The voice of Frankie Armstrong at Jericho Sailing Club

Photo: Harbourtownrecords.com

Michael and Lynn own the shop Celtic Traditions, where they sell traditional Irish and Scottish woolen sweaters. Michael fiddles and Lynn sings and they love traditional music of the British Isles and elsewhere.

In the winter months, on Tuesday evenings, their shop becomes a coffee house, with a steady stream of folk groups and artists dropping by to sing and play. In the summer, a room in the Jericho Sailing Centre at 1300 Discovery Street is where the folk music action is.

Last night it was packed. Jam sessions featured voice, fiddles, mandolin and more. The atmosphere evoked the sixties, with a lot of foot-tapping and singing along with the chorus. Many in the audience had enough miles on them to remember those hootenanny times.

The featured singer was Frankie Armstrong. A lady who sang her way through the sixties and kept right on singing, she used her harmonica to select a key, then wowed the audience with her soaring voice.

She sang traditional ballads about the labour and heartbreak of farming and about the war between the sexes. She sang about a drunken poet who falls into grief over the loss of a monkey, and writes the best poem of his life. She sang a Norwegian cow calling song, and one about women in a north London bottling factory trying to organize an all-woman union in 1911.

She closed down her set with an interactive song called Voices, that reflected on what the human voice can achieve, singly or in chorus. This song originated when the women of Britain occupied Greenham Common to keep out the cruise missiles. Today, she said, that place is a nature reserve, helped to that status by those voices that kept on singing there long ago.

The audience refused to let her go without an encore, and for this she sang a song of encouragement. The room was jammed to the rafters and hot as Hades; the people beside us had wisely brought fans to keep a bit cooler. But the performers and audience were in fine voice, and it was a great musical night.

BY THE WAY: For those enjoying the ancient library posts, we're moving forward in time soon: some libraries of our times.