Shelagh McDonald Sings “Stargazer”
Listen to this track by Edinburgh-born and Glasgow-raised chamber-folk singer and one-time musical cold case file Shelagh McDonald. It’s “Stargazer”, the title track to her 1971 record to follow up her debut that appeared the year before. The album features contributions from a galaxy of British folk luminaries including Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, Danny Thompson, and others.
This level of talent on her record is a reflection of McDonald’s status in that community of songwriters and musicians. Her clear alto voice is easily in the same league with the genre’s best singers like Jacqui McShee, Sandy Denny, and others of the era. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period when traditional music from the British Isles and original songs inspired by it represented a commercial beachhead to build a lasting career. With the Stargazer album’s positive reception at the time, things were really looking up for Shelagh McDonald.
However, McDonald’s path as a professional musician and songwriter didn’t exactly go to plan. Strange circumstances surrounded her life after this song and its namesake album came out. For many years, McDonald’s life trajectory was shrouded in mystery after a severe reaction to LSD sidelined her career as a musician. Plagued with the aftermath of her bad trip that included temporarily her losing her ability to sing, McDonald left London and went back to her parents in Scotland. Later on, she married Gordon, a bookshop owner and scholar. Things didn’t go to plan there, either.
Instead of settling down into a middle-class life similar to her upbringing, McDonald spent years in dead-end jobs and on government benefits. She lived with her husband in a tent for a long while before returning to writing and performing. Her return to the world came after she read about her own decades-long disappearance one day in the local paper. This was around the time the Let No Man Steal Your Thyme compilation came out in 2005 when the assumption had been that she’d simply vanished.
After reconnecting with some of her old contacts, she’d follow up with a third record Parnassus Revisited in 2013, 42 years after its predecessor. By then, she’d reinvented herself and her singing voice for live appearances. She considered her time as a missing person as if it were a kind of parallel existence rather than as lost time. She experienced great disappointment and grief over the loss of her career as a professional musician. But looking back, McDonald remained satisfied that things worked out well for her overall. She’d eluded fame’s treadmill and had lived her life free of its obligations.
Shelagh McDonald had come to be a songwriter and musician from the grass roots level, initially as an admirer of Bert Jansch, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and others. By the end of the 1960s, she’d started playing the same folk clubs in Glasgow as John Martyn, Billy Connolly, Gerry Rafferty, and others. Soon enough, she received an invitation to come down to London through fellow musician Keith Christmas to establish herself on the scene there, too. This eventually led to becoming a recording artist.
Making a record was a new world for her. She’d been a musician used to solo club dates and “floor spots”, not studios. But by the time of her second album, Stargazer, she’d got used to the way things were done in the studio. It helped that she had a good feel for working with engineer John Wood who’d famously worked closely with her contemporary, Nick Drake. But sometime during the making of a follow-up record by 1972, everything went awry.
The derailment of her career as a rising star of British folk was considered a tragedy by many, and almost thought of in the same way as Nick Drake’s unfortunate path. That’s hard to refute in terms of her lost artistic potential as a recording artist, given her level of talent. Of course, unlike Drake and also her contemporary Sandy Denny, she survived. The only tragedy that remains is how much attention her one-time missing person status took away from the praise her work deserves. Her slim volume of material showcases her abilities as a singularly gifted vocalist who delivers original material that packs an emotional punch.
Title track of her second record “Stargazer” is a case in point by itself; a richly layered song that pulls from traditional music in terms of both textures and themes, but also from chamber pop, film music, and even an operatic chorus in the extended outro to lend it powerful gravitas and a kind of cinematic majesty. There is a wintry beauty to this track that’s full of natural images, overwhelming and unspoiled landscapes, and of mythical evocations of idealized love and the passage of time in the tradition of British Romantic poetry.
He was a stranger to her, his father was a poet
Led her by the hand up the hill
Touched the golden sunset
How do feelings die? He’s afraid to know
Why does she have to lie?
She’ll only stay until it’s time for her to go
She said: take the sun in your hand, be glad
For this is love you hold …
~ “Stargazer” by Shelagh McDonald
The string arrangement on this cut is by Robert Kirby who’d worked up similar arrangements on Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter. The quality he struck on those records also apply here; a kind of tragic wistfulness that also contains a sunrise of hope only just hidden and about to emerge behind the song’s foreground. This is in line with the lyrics to this original tune by McDonald, full of the same kind of imagery and with an emotional palette of wonder, loneliness, expectation, and contentment all living in the same space and as a part of a melancholic spectrum. True to folk traditions, “Stargazer” reflects a quality both of its time and transcendent of it. It’s impact, which is the result of how well the arrangement frames McDonald’s voice and the story she’s telling, is immediate and profound.
This cut captures a central truth to the human experience; that we’re all wandering to one degree or another, seeking the light of the sun as we climb the hill. None of us have any assurances that the one holding our hand as we ascend will still be there when we reach the top. Yet it’s in moments along the way that we find the our rewards as we make our way upward and onward, holding onto love as best we can as we go.
For more on Shelagh McDonald, read this interview with musician Ian Anderson from 2012, just before she returned to the stage by early the following year. McDonald touches on her career and the events and intervening years that interrupted it. But she also expands on what the vital British folk scene looked like and how it felt to be a part of it during its late-Sixties-early-Seventies golden period.
There’s also this 20-minute interview on the BBC to hear McDonald talking about her early career, her life off the grid, and what it was like to return to music.
Enjoy!
#70sMusic #britishFolk #chamberFolk #pastoralMusic #shelaghMcdonald #singerSongwriters
BC BY-NC-SA
Andi Chorley
Skavau
The Delete Bin
Mrowster
Fionnbharr
Jon 
