For a while it looked as though we might all join hands and huddle around an imaginary camp fire in preparation for the arrival of the fast-rising country-folk singer Lucy Kaplansky. The audience, the fastest sellout of the entire Big Big Country Festival, was hushed in an un-Glasgwegian, reverential silence in the old Ramshorn Church. There was a quietly busy bar, but it all felt as though we were about to speak with an angel, and I had terrifying visions of a cloned Nanci Griffith - one of the many artists Kaplansky has worked with - at her twee worst. But the dark, diminutive Kaplansky (not an obvious stage name for the country circuit), far from being the overly precious miserabilist expected, was animated, sparky and humorous. The acoustics were faultless, and every nuance of her soaring, twanging vocals shimmered as though she was carving the lyrics from her new album, Ten Year Night, in the sepulchral air.
The first few songs prove that her many independent albums rarely capture her moody crackle and finely judged guitar playing. Her conversational style helped break down the devotional atmosphere, although some of her songs are only passable reflections on love and loss. But this incongruous country-New Yorker is stepping out of the shadows of her former creative cohort, Shawn Colvin, with confidence and poise. The break-up, seemingly, was not smooth, and while Colvin became big in the States, Kaplansky undertook a doctorate of psychology before returning to the concert circuit. The experience seems to have hardened her, for she is no longer "in the mood for moonlight and new age tears" as she sings in the vicious Turn The Lights Back On, and that's when she is great. Her strength is lies in beautiful bitterness rather than the slow love songs that verge on the slushy.
And sometimes it was all too pristine, the lyrics too well honed; it is possible she has studied those psychology books too much. But her best revenge songs go well beyond coffee-shop strumming and the glitz-country of Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks.
The audience hung on every crystal syllable, but you can't knock the girl who, towards the end, found it all so gratingly quiet that she deliberately ordered a straight bourbon from the stage to the back bar.
