Folk singer Kate McGarrigle left a deep musical legacy both in recordings with her older sister Anna McGarrigle and in her two children, singer-songwriters Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright.
Kate and Anna McGarrigle were revered for their heavenly harmonies and sensitive love songs, made famous by the likes of Linda Ronstadt and Maria Muldaur. Lavish praise greeted the Montreal duo's arrival in the mid-1970s, with the British and American press citing the intimacy of their voices and honesty of their songs.
Kate McGarrigle grew up bilingual, but, in many ways, music was her first language. Born the youngest of three sisters to an entrepreneurial Irish-Canadian father and a Québécois mother, she and her siblings were raised in St. Sauveur des Monts, an hour north of Montreal. Frank and Gabrielle (Gaby) McGarrigle (née Latrémouille) led regular singing sessions at home and their daughters gained parental approval for how well they sang harmony.
The music that the girls were exposed to was eclectic and some would say old-fashioned.
“Our father was born in the 19th century,” Kate once explained. “A lot of our friends' parents were bobby soxers, but we never had that forties, Frank Sinatra, Italian jazzy music. I guess we had everything else – classical, Stephen Foster, old show tunes, Bing Crosby, French folk songs from our mother.”
Music extended from the family parlour to the Roman Catholic village school, where Kate and Anna took piano lessons from nuns and found that songs often transcended language barriers in the playground.
“At recess,” Kate once recalled, “we would play games and rounds and sing different songs in French. For us, it was easier than sitting and having a conversation about dolls and things. The moment you got into singing, it fortified your personality in the schoolyard and the classroom.”
By the early sixties, the sisters had become aware of the new folk music coming from coffeehouses in New York and Montreal.
At 16, Kate asked for a mandolin at Christmas and threw a tantrum when she and Anna received wristwatches instead. Even Western, steel-string guitars failed to mollify Kate, until Anna suggested they trade them in at the local pawnshop for two Spanish, nylon-string guitars. Suitably armed, the McGarrigle sisters launched themselves as budding folk singers. Influenced by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Kate and Anna joined Jack Nissenson and Peter Weldon in a group called the Mountain City Four, which performed in Montreal coffeehouses such as the legendary Café Finjan. Commercial success first came to the McGarrigles through recordings of their songs by others, including Ms. Ronstadt, who named her breakout 1974 album after Anna's Heart Like a Wheel .
Despite their physical resemblance, the two McGarrigle sisters had telling differences.
Anna was a romantic, while Kate was more down to earth. Those qualities were reflected in their education paths: While Anna attended L'École des Beaux-Arts, Kate studied math and engineering at McGill University, eventually earning a bachelor of science in 1969. That year, Kate teamed up with musician friend Roma Baran and started touring the northeastern United States folk circuit.
While in Greenwich Village at the Gaslight, Kate met Loudon Wainwright III, the sardonic folk-singing son of Life magazine editor Loudon Wainwright Jr. He was instantly smitten.
“I think every guy in the Village, they were all interested in Kate,” Mr. Wainwright told an interviewer. “She was very attractive. When you heard her sing and play, you were knocked out. She was a wild and crazy swingin' folk chick.”
By 1973, Kate and Loudon were married and baby Rufus was born. Martha followed three years later, but the marriage was already on the rocks. “There was a lot of animosity,” Kate later recalled, who by this time had partnered with Anna. “[Loudon] was at a point in his career when he was frustrated, while my sister and I had made a record that was being touted as the best thing since sliced bread.”
Indeed, the sisters' 1975 self-titled debut, Kate and Anna McGarrigle , featuring songs like Kate's wistful ode to homesickness, Talk to Me of Mendocino , and her deeply melancholic response to Loudon's infidelity, Go Leave , earned rave reviews in Rolling Stone, The New York Times and New Musical Express. England's Melody Maker wrote: “These are amongst the very best voices – Anna's, lilting and airy, Kate's deep and fiercer – to be heard in popular music today.”
