Ottawa Citizen

MOUNTAIN CITY GIRLS

McGarrigle­s tell their stories

- PETER ROBB

McGARRIGLE NIGHT

Mountain City Girls Anna and Jane McGarrigle (Random House Canada) In town: The authors will be in Ottawa on Saturday April 23 for an evening of storytelli­ng and song. Centretown United Church, 507 Bank St. at 7 p.m.

The house in Saint-Sauveur is in desperate need of repair, but the extended McGarrigle clan is rallying to keep the roof overhead and the walls standing.

If home is where the heart is, that place is the beating centre of the lives of Jane and Anna McGarrigle, two of the three sisters who have made beautiful music together and apart, and their large extended family that includes many children and grandchild­ren. It is the house their father Frank built.

In the memoir Mountain City Girls, the home has special significan­ce, even though the sisters moved to other places far and near as they entered adulthood.

“We use it all the time,” says Anna McGarrigle. “People go up on weekends. But there is no one living there full time right now.

Sister Jane says: “There is a big structural project in our future. We will be meeting up with Rufus and Martha about how to go about this and when. It needs to be reinforced. The roof is sagging and foundation needs work. It will be a big job and it won’t be done for a year. It’s a recommitme­nt to the house.”

Rufus and Martha Wainwright are the children of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III and prominent performers in their own rights. Kate died six years ago of a rare cancer, but such are the ties that bind that her children and grandchild­ren are deeply connected to the past and present of the McGarrigle family.

The memoir is the story of their large extended family. It begins in their early years and goes into the 1970s, when Kate and Anna were embarking on their successful and respected careers as a performing and songwritin­g duo. They recorded a dozen or so albums and had their songs covered by stars such as Linda Ronstadt and Emmy Lou Harris.

It is a charming eclectic collection of stories that got started at the Luminato festival in Toronto when a publisher, after listening to many McGarrigle moments, suggested a book.

The two sisters then worked hard pulling together their memories.

“I would remember a snippet of something,” Anna said, “and then have to think really hard and go through layers and layers of the past and come to that spot and try to remember who was sitting where and that kind of thing.”

“It is possible to do, except you have to recall these things.”

The sisters talked and those conversati­ons triggered other stories about other people, Jane said.

“And we had a big box of photograph­s that go back a really long time and that brought stuff back. I had letters. I lived in California for a long time and I had letters from my father and mother and Kate and Anna and they all triggered memories and stories so we had a treasure trove besides our own memories.”

The memories were retrieved slowly and, Anna added, “even though they may be incorrect they are your memories.”

Jane and Anna will be in Ottawa on Saturday, presented by the Ottawa Internatio­nal Writers Festival, singing some of the old songs and telling some of these stories.

Those early years seem so typical of a life growing up in the 1950s. The McGarrigle­s weren’t rich.

“We were not aware of money problems,” said Anna, beginning the thought. “We always had enough food and everything, but because my father was a purchasing agent and worked for himself we never knew ...”

“When the next windfall would happen,” said Jane, jumping in.

“My parents never thought of themselves as being poor or even broke. My mother was used to being a very frugal person, the way she was brought up.

“There were certain ironclad rules. You couldn’t just quit a job until you had another one. You couldn’t have one day between jobs. There was none of this going off and exploring possibilit­ies.”

As a result for Anna and Jane, the music business was more an evolutiona­ry thing. They were always interested — Jane played the organ in a local church, for example, and “could have had a career on her own,” Anna said.

“I sort of came into it by default. I never saw myself as a musician,” she continued.

“Our sister Kate was the one who was determined to be in the music business. Kate was brought into it by another friend who was hungry for that kind of life.”

Timing was everything for the sisters, Jane says.

“Kate was out there singing her songs and Anna’s songs when she was on road with Roma Baron at a time when singer-songwriter­s were the thing. If it had happened five years before when it was Tin Pan Alley, the ground might not have been so fertile as it was in the early 1960s when Bob Dylan opened it all up for people.”

The book ends rather abruptly, well before Kate’s passing and before the big successes of the sisters. Jane and Anna are not planning another book but they aren’t ruling it out.

The book ended where it has, primarily because the publisher was pushing. The manuscript was already a year late when it was handed in.

“We said to them ‘We can’t just end it there’,” Jane said. “But the publisher said, ‘Sure you can, you can pick it up later in another book.’ For a while we entertaine­d the idea that maybe we would, but it hasn’t happened.”

Today Jane lives in Mile End in Montreal while Anna lives on a farm near Alexandria, Ont., with her husband. They think often about Kate. “She is a missing piece in our lives, especially at the beginning. Now it’s been six years,” Anna says.

“In a funny way, (during work on the book) it was almost as if she was here all the time. There was something in the air. Her children are around ... Martha lives in Montreal. Rufus lives in the air. He is always on the move and working.”

Jane says that Rufus and Martha “have done everything they can to keep the family united and connected. We do a lot of that with the events that we do for Kate’s foundation.”

Is music the glue that holds it all together? “You don’t have to make music to stick together, but there is something obviously about music that brings most of us together,” says Anna. “It’s just the way our families are, especially my mother’s family, the Latremouil­les.”

These days, Anna is busy “noodling around” with music, writing, she says, “garage band songs, things with beats and stuff.” Jane is working in the business side, and writing musical scores for film and television.

And they are finishing up the French translatio­n of the book. It will be released on July 4.

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 ?? NATHAN DENETTE/THE CANADIAN PRESS ?? Sisters Jane, left, and Anna McGarrigle will be in Ottawa on Saturday singing songs and telling stories from their book.
NATHAN DENETTE/THE CANADIAN PRESS Sisters Jane, left, and Anna McGarrigle will be in Ottawa on Saturday singing songs and telling stories from their book.

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