Making it her own

Traditional Singer of the Year Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill is defined by her gift for marrying old and new. She talks to Siobhan Long

'You can't teach someone how to sing. The only way you learn to sing is to listen." Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill takes no prisoners when it comes to the subject of singing. She is to traditional singing what Sammy Davis jnr was to the Las Vegas cabaret circuit, and what German singer Ute Lemper is to the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill: the quintessential interpreter, capable of breathing new life into the lynchpins of the tradition, and yet never shirking the challenge of a new song, an untold story.

"The flow of the words, the feel of the words and the melody - these all have to work together for me to want to sing the song in the first place," Ní Dhomhnaill adds, in an attempt to pinpoint that axis where song and singer intersect. "You have to feel the whole experience. Traditional music just doesn't sound right if it's too trained. It loses the total naturalness. When I was young, I was told: 'tar leat an amhrán agus déan do rud fhéin leis' ('listen, and then make it your own')."

Honoured last weekend by TG4 in the Gradam Ceoil Awards as Traditional Singer of the Year, Ní Domhnaill is not a singer prone to flowery reminiscences of a youth which was a shrine to the tradition. Her family home was a place where music of all kinds was embraced. Broadway standards loped up alongside Co Donegal's finest sean-nós songs like blood brothers, each afforded their own identity, and both bonded by a fundamental love of music.

Although Ní Domhnaill grew up in Co Meath, where her grandparents moved during the Land Commission resettlements, her father, Aodh Ó Domhnaill, was a teacher and music collector. His encounters with singers and musicians left a deep mark on the young Maighread.

"My father also loved jazz," she recalls with a smile, "and my mother loved operettas and the shows, so there was that big body of music all around us. My father's first passion though, was traditional song, and as small children, in Rannafast during the school holidays, we would go around with him while he collected.

"I remember sitting on the stone step, listening to someone inside singing a song, and then we'd go off swimming. There was a magical thing created in Donegal. It was an extraordinary experience."

It was while Maighread and her sister and brother, Tríona and Micheál, were in summer college that they encountered Dáithí Sproule (now Altan's Stateside guitarist), with whom they formed the groundbreaking group, Skara Brae. They recorded their debut album in 1970 (when Maighread was aged 15), which is still seen as a turning point in the tradition, primarily because of its inventive song arrangements. Ní Dhomhnaill is quick to dispel any misconceptions that Skara Brae's influences stretched no further than the Donegal county boundaries.

"At the time we became Skara Brae, the Beatles were big, Pentangle and Steeleye Span were on the scene, and we got together originally for a college concert," she says. "We put harmonies to the songs, and added guitar accompaniment. Clannad would have been around at the same time, and they and others were listening to what we were doing."

Drawing on the endless store of songs in the possession of their aunt, Néilí Ní Dhomhnaill, Maighread, Tríona and Micheál were lucky enough to be able to draw the water from the well themselves. Neilí's song store was one of the richest in the country, and it was through the women that songs were passed down through the generations, Maighread notes.

"My aunt Neilí began to feel that she was on a mission, and that she needed to pass on these songs to her family," she says. "Micheál spent a lot of time with her, collecting the songs, and after that my husband, Cathal started collecting from her as well."

As a young nurse, Maighread Ní Dhomhnaill squeezed her singing into the few gaps left by her day job, while Micheál and Tríona forged new ground with the Bothy Band. Dublin in the 1970s was undergoing a transformation in live music, with a burgeoning folk-club scene. It was here that Maighread began to forge her own identity as a singer, independent of the Ní Dhomhnaill clan.

"I remember working until 10 at night," she says, laughing. "And then I'd throw off the veil, leave the Mater and run down to Slattery's for the last hour of the night! People like Tommy Munnelly, Tom Crean, Kevin Conneff and Seán Corcoran were fantastic, and that helped me hugely to get my own repertoire together, apart from Skara Brae."

The beating heart of the song tradition is its openness to the new, and its willingness to integrate it with the old. Ní Dhomhnaill's father, Aodh, penned a number of fine songs, including the magnificent Amhrán Hiúdaí Pheadaí Éamoinn, which could have been written as readily two centuries ago, so sympathetic was it to the unwritten grammar of the tradition. Ní Dhomhnaill's repertoire is defined by her gutsiness, her determination to marry old and new, and she makes no bones about her delight in entering that netherworld where she and her sister, Tríona, sing harmonies so close that they had to be divined by their shared gene pool.

"Tríona is so unique in what she does," Ní Dhomhnaill says. "I've seen her harmonise with other people, but when we do it together, we become one voice. Believe it or not, I can't do harmony, but she can simply take a tune and do anything with it. I really feel that what we have is unique."

The evolution of the voice as an instrument is something that Ní Dhomhnaill feels is fundamental to the singer's artistic expression. Although she has only released a total of three albums (her eponymous debut in 1990, 1999's No Dowry and 2000's Idir An Dá Sholas, with Tríona), she readily acknowledges the changes in her voice over the course of the recordings.

"When I listen back to Skara Brae, I sounded like a child," she says with a chuckle. "But I suppose I was a child. But No Dowry marked the point where I really needed to sing, after a long break, and that, to me, of all my albums, was the more mature me. That was the start of the second stage of my life as a singer, and it's where I came into my own."

Life experience leaves its mark on the singer, and Ní Dhomhnaill's voice has taken more than its share of buffeting in recent years, a buffeting that's not over yet, and one that curtails her singing considerably.

"I've been battling with chronic asthma for the last five years," she says. "I'm on steroid therapies and they play havoc with the voice. When you ingest the inhaler, it coats your vocal cords and you get a reduction in voice volume on lower registers. It's very, very difficult.

"As a singer, if your voice is under threat, not alone is there the disappointment of it but there's the uncertainty as to whether the voice will stand up to the demands of a concert. It's difficult, because I'm at a time in my life when I want to sing more, and I can't. Singing is so connected to my spirit that I couldn't imagine not being able to do it. I feel I'm in my prime now and it's a huge, huge problem. Of course, the smoking ban was the biggest help for myself and for so many singers. I'm lucky, too, that I perform a lot with other people, and so I can sing a song or two and then take a rest. But there are a lot of singers out there who suffer, and as we get older, these are the problems we encounter. It's devastating."

These health issues have forced Ní Dhomhnaill to re-evaluate the way she approaches singing, as she runs the risk of losing her singing voice altogether.

"All I ever had to do was open my mouth and sing," she says. "Now, I'm cautious before a gig to make sure I'm rested. I have to prepare for the gig in a way I never had to do before. I took so much for granted. A friend of mine calls me Celine Ní Dhomhnaill, because apparently Celine Dion never opens her mouth when she's on tour! People think that opera singers can be precious about their voices, but actually your voice is very, very important and we in the traditional mode never really thought too much about it at all. Fiddles and pipes are looked after, but not voices. But my voice is my instrument. It's a precious commodity and I have to protect it."