About These Songs

"Leaving High Prairie" was recorded at Big River Recording in Bingen, Washington, and engineered by Rick Hulett in February 2011. Susan Sinclair most graciously joined us with her fiddle and Rick jumped in on bass. Please take a look at Susan's website at www.susiesinclair.com and Rick's at www.rickhulett.com/big_river_recording.html. This song is one of mine, written when I made the decision to move to California, even though I did not yet know how that would happen.

"Nine Times a Night" and "Pancake Song" were both recorded live in Occidental, California on Arnoldo Levine's radio show, Tommy's Holiday Camp at KOWS Radio in September 2010. "Nine Times a Night" is a traditional song, collected by A.L. Lloyd and published in The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs in 1960. I learned it from my friend and long-time music partner, Mary Benson.

"Pancake Song" is original and is as much fun to sing as it was to write.

"Bonny Portmore" was recorded live during a performance at The Washington Center for the Performing Arts in Olympia, Washington. Barbara Metcalf is playing fiddle and Jessie McKeegan is playing wooden flute and singing harmony vocal. We called ourselves Metcalf, McKeegan & O'Malley. This song is traditional, dating back to the logging of the great oak forests of Ireland for use in building British warships. It stands as an eerie early environmental warning from the 1600's, originally called "The Highlander's Farewell to Bonny Portmore". How sad that humans have continued to hold war and profit as more important than our Mother Earth.

"She Moved Through the Fair" and "On My Sleeve" were also recorded and engineered at Big River Recording. Rick Hulett provides the harmony vocal and bass. The former is my favorite traditional Irish song of all time, and one I may have lost if I hadn't decided it to sing it for my father when he was dying and went on a hunt for the words without knowing what it was actually called. I "accidentally" bought a tape for my father that had the song on, even though I didn't recognize the title.

"On My Sleeve" is an original, written after a friend chided me for always having my heart on my sleeve. After a lifetime of hearing that phrase I suddenly got the perverse idea of taking it literally.


Thank you for listening!
Marilyn