 |
Susan McKeown (born February 6, 1967) is an Irish folk singer, songwriter, arranger and producer.
|
Susan McKeown (born February 6, 1967) is an Irish folk singer, songwriter, arranger and producer.
Susan McKeown was born on February 6, 1967, in Terenure, Dublin, Ireland. [1] She briefly attended the Municipal College of Music, Chatham Row, Dublin—now incorporated into the Dublin Institute of Technology)—as a teenager before abandoning a potential career in opera order to sing folk and rock. Together with John Doyle, McKeown formed The Chanting House in 1989. Mainly performing as a duo, they toured Europe with Donogh Hennessy and other musicians, playing original songs and traditional tunes. They released a cassette-only album titled The Chanting House in 1990.
Upon graduating from University College Dublin, McKeown was awarded a scholarship to attend the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Manhattan. In 1990, with a bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland, she relocated to New York City. Doyle followed and they were soon to join forces with Seamus Egan and Eileen Ivers, with whom they recorded one live cassette and one track, "If I Were You" (a song penned by McKeown), which they contributed to the album Straight Outta Ireland in 1993.
McKeown was a regular performer at the coffeehouse Sin-é along with emerging songwriters Jeff Buckley, Dorothy Scott, Gerry Leonard, Deirdre Correia, Jack McKeever and began writing more songs with encouragement from musician and producer Jimi Daley (featured in the documentary Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley). [2] With Chris Cunningham, Michelle Kinney, Lindsey Horner and Joe Trump, as "Susan McKeown and the Chanting House" McKeown performed at clubs such as Sin-é, Fez, The Bottom Line and the Bowery Ballroom, and recorded a cassette album,Snakes, in 1993. But it was the release of Bones in 1995—produced by Daley—that garnered her international attention and launched her touring and recording career. The latter featured original songs with her take on a centuries-old keen (caoineadh) and an arrangement of Robert Burns' "Westlin' Winds", later recorded by Fairport Convention.
In 1997, she recorded three albums: her own Bushes & Briars (Alula); Peter & Wendy, the soundtrack to the Obie Award-winning Mabou Mines theatrical production of the same name, which was composed by Johnny Cunningham; and Through the Bitter Frost & Snow, a collaboration with bassist Lindsey Horner. At this time, she began to divide her work into albums of traditional music (Bushes and Briars, 1998) and singer-songwriter albums (Bones, 1995; Prophecy, 2002).
Around 1992, Scots fiddler Johnny Cunningham asked McKeown to be the singer of the songs he had begun composing for the New York theatre company Mabou Mines' production of Peter & Wendy. He composed the rest of the songs for McKeown's voice. They worked together on the show for many years, including performances at The Public Theater, New Victory Theater, Spoleto Festival, Berkeley Repertory, UCLA Geffen Theatre and Dublin Theatre Festival. In the late 1990s, McKeown and Cunningham formed a duo and started an annual winter tour of music and song from the Scots and Irish traditions. This resulted in their producing the album A Winter Talisman in 2001 with guitarist Aidan Brennan.
In 1997, Cunningham invited McKeown to perform on the album and PBS TV Special The Soul of Christmas with Thomas Moore. It was while working on this show that McKeown suggested to Cathie Ryan and Robin Spielberg the idea of recording an album of songs relating to motherhood, resulting in the Mother album (1999).
McKeown began producing, and contributed to the albums Lowlands (2000 Green Linnet) and Sweet Liberty (2004 World Village/Harmonia Mundi). The latter earned a BBC Folk Music Award nomination for her setting of an English folk song with a mariachi band. Her second release for Harmonia Mundi's World Village imprint was Blackthorn (2006).
In December 2003, McKeown joined the klezmer band The Klezmatics onstage at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan in a concert of songs they had composed to lyrics by Woody Guthrie. She has toured and appeared with The Klezmatics often since then, performing in Europe and across the U.S., including in Carnegie Hall in New York City and Disney Hall in Los Angeles. Together they recorded Woody Guthrie's Happy Joyous Hanukkah (2004) and Wonder Wheel (2006) which won a Grammy for Best Contemporary World Music Album.
In 2009, McKeown and Lorin Sklamberg, the lead singer of The Klezmatics, released Saints & Tzadiks (World Village/Harmonia Mundi), an album combining Yiddish and Irish songs.
McKeown devised and produced Songs from the East Village, a world music album of songs from the students, parents and staff of The East Village Community School in Manhattan which was released in September 2010. The album was featured on National Public Radio and has since raised over thirty thousand dollars for the school's Language & Arts programs .
In October 2010 she released the solo album, Singing in the Dark, an exploration of creativity and madness with lyrics from poets who lived with depression, mania and addiction, featuring musical settings of lyrics by Dalkey-born John Dowland, James Clarence Mangan, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Sexton, Gwyneth Lewis and others, with music composed by McKeown, Leonard Cohen, John Dowland, Violeta Parra, and Klezmatics members Lisa Gutkin and Frank London.
McKeown was a 2012 recipient of The Arts Council of Ireland's Traditional Arts Bursary.
In November 2012 she released Belong, her third album of original song. ‘Everything We Had Was Good’ - a duet with James Maddock - reached #1 on the American Folk Music Chart and the album reached #11 . A video for ‘On the Bridge to Williamsburg’, a duet with Declan O’Rourke, was released in November 2014.
In February 2018, she was IrishCentral's 'Anam' Award recipient for "discovering and revealing the soul of Irish song". [3] Later in 2018, McKeown was Music Network Ireland's musician-in-residence at Dún Laoghaire LexIcon Library during which she researched the lives of extraordinary Irish women from the county whose stories were little known and composed and performed songs about them.
In January 2020, she wrote and performed original songs in Honor Molloy's 'Round Room' as part of New York-based Origin Theatre Company's 1st Irish Theatre Festival.
McKeown is the founder and director of Cuala Foundation. [4]
In 2021 Susan was contacted by the Afghan Dreamers, the original members of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team, and when they fled Afghanistan for Pakistan she worked with the Irish government Departments of Justice and Foreign Affairs to secure special refugee status for the young women. Over the next 2 years Cuala Foundation raised money from donors and directly supported their resettlement in Ireland as well as that of their 55 family members in California.
Screenwriter and director Marian Quinn cast Susan in the role of Teresa in her film 'Twig', a retelling of the Greek tragedy Antigone, that was the opening film of the Dublin International Film Festival on 22 February 2024.
| This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(September 2020) |
Ella Jenkins is an American folk singer and actress. Dubbed "The First Lady of the Children's Folk Song" by the Wisconsin State Journal, she has been a leading performer of children's music for over 50 years. Her album, Multicultural Children's Songs (1995), has long been the most popular Smithsonian Folkways release. She has appeared on numerous children's television programs and in 2004, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Solas was an American musical group officially formed in 1996, playing Irish traditional music as well as original compositions influenced by the country, rock, and Americana genres. With several members who are prominent performers, both solo and in other constellations in the Irish traditional music scene, Solas has been described as a "Supergroup". Their name comes from an Irish word meaning "light".
Karen Matheson OBE is a Scottish folk singer who frequently sings in Gaelic. She is the lead singer of the group Capercaillie and was a member of Dan Ar Braz's group L'Héritage des Celtes, with whom she often sang lead vocals, either alone or with Elaine Morgan. She and Morgan sang together on the Breton language song "Diwanit Bugale", the French entry in the Eurovision Song Contest 1996. She made a cameo appearance in the 1995 movie Rob Roy singing the song "Ailein duinn".
The Klezmatics are an American klezmer music group based in New York City, who have achieved fame singing in several languages, most notably mixing older Yiddish tunes with other types of more contemporary music of differing origins. They have also recorded pieces in Aramaic and Bavarian.
"Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye", also known as "Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye" or "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ya", is a popular traditional song, sung to the same tune as "When Johnny Comes Marching Home". First published in London in 1867 and written by Joseph B. Geoghegan, a prolific English songwriter and successful music hall figure, it remained popular in Britain and Ireland and the United States into the early years of the 20th century. The song was recorded by The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem on their eponymous album in 1961, leading to a renewal of its popularity.
Isla Cameron was a Scottish-born, English-raised actress and singer. AllMusic noted that "Cameron was one of a quartet of key figures in England's postwar folk song revival – and to give a measure of her importance, the other three were Ewan MacColl, A. L. Lloyd, and Alan Lomax". She was a respected and popular folk music performer through the 1950s and early 60s as well as appearing in several films; she focused almost exclusively on her acting career from 1966 onwards. Cameron provided the singing voice for actress Julie Christie's part in the hit 1967 film version of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, but changed career direction and became a film researcher in the early 1970s before her early death in a domestic accident in 1980. One of the traditional songs in her repertoire, "Blackwaterside", recorded by Cameron in 1962, was subsequently popularised by notable "next generation" U.K. folk music performers Anne Briggs, Bert Jansch and Sandy Denny.
Lisa Moscatiello is an American singer who is part of the Washington, DC area music scene. She is listed in Music Hound's Folk: Essential Album Guide, and is most often categorized as a folk vocalist. Moscatiello is, however, known for her versatility and range, and has appeared on stage singing the music of Scottish fiddler Johnny Cunningham in a production by the avant-garde theatre group Mabou Mines, and is featured on recordings by the Washington, DC-area electronica band, Arthur Loves Plastic.
Lasairfhíona Ní Chonaola is an Irish singer-songwriter. She is deeply rooted in the sean-nós singing style of her home on Inis Oírr, one of the Aran Islands.
Sandrine Piau is a French soprano. She is particularly renowned in Baroque music although also excels in Romantic and modernist art songs. She has the versatility to perform works from Vivaldi, Handel, Mozart to Schumann, Debussy, and Poulenc. In addition to an active career in concerts and operas, she is prolific in studio recordings, primarily with Harmonia Mundi, Naïve, and Alpha since 2018.
Johnny Cunningham was a Scottish folk musician and composer, instrumental in spreading interest in traditional Celtic music.
Eimear Mary Rose Quinn is an Irish singer and composer. She is best known for winning the Eurovision Song Contest 1996 with the song "The Voice". Since then she has toured and performed extensively internationally and has released four albums of her work, the most recent being Ériu, recorded with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and released in 2020.
Country and Irish is a musical subgenre in Ireland formed by mixing North American country-style music with Irish influences. It is especially popular in the rural Midlands and North-West of the country, but less so in urban areas or in the South-West where more traditional Irish music is favoured. It also remains popular among the Irish in Britain, particularly among the older generation. In a review of the album Round the house and mind the dresser: Irish country house dance music, Vic Gammon observes that the music was partially inspired by a desire for cultural independence.
Lowlands is an album by Irish songwriter, and folk singer Susan McKeown, released in 2000.
Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill is an acclaimed Irish traditional singer, keyboard player, and composer. She is considered one of the most influential female vocalists in the history of Irish music. Throughout her career, Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill has worked with renowned traditional Irish groups such as Skara Brae, The Bothy Band, and Nightnoise. In February 2024 it was announced that she was to be recognised with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 6th RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards.
Woody Guthrie's Happy Joyous Hanukkah is an album by The Klezmatics, released in 2006. It contains Hanukkah-themed songs, with most of the lyrics written by American folk singer Woody Guthrie in 1949.
Casey Neill is an American musician. He leads Portland, Oregon-based band Casey Neill & The Norway Rats, singing with a raspy vocal quality and playing electric and acoustic guitars. Neill's style, folk-punk, mixes influences from punk, Celtic and folk music, and has been compared to R.E.M. and The Pogues.
Lisa Gutkin is an American violinist, singer and songwriter of The Klezmatics. She played in Sting's The Last Ship, had a cameo appearance in “Sex and the City,” and is a MacDowell Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Lisa appears on hundreds of recordings including From Here On In, a CD of her original songs produced by John Lissauer, and Play Klezmer Fiddle!, an instructional DVD. She has co-authored songs with Woody Guthrie, Anne Sexton, and Maggie Dubris, and composed for symphony orchestra, dance, and film. She is the Co-Music Director and Co-Composer for the Broadway show "Indecent (play)" which won 2 Tony Awards for Best Direction of a Play and Best Lighting Design of a Play in 2017.
Gerry Leonard is an Irish guitarist known for his harmonic and ambient guitar style and for his work with David Bowie, Suzanne Vega, Rufus Wainwright, Laurie Anderson, Duncan Sheik and many others. He has a solo project called Spooky Ghost. He currently lives in New York.
Caitríona O'Leary is an Irish singer known for her performances of Irish traditional music and Early music. Described by Crescendo Magazine as "a fascinating, charismatic singer" and by Toccata-Alte Musik aktuell as a musician that "captivates and captures the listener immediately".
Heather Elaine Rankin is a Canadian singer, songwriter and actor. She is most well known as a member of the multi-platinum selling musical group The Rankin Family.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
