Quinie: “I initially felt like I shouldn’t sing these songs”

Originally from Edinburgh, Quinie (real name: Josie Vallely) was not particularly musical growing up, “other than a few socialist songs around the campfire as a teenager”, she says. It wasn’t until later that she started singing and channelling her low voice into covering Tracy Chapman songs, but it was when she heard the raw folk singing of Sheila Stewart that Quinie thought, “this is what I’ve been looking for, this is what my voice was made to do.” Rejecting the virtuosity favoured by many contemporary trad musicians, she was drawn more towards the DIY music which she thinks complements folk music. “I take the ‘do what you like’ attitude of DIY and combine it with the ‘cherish what has come before’ values of the folk tradition.” Her previous albums – dating back to her self-titled debut in 2017, which came out on cassette with a handmade felt cover – are the fruits of this approach and display Quinie’s frank, untrained voice with minimal instrumental backing. Pipes and fiddle make recurring appearances, but the main thing that runs through all of them is her love and respect for the oral tradition.

These traditions are encased in the title of her new album, Forefowk, Mind Me, in which she sings in various dialects of Scots, as well as English. “In Scots, when we say ‘mind me’, we might mean ‘remind me’, ‘remember me’, ‘watch me’ or ‘care for me’,” she explains. Much of her work is inspired by the great Traveller singer Lizzie Higgins, who Quinie considers as having her own distinct take on the songs of her ancestors: “She was not just a vessel for tradition.” I was reminded of the Gustav Mahler quote: “tradition is tending the flame, not worshipping the ashes,” and, when I bring it up, Quinie talks about what she sees as a fixation in folk music on the idea that we’re always on the cusp of losing something, that there always seems to be a pressure to save a song and then do something with it rather than just “existing with the music.” She particularly likes the way anthropologist Tim Ingold thinks about the passage of generations as a rope of intertwining fibres, rather than as layers stacked on top of one another.

Lizzie Higgins’ unique style was influenced in some ways by the pipes that her father played, and a similar interplay between instrument and voice infuses much of Quinie’s music. On Forefowk, we are treated to snippets of canntaireachd – the instructional vocalisation of the art music of the Highland pipes known as piobaireachd (or Pibroch). Rather aptly, canntaireachd is referred to by some Scottish Travellers as ‘cantering’ and, as Quinie developed this latest album while travelling with her horse Maisie around Argyll, it is a connection she enjoys. Much of the album is about the love of ordinary places and how a love of environment connects to other forms of love. Travelling on horseback is, for her, a way of being more immersed in her surroundings and allowing creativity to flow.

Quinie has been around horses her whole life, and it is another connection she shares with Travellers, though she is not a Traveller herself, a situation that initially caused some consternation. “I initially felt like I shouldn’t sing these songs,” she says, “because I’m not a Traveller, and I saw people around me doing that in a way that made me uncomfortable.” But, over the years, she met Travellers who convinced her that a settled person singing these songs could raise awareness of the discrimination they face. So, she sings these songs acknowledging the debt that she owes to the Scottish Traveller singing tradition, while weaving in many aspects from outside of it too.