Years ago on SBS I saw a show featuring a sort of Berber and Cossack circus. Traditional music was sung live as the riders demonstrated their incredible horsemanship, and one of the songs sung by the Moroccan women stuck with me. This became the verse and chorus of Southern Star. They sang in Moroccan Arabic and I couldn’t understand the words, let alone remember them; my Arabic has never been good despite a few years of Saturday school; we just always spoke English at home with the exception of a few words here and there. So when it came to putting words to the melody, it was going to be English, and I drew on what I envisioned with the music which was a desert caravan under a great expanse of night sky. Words came forth that expressed a sadness at what was left behind but a determination to survive in a new place. It felt like the ancestors speaking, those who had made treks across the desert many times and more recently, that made by my father in coming to Australia.
Mixed in there in the ‘jig’ parts (technically a 'reel') are memories of a piece my mother used to play on her old tapes when I was a child. Such pieces are written into my musical mythology because of the young age at which I heard them. She said it was called Alistair of the Hills and she doesn’t know who composed it, but I always loved it. Later I realized that some Celtic music lends itself very well to Arabic rhythms, and so I forged the two in Southern Star. A couple of sessions later and the band added their magic.
When it was finished I saw how two parts of me that had always seemed so disparate could marry together. Perhaps the wistfulness of the Arabian parts reflected what I saw as my father’s sadness in leaving his country, and the joyful Celtic parts the more enthusiastic Aussie that had had more time to heal since the voyage six generations ago. Either way people survive, they move on, they cross borders and make children that inherit nothing and everything. The image of people making that trek throughout time with the Southern Star as their guiding point makes a pilgrimage to an ancient and powerful land out of what other people might simply call ‘migration’.
- Vanessa Alia
Southern Star is Track 2 on Unsung Yarns. Click on the the Unsung Yarns link below for more details.
credits
from Unsung Yarns,
track released December 20, 2010
Music and lyrics by Vanessa Alia
Vanessa Alia (vocals/darabaki), Mahesh Radhakrishnan (backing vocals/guitar), David Carr (banjo/guitar), Mirabai Peart (violin), Robin Dixon (double bass)
Recorded and mixed by Greg Le Couteur at Shadowsounds (Kellyville and Glossodia)
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