Few traditional singers/musicians come as garlanded as Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy, two, unassuming giants of English folk. They did two little gigs for the Earagail festival, which is spread widely over the chaotic, semi-suburbanised, odd ould Gaeltacht of north-west Donegal - from Tory Island to the bungaloid sprawls of Bunbeg and Derrybeg, to the relatively urbanised Letterkenny.
Last weekend was "the weekend of the 12th", when thousands of Northerners from Derry, Belfast and indeed the Garvaghy roast themselves pink on the Donegal coast. Waterson and Carthy had to turn people away from their Letterkenny gig on Friday night, although there were a few empty seats in the remote, intimate little Ionad Cois Locha venue in Dunlewey, an ESB gesture to the community a number of years ago after the closure of the peat-burning generating station, which rusts majestically nearby.
In an area where everything is spelt and pronounced differently to the "new Irish" we learnt at school, it was heartening to see Martin and Norma, such staunch defenders of an older England peasant and gypsy folk culture. And they're not out of place among such musical dynasties as the Brennans and Mooneys - as they are known locally - of Clannad, Enya and Altan. Because between themselves and their daughter Eliza, the Carthys/Watersons are their own little dynasty, keeping the folk flame alive through a barrage of recordings and performances.
A one-time Steeleye Span member, Martin Carthy emerged from the folk clubs in the early 1960s: his intricate guitar settings of the raw, angry old English ballads of hardship, murder, poaching and transportation, catching the imaginations of people like Andy Irvine, Bob Dylan and even Paul Simon, who shamelessly lifted Carthy's arrangement of the traditional old Scarborough Fair. Although most people aren't aware of it, Simon was forced to make a legal settlement in 1970.
Over the 1990s, Carthy has kept up a slew of new recordings (including a couple with his old accomplice, Dave Swarbrick), and last year, under the new Labour government, he received an MBE from the Queen for his services to English folk music.
Turning 60 this autumn, Carthy's wife Norma Waterson has been around a couple of years longer. She, her sister Lal and brother Mike started up the Folk Union One club in Hull in the late 1950s, which ran until three years ago. From various outfits among their extended family, they formed the Watersons, an influential harmony vocal group devoted to traditional east Yorkshire song. They were later joined by Martin, who after Norma's stint as a pirate-station DJ in the late 1960s in Montserrat, married her in 1972.
Norma relaunched herself with her first solo album in 1996. Nominated for the Mercury Music Awards, it was just pipped by Pulp by one vote, but ran well ahead of the Oasis braggarts. She has just delivered a brand new album, The Very Thought of You, with extraordinary covers including Over the Rainbow, Freddie Mercury's Love of My Life and Nick Drake's River Man. A grandmother of three, she chuckled as she told me that the album has gone straight in at No 18 in the indie charts.
And although she joked at the time of her Mercury nomination that they were only being kind to "a little old lady", she is nothing of the kind. A powerful stage presence with her hair worn long like a gypsy woman, she stands and sings out the songs with peculiar mannered movements, hands out like a priest, or the music-hall point of a finger, while the feeling in her voice cuts through you. Between that and Martin's intricate hardcore minstrelsy and historical protest ballads, they cut a peculiarly medieval figure.
For all their success, they are a most unarrogant pair. Martin is nervier, always painfully polite (even to Norma), but with a boyish impatience and almost anxious skip in his stride and conversation. Norma is more earthed, her child-woman face with the glittering, beady eyes often gazing into the distance, although she happily knuckles into frank conversation about gypsies, politics and musical history, or whatever subject you care to bring up.
After Norma and her two siblings were orphaned by illness shortly after the war, they were brought up by her half-Irish mother, whose own mother was Lizzie Quinn, a Sligo Traveller. "Both my parents and all my aunties and uncles played instruments. My gran sang all the time, songs like If I Were a Blackbird, popular songs of the day, Victorian parlour ballads - and hymns.
Her life was ruled by religion and superstition. And in our house we had a piano and an organ, one-string fiddles, banjos, coronets . . . "
"On my father's side of the family, my grandfather was a big union man who was born in Jarrow. He went on the famous march in the 1930s and played the Northumbrian pipes."
"We lived in the immigration area in Hull, it had settled gypsies like us, Irish, Italian, Indians, European Jews, Russians. We had the Catholic Church on one end of the street, the synagogue at the other and the pub in the middle!"
Martin has Irish blood too. "My great great grandfather came over from Ballybunion after the Famine and settled in the South End of London. His brother was Tom Carthy, the piper whose photographs made it into O'Neill's book of Irish musicians." Apparently the likeness is striking.
His great great grandfather changed his name from Timothy McCarthy to George Carthy: "You must understand that when the Irish came to England, they wanted to be absorbed into English culture. That social apartheid went on right into the 1960s until the Race Relations Act, which meant they couldn't put up signs any more saying `No Irish need apply'.
Meanwhile, Martin's father, who died in 1987, was a Labour politician, Albert "Toby" Carthy. "He worked with the TUC for years and was general secretary of the Socialist International from 1957 to 1970. Although he played fiddle when he was younger, and collected instruments, he sat on his musicality. I remember he came along when I was running guitar workshops at the Cambridge Festival, and I remember begging Paul Brady to get up and sing a couple of jigs or reels, and he did, and one of the tunes was The Wind That Shakes the Barley. I was astonished to see the glint of a tear in my father's eye. He just said `I haven't heard that tune since I was 21', and went back into his shell."
Between the pair of them, their knowledge of English folk traditions is broad and deep. Norma: "Up to the beginnings of this century, country musicians would play hornpipes and reels and schottisches all over England, just the same as here."
Martin: "Or amazing double-hornpipes, in 9/4 time. But they began to disappear because the dances were suppressed by the Church."
Norma: "And the instrumentation disappeared, the Leicestershire and Yorshire pipes - at one time, there were pipes for each county in England, and specific music for each one, but the only ones left now are the Northumbrian pipes."
They claim that, although the Catholic Church all over Europe also attempted to stamp out or control the country dances, the Protestant churches were more effective. Norma: "It goes back to the Cromwellian thing, that instruments were the spawn of the Devil."
Martin: "Even on tour in Europe, we always have the best time in the Catholic countries; they're the best audiences. The difference between Flanders and Holland is quite extraordinary, or even between the north and south of Holland, it's incredible."
I remark that in both their repertoires, the songs are dark, sad songs of misfortune and horrible hardship. Norma: "But they're the best songs. Who wants the airy-fairy ones? Most traditional songs are all about the human condition."
Martin: "Even a lot of the lighter songs, people sang them when they were trying to mentally escape from a pretty terrible plight. But when I think of some songs I sang with Steeleye, lovely country idylls that the English are so good at, about `skipping through the hay' . . . "
Norma: "Or milking your spotted cow . . . " Martin: "It's gorgeous stuff, but there's a critical bit missing." Norma: "They were starving most of the time."
Martin: "The bit that that makes you think, `well wouldn't it be nice to skip through the hay, and have lambs gambolling and so on.' "
The pair of them are fine, fit-looking, vivid people, but do they not find it tough on the road, spending up to nine months of the year doing anything from little gigs like this to Glastonbury and major European festivals?
Norma: "He thrives on it, but I like my home and order, to get up at a certain time, to go to the swimming baths, do a bit of gardening. When you're on the road, every day is different and there's no order, and sometimes it throws me."
They rely on each other, and indeed their 23-year-old daughter, Eliza, a gifted fiddler-singer who has toured with them since she was a young teenager. Her solo double-album, Red Rice, was nominated for the Mercury, and with its range from traditional folk to a fusion with drums/bass and samples, sat up on Virgin and HMV bestseller lists for over a year.
Martin: "Norma has given Eliza the same sort of upbringing that she had, musically speaking, and Eliza is another one of those people who can sing anything. She's unafraid, a song as far as she's concerned is a song. However, within traditional music, she has narrowed her options to concentrate on English folk music - simply because the Irish and Scottish music is so prevalent."
The last song on Norma's new CD is a cutting Fallen Leaves - written by Eliza, who obviously has inherited some the song-writing gifts of her auntie Lal, who died last September. "Eliza has a very dark side, and that song came out of a conversation after Princess Diana died. I was sorry she died and sorry for her children, but I couldn't understand the hysteria.
"Anyway the song is about that and Marilyn Monroe, and how people are perceived in the public eye, and about how you bury yourself" - she hums a line, "you are only pretty if you disappear". "These people will be forever young in people's eyes, but really, it's about women growing old, and about men . . . "
Part of Norma's recent success has come from covering big popular songs.
Martin: "Norma just gets up and sings at the top of her voice and she can anything to a traditional ballad to Over the Rainbow to Solid Air. She understands that because Count Basie is one of her favourites, she's a big jazz buff, she has a complete understanding of it. Her first husband was a jazz drummer. She also loves opera, although she's never tried singing it.
"It's the whole thing in her family, you listen to everything. I've never done the big songs. I do the traditional stuff, because it's what I'm good at."
Still, his new album, Signs of Life, carries songs by Bob Dylan, the BeeGees, Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel (written by Mae Axton, mother of country singer, Hoyt Axton) and Hoagy Carmichael. Both it and Norma's have gone forward for the Mercury Awards. Martin to Norma: "Yours'll get nominated; mine won't." He speaks with utter certitude.
Oh, has there ever been a competitive element between the two solo careers? Martin is about to frame a careful, English response but Norma just peals with laughter and rolls into him with a mischievous, girlish grin: "Oh don't worry, we've plenty else to fight about."
