The Scottish folk group Ed Miller Trio performed the first official concert of the fall semester for ULM’s School of Visual and Performing Arts.
The trio played on Sept.5 in the Emy-Lou Biedenharn Recital Hall as part of the Guest Artist on Campus Series.
The performance kicked off the month leading up to the 2013 Northeast Louisiana Celtic Festival at West Monroe’s Kiroli Park on October 5 that Enoch Doyle Jeter, printmaking instructor at ULM, always helps put together.
This is VAPA and the festival’s ninth collaboration. They continue to bring Celtic music to both ULM and northeast Louisiana for audiences who want a good time and to learn more about the culture.
Ed Miller’s wry humor was as important to the performance as the vocal and instrumental abilities of the trio’s members: Ed Miller, guitarist and vocalist; Scooter Muse, guitarist; and Jil Chambless, vocalist and flute player.
The trio began by encouraging audience members to sing along, or at least to the songs’ choruses, and to dance in the aisles as two young girls did throughout the show.
As Jil Chambless said, “The goal is to get the audience to tap their feet and to smile and to know the stories behind the songs and where they come from.”
Many songs had the audience laughing and clapping along like the “Manchester Rambler”, the hilarious “The Devil Made Texas”, another that Miller calls “a true Scottish love song” about whiskey and the song about “the oldest trade in Scotland: begging.”
The concert would have been incomplete without Miller’s many jokes on topics such as Texas heat, popular music and a beggar’s role as “National Enquirer on legs” in Scotland’s past.
Miller also gave audience members information on Scottish culture in the introduction of each song. He spoke about the importance of preserving culture by keeping old traditional songs alive.
Erika Deras, a freshman English major, said that she liked that “he told a story before every song.”
Derle Long, VAPA Director, called the concert “a fun event” in which the audience could “get up and dance” to the music. Long said students can also look forward to more concerts such as the ULM Percussion Ensemble on Nov. 18 in Brown Auditorium.
