FOLK MUSIC REVIEW : Gillette, Mangsen: At One With Music, Each Other

Steve Gillette and Cindy Mangsen had no qualms about venturing into the mystic during an altogether solid folk performance here Saturday night at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments.

But the husband-and-wife duo dispensed with any attempt to create a mystique about themselves and what they do. The basis of their show was talent, straightforwardly and liberally applied.

The Vermont-based couple make an annual winter stop at the cozy Shade Tree, escaping the fangs of northern New England winter and paying a homecoming call to Orange County, where Gillette began his career as a folk singer and songwriter in the mid-’60s.

Though he never made it into the first circle of ‘60s-vintage folk performers, Gillette has written or collaborated on a number of widely heard songs. Among them are “Back on the Street Again,” a Top 40 hit for the Sunshine Company in 1967 (later covered by Linda Ronstadt in her Stone Poneys days) and “Darcy Farrow,” a ballad popularized in the ‘60s by Ian & Sylvia and John Denver.

More recently, Gillette’s material has found a home in Nashville, with songs covered by the likes of Waylon Jennings, Kenny Rogers, and, on his 1992 Christmas album, Garth Brooks. Mangsen has been making her way in the low-profile world of traditional folk since the mid-’70s.

During their 85-minute performance, the two silvery-haired singers didn’t engage in a lot of chitchat designed to exploit their domestic life for cute humor or self-dramatization--an easy path for musical spouses to follow. Gillette did allow at one point that “Share Me With Texas,” an engaging, one-man take on Western swing, complete with Bob Wills cowboy yell, was inspired by the fact that “we have this love-hate thing with Texas: I love it, and (Mangsen) hates it.”

Absent much talk about a musical marriage, the couple, who have been together since 1989, simply demonstrated the fruits of such a life. They offered a sympathetic twining of voices that were individually appealing and beautifully matched. Mangsen was an especially strong harmony singer, backing her husband with hues alternately reedy and tawny, but always exceptionally sensitive and warm. Gillette’s voice was deep and sturdy, but also fervent and sweet.

They were also a good match instrumentally. Gillette’s guitar playing was far above average for a self-accompanying singer-songwriter. He put some bite and motion into up-tempo songs based in country or blues, and provided glistening decorations for the ones that called for sheer prettiness.

Mangsen’s concertina supported the voices with another rich layer of harmony. She also played some banjo, and created just the right sense of droning old English mystery on guitar during her solo performance of a centuries-old traditional ballad, “Down by the Green Wood Side.”

That song’s tale of a mother who commits double infanticide rather than raise illegitimate twins allowed Mangsen to match the body count of Gillette’s tragic “Darcy Farrow.” In that song, a winsome lass dies in a riding accident (inspired, the singer explained, by the time his sister, Darcy, had her cheekbone fractured by a horse she kept stabled at Irvine Ranch). Then her grief-stricken beau blows his brains out. Cliched elements, perhaps, but somehow, through melodic grace and fervency of delivery, “Darcy Farrow” came off as a broader, archetypal statement about the truly tragic pity instilled in a community when its promising young people die senselessly.

Some of the evening’s songs of mystery and awe revolved not around death, but creation.

The artist’s ability to cast a mood of ineffable sadness was evoked in “La Guitarra,” a poem in Spanish by Federico Garcia Lorca that Gillette has set to music. Mangsen’s quietly beautiful anthem, “Songlines,” made use of the creation myths of Australia’s aborigines. One could imagine Midnight Oil, the hard-rocking Australian band that has also delved into aboriginal lore in its songs, having an amped-up go at this one. The song, a rare original for Mangsen, who is more of an interpreter than a writer, imagines the fate of all life resting on humanity’s ability to use its creative powers to generative ends.

Along with the horrific, the historic (a ballad about a summer frost that caused mayhem in Vermont back in the early 1800s), the tragic and the mystic, Gillette and Mangsen offered a solid helping of the downright silly. These included a Shel Silverstein song that turned romantic rejection into alphabet soup (the refrain, “Gonna tell ‘em at the ASPCA you treat me like a D-O-G,” gives you an idea of the concept: song-as-spelling-bee). “Their Brains Were Small” was a dim assessment of humanity’s chances of improving on the luck of the dinosaurs. The “Daughters of Feminists” imagined little girls rebelliously adopting all the old-fashioned female stereotypes that their moms tried to shed.

Mangsen showed a nice comic flair, embellishing humorous songs with wry looks and witty inflections of voice. But she was by far the quieter partner. Gillette was smooth and assured, coming off like a veteran high school teacher who has an easy, familiar touch with the students.

The concert touched on social commentary, with “Heartland,” a driving, dramatic evocation of the lives of economically embattled small farmers, and “Jay Gould’s Daughter,” a traditional hobo song that jauntily mocked the robber barons while clipping along to a lively train rhythm.

The show closed with fervent, lovely songs about lasting family bonds (“Healing Hands”) and romantic love (“Bed of Roses”). A show that offered a good sampling of just about everything folkish came down to warm sentiments, beautifully rendered.