GAELWYND

NORTHERN LIGHTS

GAELWYND, 2005

Having made her Gaelwynd debut on the previous year’s Out On The Ocean, Giddens immerses herself in Celtic tradition

Gaelwynd was a very important part of my life. I was fresh out of college and just starting to get into folk and non-classical acoustic music. I’d been doing Christian music in a gospel sense and vocally, but I hadn’t been doing any instrumental work at all. My name is Welsh and I’d always been interested in Celtic music, so I started getting more and more drawn to it. Gaelwynd put an ad in the paper, looking for a vocalist. I did a little audition for them. I still had a folk voice – growing up, I sang stuff like Peter, Paul & Mary with my dad – but they kind of beat it out of you at the conservatory. So I had to find a way back to it that felt like an authentic version of me. It took some doing. Everybody in Gaelwynd was parttime, so it was a really gentle introduction to the idea of being in a band. And I really think that it colours a lot of how I look at the structure of instrumental music now. I started making connections between black people and Celtic music. When I was in Gaelwynd, I met a scholar of Gaelic studies, and started learning about the idea of whiteness as a self-construct: the idea of black people who were raised as Gaelic speakers, say in North Carolina, and thought themselves Gaelic. Those people considered themselves part of that clan and therefore colour was irrelevant. That was my first entry into really thinking about colour in a more sophisticated way. It was a great learning ground for me for when I co-created the Chocolate Drops.