Some records document a moment; Forefowk, Mind Me, the third album from Glasgow-based singer Quinie (Josie Vallely), gathers centuries into its marrow. These songs are not preserved artifacts but living utterances, steeped in soil, weather, and memory. Born from a slow horseback journey through Argyll, the album carries the rhythm of hooves and breath, of listening to land and people. That origin is audible: the music moves at the pace of landscape, not industry.
Quinie has long embraced the rawness of Scots traveller song, following the unaccompanied lines of Lizzie Higgins and Sheila Stewart. But here, she doesn’t simply honor the past; she enacts a conversation with it. The title—“forefowk” meaning “ancestors” in Scots—frames the record as caretaking, the songs woven into her voice until they emerge not as echoes but as something alive.
Col My Love opens with the drone of Harry Górski-Brown’s pipes and Quinie’s canntaireachd vocals, syllables braiding into the melody like a tide. It’s less a song than an invocation. The unaccompanied Bonnie Udny offers stark intimacy, while her take on Matt Armour’s Generations of Change turns a Fife family history into a meditation on lineage and labour, sung with a dignity that feels carved rather than polished.
There is joy, too. Macaphee Turn the Cattle revels in play, her voice skittering over fiddle and improvised percussion that reportedly includes a cheese grater and a woodburning stove. Auld Horse shifts that play into ceremony, spoken word and field recordings meeting viola and double bass in a quiet, experimental ritual. On Sae Slight a Thing, Marion Angus’s poetry meets an old Uilleann pipe melody; the duduk’s warmth and the pipes’ edge frame Quinie’s voice like wind moving between trees, a haunting centrepiece.
Part of what gives the record weight is its awareness of inheritance. Though not a traveller herself, Quinie sings these songs with the blessing of traveller friends, approaching them as stewardship rather than appropriation. Her journey with her horse Maisie isn’t a pastoral flourish but part of the work—a way to sync her rhythm to the landscapes the songs inhabit.
Recorded at The Big Shed in Highland Perthshire, the album lets the outside world seep in: rain, air, a hum of space that isn’t a studio. Her collaborators—Górski-Brown, Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh on viola, Oliver Pitt on duduk and bouzouki, Stevie Jones on bass—create frames rather than cages, leaving silence to carry as much weight as sound.
It would be easy to call Forefowk, Mind Me a niche record for Scots-language devotees, but its scope is wider. By digging deeply into tradition, it hits something elemental. In a folk scene divided between glossy revivalism and avant-garde deconstruction, Quinie has carved a third path: tradition neither embalmed nor exploded, but lived. This is not a grand statement album. It’s rarer than that: a record that sounds as if it has always been here, waiting to be heard.
