The death of singer and songwriter Kate McGarrigle, at age 63 on Jan. 18 of clear-cell sarcoma, is an awful loss. As recently as Dec. 9 of the year past, she performed with her sister Anna and her children Rufus and Martha Wainwright -- one of the annual "family Christmas" shows that the McGarrigles and the Wainwrights liked to put on, this one at the Royal Albert Hall in London but more frequently at Carnegie Hall in New York.
Her debut album with her sister, entitled Kate and Anna McGarrigle, was released in 1976. It set the template for every album they recorded: folk music influenced by pop and country, filtered through their French-Canadian Quebec upbringing. The stark, often staggering beauty of their harmonies could not hide the fact that Kate and Anna were always playful misanthropes, capable of sarcasm, bitterness, and a detachment that allowed Kate, in a song on their second album, Dancer With Bruised Knees (1977), to gaze down upon her infant son and sing, "Some of them make it, some of them don't."This is one of my favorite McGarrigles performances, Kate singing her "I Eat Dinner":
Kate -- sitting behind her piano, exchanging unknowable glances with her sister as they sang -- made music unafraid that its often soft tone would be mistaken for passivity. This sister-team recorded songs with such astringent precision, it's no wonder it took other performers, with more lush voices and arrangements, to make hits of the McGarrigles' songs (Linda Ronstadt, "Heart Like A Wheel"; Maria Muldaur, "Work Song").
Kate took long periods off from recording to raise the family she had with the great singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. They divorced 1976, and Loudon wrote some memorable songs about their relationship, including "Red Guitar," in which he recounts destroying a cherished guitar in a drunken rage. The song peaks with the line, "Kate, she said, 'You are a fool, you've done a foolish thing.'" Wainwright recorded Kate's "Come A Long Way" as a rueful salute to their marriage; when Kate and Anna got around to recording it four years later, the song was transformed into a testament of self-reliance.
I fear I've made Kate McGarrigle sound grave and severe, living a stoic life in cold Canada. In fact, she had a wicked sense of humor and a great playfulness about her. Once when I interviewed her, she reminded me that I'd once described Kate and Anna in print as "the Bronte sisters with mittens." "We laughed and laughed" when they read that, she said.
Firm, funny, realistic, and independent, Kate McGarrigle was certainly a wonderful musician, and she seemed like a wonderful person.
