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 collected these songs from people using a method that fits the album’s strange, rustic mood: she rode her horse, Maisie, across Argyll (“you pay attention to all your senses, have different conversations with people and connect to older ways of doing things,” she writes in the liner notes of this journey; she’s also made a 15-minute film). On Auld Horse, her spoken words ripple against field recordings of water, the fabulous double bass of Stevie Jones (Alasdair Roberts, Sounds of Yell) and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh’s rumbling viola. Another spoken word track, Health, Wealth a Yer Days, is warmed by handclaps and Oliver Pitt’s bouzouki.
