Lead voice in the country woman's association

It’s all the same kind of music. I’ve dabbled in traditional music and did a couple of tours with The Chieftains, so I’ve definitely been educated

WHEN ALLISON Moorer steps on stage with Paul Brady, Aly Bain, Jerry Douglas and a host of others for the Transatlantic Sessionsat the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin later this month, the American country singer/songwriter believes she will be just coming home. "It's all the same kind of music," she says from her Woodstock home in upstate New York. "I've dabbled in traditional music and I did a couple of tours with The Chieftains, so I've definitely been educated.

“And when it comes to singer- songwriters, what we do is not that far removed from straight folk music and traditional music. The form has not evolved that much when it gets down to it. You can boil it down to its essence and still you have words and music. There are all kinds of different directions it can go in, but it’s still pretty much the same thing. I consider myself country and we definitely know the roots of country music. It makes sense to me; I don’t see it as a stretch at all.”

Alabama-born Moorer (38) is going through something of a blissful period in both her personal and professional life. Last year, she gave birth to her first-born John Henry Earle following her marriage, her second, to singer/songwriter Steve Earle, and she also released Crows, an album she rightly considers “the best one I’ve ever done”. It is a very impressive and intense record, laced with thoughtful songs and typically riveting singing.

“Well,” she recalls, “I wrote most of the record before I knew I was pregnant. Actually, I wrote a lot of it after I suffered a miscarriage, so there is some of that in there. There is quite a bit of self-examination, quite a bit of existential angst there, but I always try to juxtapose that with something that other people can relate to, God knows I don’t want to bore anybody with journal entries!

“So it is just about questioning, about grown-up adult life. It’s about the things I sometimes think about: it’s about the struggle to be happy, the choice to be happy. It’s about all those things. I think it is a real grown-up record for want of a better word.”

Behind her soft Southern drawl, Moorer gives the impression of somebody who values her privacy, which might seem surprising for a woman who earned a degree in public relations. However, her caution is understandable. Her life story has been marked by extraordinary tragedy; her father killed himself after killing her mother in 1986. For Allison Moorer and her sister, the equally brilliant singer/songwriter Shelby Lynne, to survive this pain they have had to dig deep, as their work testifies.

But as a performer, forced to live life in public, how does she cope with the legacy of the past?

“You do. Well, you either do or you don’t, right? It happened a very long time ago, gosh 24 years ago, so I have lived most of my life having had that happen and it’s not something I dwell on. I feel that my parents have been reduced to these tragic figures and that’s not fair. I certainly don’t think of them that way. They died tragically and it was a terrible thing and I certainly miss them, and especially now that I’ve had a child I miss them more but in a much different way. But I guess you could say that I’m used to it.”

Yet she admits that going through such an experience makes you more guarded. “I think it has. Yes, I am private because simply there are days when I don’t want to share those details with someone who doesn’t know. It’s not a very fun thing to talk about.”

What is fun is her reactivated onstage relationship with her sister. “We’ve just done some shows together and they could not have gone better. We just loved, loved doing them. And we hope to make an album together next year. A proper tour will follow that and hopefully we’ll get over there to share it with you guys. We’ve both wanted to do it for a very long time and we are just having fun exploring where it can go and what we can do because when we get together it seems limitless. Our two voices together is something that is really special . . . It’s about knowing each other, about a sixth sense, it can’t be explained.”

It’s certainly stirs the imagination. While Shelby Lynne is arguably the most seductive country soul singer this side of Dusty Springfield, with each new album Allison Moorer’s voice gets richer, more honeyed, with greater gospel leanings.

“We’re very different singers but there are some things that are unavoidable as to sounding alike – we’re sisters!”

Another side project on the cards is a studio collaboration with husband Steve Earle: “It’s on the list of things to do and hopefully we’ll get around to it before we die.” But right now, it takes them all their time to juggle their separate schedules to see as much as they can of each other.

“We try to time them [the tours] so that when he is playing I’ll go along and he’ll do the same. He came along for those shows with my sister and he minded our baby. We try to be together as much as we can; those absences [on the road] are things we don’t like. It’s just a huge juggling act, you’ve got to keep all the balls in the air somehow.”

Allison Moorer will be appearing with Aly Bain, Jerry Douglas and special guests: Paul Brady, Ashley Cleveland, Julie Fowlis, Tim O'Brien, Dirk Powell and many more at the Transatlantic Sessionson Saturday, January 29th, in the Grand Canal Theatre, Dublin. Her album Crowsis available on Rykodisc.