Today's Tunage: Unforgettable songs from a pair of Canadian sisters

If somebody made a movie, a musical biopic about a pair of highly regarded songwriters who provided material for some of the most popular and influential pop, folk and country singers of the day, they wouldn’t cast a pair of French-speaking sisters from a small Canadian village outside Montreal as the leads. Yet that is the real-life story of Kate and Anna McGarrigle, who wrote songs for Linda Ronstadt (including the title song of her breakthrough album “Heart Like a Wheel”), country queen Emmylou Harris, and Maria Muldaur.

But luckily the McGarrigles also sang and played their own songs. Over the course of 30 years (1975-2005), the sisters recorded 10 albums, two of them sung completely in French. Occasionally they ventured out on concert tours. Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s albums often sounded like recitals from the family living room in the village of Saint Sauveur des Monts, Quebec – folksy blends of pianos, guitars, fiddles, banjos, accordions and harmonicas.

But the songs are unforgettable. The rich blend of acoustic instruments and vocal harmonies showcase deeply felt and incisive lyrics about life, love and family, filled with the insight, passion and inner life of an Emily Dickinson poem. They give life to the joy, sweetness, sorrow and anger of romantic and familial love. “Talk to Me of Mendocino” recalls the longing and reverie of a romantic getaway in the California Redwoods. “I Eat Dinner” embodies the loneliness of divorce. “Leave Me Be” tells of a parent’s worst fears realized when her child first faces the world alone.

The McGarrigles are considered folk artists. They came of age during the 1960s folk renaissance, and Kate was a part of the scene in Greenwich Village, where she met and married singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. But even if their musical arrangements employed banjos, accordions, fiddles and guitars, their songs hark to popular songcraft from an earlier era, including Cole Porter and Stephen Foster. In fact, they frequently covered songs such as “Gentle Annie,” “Hard Times Come Again No More,” and “What’ll I Do.” Their vocal harmonies, often including members of the extended family, also harked back to an era of singing old songs in the parlor.

Joe Boyd, who produced the McGarrigles, summed up the sisters’ unique origins and appeal in the liner notes to “Tell My Sister,” a box set of their first two albums:

“(Kate) and Anna have given us a bridge to a sensibility from another time: they grew up north of Montreal in a house with no TV, a piano, and a father who was born in the 19^th century. Her parents and older sister Janie sang in the evenings, and the way to earn approval was to find a harmony part. Yet Kate and Anna resisted being filed under folk, and they were right. They might not have been pop stars, but they occupy an uncharted landscape on the border between Cole Porter, Quebecois traditions, Stephen Foster, and the innocent early years of the folk revival. Wherever you locate it, the heart of North American song isn’t far.”

Kate McGarrigle died of cancer in 2010, but the McGarrigles' music hasn't been completely silenced. Kate and Anna were/are the matriarchs of an extended musical clan made up of spouses, children and friends and relatives. Kate was mother to singing stars Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright, both children of her marriage Loudon Wainwright III. The extended McGarrigle family has recorded a memorial concert, and various family members are still performing. Rufus and Martha probably have long careers in popular music ahead of them.