they mostly stuck to a lineup of Willow on violin, Greta on guitar, and Solana principal vocalist and percussion.

Best anecdote of the evening: a story of the TSA agent who held up the line by trying to identify all their instruments through the x-ray machine. The only one that stumped him was the mandolin, which he eventually identified as a "hobbit guitar." And ever since then, that's what it is in the Gothard household.

This music isn't as heavyweight as that of my favorite folk sister groups of the past, like the Roches or the McGarrigles, but the purpose of music is to be enjoyed, whatever its density. I enjoyed this enough that I now count myself as a Gothard Sisters fan, and I came home with a CD and a t-shirt.