Singer Mary McPartlan has delved deeply into her past for material for her second album, which she has lovingly crafted with a little help from her friends, writes Martin Doyle

LIKE THE MINERS in Arigna where her father and brothers once worked, Mary McPartlan has dug deep into her native soil and found a rich seam of memories and songs, many of which may be unique to Leitrim but whose resonance is universal.

Petticoat Loose, her second album, takes its name from a song written by the poet and playwright Vincent Woods, her lifelong, childhood friend, but what should make its name are the other two he has written, Sanctuary and Kiss The Moon, which excavate the roots of her family tree to create something as dark and beautiful as a bog-oak sculpture.

McPartlan was 50 when she recorded her first album, The Holland Handkerchief, four years ago, but its impact was immediate, being shortlisted for the Meteor awards and winning Mojo's folk album of the year award.

She has been a singer all her life, buying her first guitar as a teenager, forming a folk duo, Calypso, in the 1970s, then a singers' club, An Riabhóg, in her beloved Galway, and touring with Seán Tyrrell and Seán Keane in a Druid production of The Midnight Court. But most of her time was spent backstage, producing traditional music concerts for theatre and television, most notably helping create the TG4 National Traditional Music Awards.

However, while working with the theatre group Skehana she heard the director John O'Hare encourage his young actors to find "a deep sense of truth and honesty within themselves". This had a profound effect on McPartlan, sending her back to Comalth, her birthplace, to nurture her creativity. Only the walls were still standing of the two-room cottage where she grew up, and trees were growing where the kitchen table and beds once stood, but it helped her tap into her childhood.

In fact, while it may have inspired her to make her first album, only on Petticoat Loose has she struck the mother lode. The respect in which she is held can be measured by the meitheal of talents that she has again assembled - the producer is Dervish's Seamie O'Dowd, and the musicians include Frankie Gavin of De Dannan, Cathal Hayden and Gerry O'Connor of Four Men a Dog, Mairtín O'Connor and Johnny Ringo McDonagh. Even the sleevenotes are by the writer Susan McKay.

Yet, even though she must know it will strike a sour note, she still feels hurt enough to want it on record that her peers have failed to take her seriously, despite the acclaim her two albums have received.

"I was still seen as a promoter, somebody to be contacted for other people's needs," she says. "I can say with more conviction since Petticoat Loose that the traditional music fraternity is bordering on an old boys' network. I feel that I don't fit. All the people who are on my CD are my great friends, I love them dearly. Apart from that, I would say that there is little generosity of spirit in traditional music circles since I flipped over to be an artist myself as opposed to a promoter. It's a major challenge to stick with it, for it's quite obvious to me now that I can never make a living as an artist, ever."

She worries about the plight of traditional musicians at the grassroots, many of whom she says are as impoverished as those on social welfare, and wishes that the Arts Council would set up a scheme similar to Aosdana "to look after the artists who have dedicated their lives to the music and inspired generations".

The singer says she had no rich musical heritage to form her growing up. "There were no influences. I don't have this lovely intellectual past, where my great-grandmother was a great collector of songs. I listened to Radio Luxembourg on the top of a mountain in Leitrim, I sang the songs out of Ireland's Own, I was 20 before we had a record player. The first record was Buddy Holly. There was hardly anything happening in Leitrim. The Dorans would pass through on fair days. John McKenna was from Arigna and Michael Coleman and James Morrison were from 15 miles away but they all went to America. The music was there but the people had to leave."

In fact, her mother's people in Plumbridge, Co Tyrone, were steeped in music - her grandfather Bernard was a fiddler, her grandmother Susannah a box-player - but she was 25 before she made the 75-mile journey from Drumkeerin. Poverty had cut her off from her musical roots.

MCPARTLAN HAS SPENT her life fighting for other people's rights so she knows how to stick up for herself. Politicised by the poverty that surrounded her, she recalls her history teacher rebuking her for reading James Connolly. When she joined the civil service, she fought for equal pay for women and later helped run the Simon Community in Galway and marched against Pinochet. At her album launch in Dublin's Liberty Hall Theatre she sang Victor Jara, Adrian Mitchell's salute to a fellow poet murdered after the coup in Chile. Michael D Higgins, a man for whom she has walked the roads canvassing, was there to recall that he had also launched Jara's biography by his widow Joan there years before.

Given her politics, McPartlan was drawn to the Sligo Trades Club, where she fell in love with the songs of Ewan MacColl, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Christy Moore. On Kiss The Moon, a song about loneliness, surviving hard times and mothers passing on love and a vision of life to daughters, she sings how when she was a child she asked her mother to lift her up to kiss the moon, and now her daughters watch it, too. Her girls, Mairead and Meabh, sang backing vocals on her album, but you sense she is even prouder that they recently marched with Amnesty International to protest against Guantanamo Bay.

McPartlan remembers an old woman protesting against the closure of Sligo hospitals cancer unit and wonders where all the young people were. "We've never lived in a more disabled, selfish society. My mother always said, 'well, if youre selfish youre going to be unhappy'."

On the other hand, devoting her life to waiting in the wings, promoting and producing other singers and musicians when she was desperate to take wing and sing herself, was making her unhappy too. Good friends gave her the confidence she needed.

Vincent Woods is one of the finest poets and playwrights of contemporary literature, we've know each other all our lives. He is very special, the closest friend I've ever had, we know each other's families and lives so well it seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to write about my father and mother, where I grew up, his deep understanding of our shared landscapes. He's always supported me as a singer and pushed me to have the confidence to do for myself what Ive done for others.

"Another person who said the key things to me when they needed to be said was Paddy Keenan. I did a few songs on a tape and said to Paddy, listen to that and tell me what you think. I was lacking in conviction that I could do it. He said, Mary, get out there and make your CD."

Keenan put her in touch with producer PJ Curtis, who together with Seamie O'Dowd produced an album full of passion, which she describes as a contemporary take on the 1980s folk revival. Petticoat Loose has moved on further musically and deeper lyrically. Each of the 13 songs has a story behind it.

On Lumé Lumé, a Romanian song performed with Con Tempo, the Romanian string quartet, based at NUIG, where McPartlan teaches part-time, she sounds like Ute Lemper. Cúmha, by Pádraig Ó hAoláin, the head of Udaras na Gaeltachta, is a lament for the loss of a rural community, drifting first from the land and the sea to the cities and then, when the factories shut, to emigration. By collaborating on it with Con Tempo, McPartlan was deliberately emphasising the universal resonance of Connemaras story. "The drift to the cities is happening all over the world."

Síos Faoi Braoch Loch Aileann and Caoine Sheáin Mhic Searraigh are two pre-Famine songs from Leitrim unearthed for her by Proinn Duignan and developed by her with the help of a Deis grant from the Arts Council. (McPartlan makes a point of acknowledging her helpers). "This is only the beginning, she says. My next move is to do more on Irish language songs from Leitrim in the 18th century. The dialect is very like Donegal and north Mayo, very different to Connemara Irish. You get a sense of yourself, the language your great-grandparents spoke."

IT WAS A CHALLENGE for her to sing Barbara Allen, a song covered by so many, but when she stumbled upon a version collected by Tom Munnelly from Leitrim in the Irish Traditional Music Archive and recorded by Dolly Parton and Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh of Altan, she couldn't resist. With her powerful, earthy voice, sung a capella with her nieces, it is spine-tinglingly good. She rang Tom's widow for permission to dedicate the song to him but warned her it was the Dolly Parton version. "She roared laughing, he loved Dolly Parton."

Petticoat Loose, the title track, was inspired by one of the folk tales from Anne O'Connor's book, The Blessed and the Damned, about a witch who would lie in wait for old men coming home from the pub on a dark night, drink heavily, taunt the priest outside church and dance so wildly, her petticoat would fall down.

The presence of Sisters of Mercy might seem almost incongruously conventional, but she just loves Leonard Cohen. "It's always a big risk to do a cover of one of the greatest writers and performers ever but the rest of the CD is all my own endeavour and experience of the world. This was just pure pleasure."

Comparisons are odious, and McPartlan has been likened to everyone from Bessie Smith to Norma Waterson, but the usual one that always gets her goat is Dolores Keane, "even down to looking like her. I'm sure that doesn't make her or me very happy, for we are so absolutely different. She is an extraordinary singer with an extraordinary history. I came a long time after with a totally different style of singing. If I had to be compared to be successful, then I'd stay at home. I am just me and that's it."

Petticoat Loose is on the MacP label. The North-west album launch is at the Clarence Hotel, Sligo, May 29; Flights of Fancy, Leitrim (with Mairtin OConnor, Cathal Hayden, Seamie ODowd), Drumkeerin Community Centre, Co Leitrim, June 8; and later dates in Charlestown, Co Mayo, Drumshambo, Co Leitrim, Dunlewey, Co Donegal and Omagh, Co Tyrone.