Instead of a family Bible, Anna McGarrigle once reckoned, the McGarrigle children had their father Frank’s old arch-top Gibson guitar. It was one of the few possessions he brought into his marriage to Gaby Latrémouille in 1935. The French Canadian Irish couple inscribed the body of the instrument with the names of their friends as well as landmark milestones. Their daughters evolved the tradition. Their eldest, Janie, added the names of her friends, but also, as a child of the fledgling rock’n’roll era, “ELVIS.” The second, Anna, added her own icon, although misspelled: “DOUANE” as in Eddy, but also as in import “customs” in French, her first written language.
It was on this instrument that trailblazer Jane, cautious Anna, and the youngest, willful Kate, learned their first chords from Frank, Anna writes in Mountain City Girls, a memoir co-authored with Jane after Kate’s death in 2010. Born in 1899, their father expected them to be able to play for company on the family’s 11 beat-up instruments, among them an accordion left as penance by a local drunk whom Frank brought home one night, to Gaby’s displeasure. He would bribe them a nickel to learn a song by the Gershwins, or the Romantic parlor songwriter Stephen Foster, or Hoagy Carmichael. Gaby kept sheet music for popular ballads and showtunes. The French Catholic nuns at convent school in Saint-Saveur-des-Monts, in the Laurentians north of Montreal, taught them solfège and chorales, and Jane drilled them all in harmony. The girls discovered the Everly Brothers and Joan Baez and, later, blues pioneer Ma Rainey and Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence. Baez, in particular, became their role model, showing Kate and Anna—a natural double act born just 14 months apart—that a girl’s place in music wasn’t limited to buying the boy rockers Cokes after watching them play. She also imbued them with particular standards for their first instruments. Gifted brand new guitars on Christmas 1961, the teenagers turned up their noses and exchanged them for the cheap nylon-stringed versions that Baez favored.
From there came their first vocal trio, with a girl who’d heard Kate singing at their new school after the family moved to Montreal. Soon after, Kate and Anna became part of the Mountain City Four, a folk outfit that sometimes had up to 10 members. While their stage presence was sloppy, the other members were dead serious about developing their interpretations, playing songs learned from the Library of Congress and Folkways, or those of Bob Dylan. When he went electric, so did they. (Anna was at Newport in 1965, and loved it.) If such great songs already existed, these purists reasoned, there was no need to write more, even—or perhaps especially—if Dylan was turning out new standards at a clip. But when Kate moved to New York City in 1969, as part of a duo with guitarist Roma Baran, she hit the Gaslight and Gurdy’s Folk City and various hootenannies, and discovered singer-songwriters showing off original material. She phoned Anna: We could do this too!
