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Tackling the cackling
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Several years ago, Quebec City’s Gabrielle Bouthillier and Danya Ortman were invited by a mutual friend to perform at a cabaret, the theme of which was musicians doing something they’d never done before. He urged the ladies to tackle a song or two by an obscure vocal duo called the Cackle Sisters, in whom Bouthillier and Ortman had a purely recreational interest. “This friend told me Danya had already said yes, and told her I had said yes,” Bouthillier laughs, “so he tricked us into it.” Good thing, because today, Bouthillier and Ortman—backed by QC’s inventive and entertaining Orchestre d’Hommes-Orchestres—have a full show assembled, showcasing the highly unusual work of Minnesota’s Mary Jane and Caroline DeZurik, aka the Cackle Sisters. In the 1930s, the sisters began a healthy if rather marginal music career, wowing crowds at Midwestern county fairs and talent shows, and before long, the audience of the radio show National Barn Dance. They weren’t the only ones bringing yodelling into American roots music, but the array of strange yelps, laughs and other vocal noises they threw in were theirs and theirs alone. “They had something in mind, I think, that they did not care to share with their audience,” says Bouthillier. “I suspect they introduced little inside jokes into the music, moments when the noises they added after a specific sentence had a second meaning. “I come from traditional singing, so the basics of their music was familiar, for Danya too. But then, the yodelling, especially the cackling—this wasn’t part of our ordinary musical vocabulary. Once we had adjusted our ears, we could hear things more precisely. Even now, after three or four years, each time I listen to the DeZurik Sisters, I hear new little details.” Likewise, Bouthillier and Ortman have done detailing of their own. The New Cackle Sisters was originally a purely musical trio. “Slowly, without meaning to, we’ve added some theatrical background to it—the way we dressed and curled our hair, we would become characters from the ’30s. We wanted to improve on that and go further with the impression of a countryside talent show, a patchwork of many different North American stereotypes—little pieces of what we all have in our imagination about this world, put together with no historical or narrative links, mixed into a made-up world.”
AT USINE C ON TUESDAY-THURSDAY, |
