At the Anchorage Folk Festival last week, an Irish band called “I Draw Slow” joked that they will never get the folks back home to believe that such a big crowd would turn out in the midst of a big snowstorm. But the Wendy Williamson auditorium was full of people tapping their toes from their seats, while others danced in the hallway.
Now this acoustic group will take its blend of traditional Irish music and American bluegrass to Juneau, another chance to prove that snow doesn’t stop Alaskans from turning out for good music.
“I Draw Slow” is a string band out of Dublin with fiddle, guitar, bass and banjo and the sublime brother-and-sister harmonies of Dave and Louise Holden.
Dave plays guitar and Louise dances along to the music. She also writes many of the songs the group performs, which are a means of sharing stories.
“Originally songs and balladry would have been a way of capturing a story and carrying it through from generation to generation, from the days there would be no telly. There would be no movies,” Holden said. “This would be the entertainment. This is how you get stories across.”
The songs range from a story about a bird that gets lost in an airport, to one taken from an old newspaper article about a woman who either fell or got pushed from a lighthouse in New England. There are also songs with a country western feel about love and loss, like “Don’t Kiss in My Bar,” which makes light of a woman who lost her man to another woman.
Holden also writes songs in what she calls “Irish” – or Gaeilge, the Indigenous language of Ireland.
She says the Irish, like Alaska Natives, are in a battle to save their language. Although Gaeilge is taught in school, many are embarrassed to speak it, because they aren’t fluent. She says she understands why Alaska Natives, who have lost a lot of their language to English, might feel the same way.
She says that fear of embracing what should come naturally is what prompted her to write a love song in what she calls the true "heart" language of the Irish.
“You can safely go to Irish, because it’s got that freshness, and it feels like it’s coming from the deepest architecture of our brains, because that’s what our foremothers and forefathers spoke,” Holden said. “Having some access to your Indigenous language, I think, is very important for yourself.”
Holden says most love songs in English tend to draw too much from Hollywood, but when she writes in Gaeilge, she taps into a rich vein of authenticity.
The love song she wrote and recorded on I Draw Slow’s new album, also called “I Draw Slow,” is titled, “A Chuid Den tSaol,” which means “my share of life” in English.
Holden says it’s a song of deep love and yearning with lyrics that can’t really be translated into English, without losing some of the meaning.
She says for many years, she didn’t write any original love songs for the band to perform.
“I thought it was high time that we should,” Holden said. But she wanted it to be different than the other ballads about love-gone-wrong, which she had written in English.
“I guess the reason I avoided it for so long is I didn’t want it to be clichéd,” said Holden, who discovered just the opposite, that Indigenous languages have the power to express more than just words but stir emotions that are as old as mankind.
