{"id":11596,"date":"2021-06-03T11:45:36","date_gmt":"2021-06-03T10:45:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=11596"},"modified":"2021-06-03T11:45:36","modified_gmt":"2021-06-03T10:45:36","slug":"musician-of-the-month-ciara-sidine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2021\/06\/03\/musician-of-the-month-ciara-sidine\/","title":{"rendered":"Musician of the Month: Ciara Sidine"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Blood, Sex and Death, I Found Her<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Janet is pregnant and alone. Her boyfriend is god knows where and her dad is having none of it and wants to marry her off to a man of his choosing. She\u2019s having none of that, and wants an abortion. And she\u2019s damned if any man will tell her what to do. It is any time between the eleventh and the sixteenth century, in Scotland.<\/p>\n

Frankie Baker<\/a><\/span> loved her boyfriend Allen Britt but she shot him anyway. Her gun was a .38 pistol, and when the time came, her aim was true. By the time Allen died, slowly and painfully in hospital days later, from a single shot wound to his stomach, a ballad about the event was already selling on street corners. It told a story in notes that swung, capturing the imagination of generations. It just wasn\u2019t her story.<\/p>\n

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A .38 pistol. In \u2018murder\u2019 ballad \u2018Frankie and Johnny\u2019, the real-life perpetrator of the shooting, Frankie Baker, was unhappy with how she was represented. Among other things was the gun detail. \u2018It wasn\u2019t a .44,\u2019 she said, \u2018it was just a little old Harrington & Richardson .38. And it couldn\u2019t have gone roota-toot-toot, \u2019cause I only shot once.\u2019 My new song \u2018Don\u2019t Do Me Wrong\u2019 sets the record straight on the events of that fateful night in 1899.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The old woman who lived in the woods killed a baby. We don\u2019t know why she was left holding it, just that she was. Her chorus is a keening wail, a weile-weile-waile that rises from the depths of the well. It is so transcendent, so collective, that others can carry out its ancient, visceral work. Locate the cry in Famine times and its echoes might offer a clue to the circumstances that gave to it.<\/p>\n

Lily goes to war to be with her lover, which means pretending she\u2019s a man. Into the bargain she saves his life. She gets to be a soldier and a heroine of the battlefield. You have to hand it to her. But I\u2019m not completely convinced she set out on her heroine journey just to be with her guy. Perhaps she believed in the cause. Perhaps she was just deathly bored with her lot and craved some action.<\/p>\n

Polly Amorous <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Polly was savagely murdered while pregnant, by her boyfriend, who threw her body in a hole in the ground he\u2019d chillingly spent the night before digging. She had it coming, he saw how other men looked at her \u2013 how would he ever truly possess such a woman? He goes off to sail the seas, but her ghost is furious and manifests on his ship, in her arms a revenant child. And he will not resist her beauty now, of this she makes sure, as she lures him to his death among the waves using the temptress charms of his projection.<\/p>\n

These were some of the voices that called out to me, as I set about exploring women\u2019s experience in the folk music canon two years ago, voices that were captured at a moment in time, that shape-shifted according to its passage, and that carry with them its cultural and social context. As a singer-songwriter interested in and inspired by women\u2019s perspectives, explored in such songs as \u2018Finest Flower\u2019 and \u2018Trouble Come Find Me\u2019, I hungered to know them, to explore their possibilities, their hidden aspects, their hearts. Were there new expressions asking to emerge?<\/p>\n

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Ciara at the Unbroken Line album launch at the Sugar Club, Dublin, with members of Tuam Home Survivors<\/span><\/a> Network Peter Mulryan, left, and Michael Flaherty, right. Ciara\u2019s song \u2018Finest Flower\u2019 was inspired by the testimony of home mothers. Image \u00a9 Lucy Foster.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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@RositaSweetman provides new testimonies from survivors of Mother and Baby Homes, and calls for a criminal prosecution of the Catholic Church and full redress.https:\/\/t.co\/Tas0iA0BPV<\/a>#MotherAndBabyHomes<\/a> #motherandbabyhomesreport<\/a> @broadsheet_ie<\/a> @amandaknox<\/a> @AliceHarrisonBL<\/a><\/p>\n

— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) January 22, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n