Last week Jon Aird managed to link the concept of stars with Flatt & Scruggs’ song ‘Iron Curtain‘ – this week it was either Iron Maiden or Eminem’s ‘Curtain Call’ album but since even our own contortions can’t link either with americana, instead we’re going with a track from Eddie Reader’s seventh studio album ‘Sings the Songs of Robert Burns’ which was premiered at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall as part of the Celtic Connections Festival in January 2003 and on release garnered her some of the best reviews of her career. Reader explained how the album came about in the extensive liner notes, how when her family was relocated to the Ayrshire town of Irvine (Burns was from Ayrshire), how it “saved my life to be introduced to an alternative Scottish beauty and language… I often thought Robert Burns was for the highbrow and not the likes of me, the hardly educated, council estate, overspill girl. Now I see that I was wrong and that I am precisely the person Burns wrote for.”
‘Dram Behind the Curtain’ is a jig by Mairearad Green written for her Grandfather, who apparently used to actually keep a dram behind the curtain – it’s coupled with one of Burns’ best-known poems, Comin thro’ the Rye which you can read more about here.
