American Quarterly

The age of recording is necessarily the age of nostalgia. If that truism is true, it was perhaps inevitable that phonography’s primal American scene—the Depression-era day when John and Alan Lomax captured Lead Belly warbling ballads and blues in a Louisiana jail—would birth a modern genre based on nostalgia above all. The flood of “folk music” that flowed from the Lomaxes’ exploits was fed, from the start, by northern sophisticates’ attraction to a mythic rural past they heard evoked in black and Scots rhythms from the unlettered South. In the 1960s, folk’s more-inspired exponents captured pop’s zeitgeist. [End Page 331] In the decades since, its sounds have devolved into the confessional dross heard on Sirius XM’s “Coffee House” channel: few of today’s hip youngsters who affect ties to America’s past, in work boots and APC jeans, also buy what is now sold as “folk.” But on the warm night last spring when lovers and kin of Kate McGarrigle gathered to toast one of the idiom’s greats, those truths only made the scene at Manhattan’s Town Hall feel more timely. On West 43rd Street, a packed house exulted along to performances by singers ranging from late-night ham Jimmy Fallon to pop-jazz princess Norah Jones, queer balladeer-extraordinaire Antony, and the drag performer Justin Bond, whom the New Yorker’s Hilton Als recently termed the best cabaret artist of his generation. All had come in singing tribute to a composer whose death from cancer last year, at sixty-three, has occasioned due reverence for a life that synthesized “folk tradition” and urbane sense with uncommon grace.

As on every stage where Kate McGarrigle once performed with her sister Anna, there were plenty of blood relations present. Anna McGarrigle was there, of course, along with her harmonizing brood, and so were Kate’s more extrovert kids: Rufus Wainwright, the baroquely talented crooner-keyboardist, and his exceptional little sister, the torch-singing songwriter Martha Wainwright (to say nothing of the new baby boy Martha rocked on her hip while singing “Love Over and Over”). The scene onstage evoked a time when people bought music not on iTunes but on sheets of paper, and when singing around a hearth was how families rode out the winter. But this tableau, like the songs by two sisters who at once exemplified and undercut the “folk revival’s” aims, evoked much more than simple longing for a bygone world. Here were sounds not merely born of the differences that mark our urban lives but able to limn the past from which they came—namely, the racial dramas around which all our music turns.

From Kate McGarrigle’s “Work Song” (1971), performed at Town Hall by Justin Bond:

Back before the blues were blue When the good ol’ songs were new Songs that may no longer please us ’Bout the darkies, about Jesus Mississippi minstrels color of molasses Strummed their banjos to entertain their massas Some said garbage, others cried art You couldn’t call it soul, you had to call it heart [End Page 332]

The McGarrigle sisters were not the sixties’ only woolen-wearing folkies to turn old sounds into modern art. But they stood out, from the start, for a success at doing so made still more piquant by their also exuding more than a hint of that most prized and nebulous quality of the folk themselves: authenticity. Born in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal, their mother was a French Quebecer with twelve siblings, their father a Scots-Irishman from the Maritimes, who, as Kate was fond of saying, “was born in the 19th century.” In their childhood home, singing in the parlor was a way to pass...