Karen Matheson with Donald Shaw - Crucán Na bPáiste 

This is beautiful and wonderfully performed music. My only whinge, with ref. to the songs in Gaelic/ Irish is that it would be really great if a translation could be added. I've studied írish and its close relative Scots Gaelic, but without being a native speaker, it's hard to really know the true meaning of a song without a translation.

Go raibh maith agut

The song lyrics were written in about 1997 by Brendan Graham (a very famous Irish songwriter). He was born in Tipperary, so I guess the lyrics conform to the Munster dialect. Karen speaks Argyll Gaelic, but she sings both North Hebridean Gaelic and South Herbridean Gaelic as well as Argyll Gaelic, and has sung in Irish together with Iarla Ó Lionáird and Karan Casey, both of whom are rather famous Munster Irish singers. So my guess is that she sings this song in Munster Irish.

But possibly BG wrote it in Connacht dialect, as the song is about events about 180 years ago somewhere near to Maamtrasna, which is in Connacht. The lyrics certainly aren't in Ulster Irish.

The difference from Munster dialect may be simply that any consonant next to a narrow vowel will be pronounced as a narrow consonant. It amazes me how many consonants that ought to be narrow are pronounced broad in both Connacht and Munster dialects; the Ulster dialect is rather better in that respect than Connacht or Munster, but even there some narrow consonants somehow turn broad. Probably any Gàidhlig speaker will pronounce all narrow consonants as narrow consonants, but most Irish people will not. And most Gàidhlig speakers will have problems understanding what Irish people say or sing for that reason.

Oh, just go away.

Evidently you are not aware that in Scotland female Gaels often do not adopt their husband's surname , and even if they do adopt it they lose it when they die - the name in the church's death record is either their maiden name or both maiden and married names. I'm not sure what current rule is for Anglophones, but 48 years ago I married an Engishwoman in Edinburgh and while we stayed in Scotland her surname on legal documents and bank documents was always "Ward or Thomson" - her maiden surname came first and my surname second. When my job moved us to England she decided not to find a teaching job, and only do jobs that used less of her time partly because the local system couldn''t cope with her name on the Scottish documents and treated anything carrying her legal name as a forgery. My bank was much more sensible - it asked me whether they should change to name on our joint account to fit in with the English system now that we were in England and we agreed that we would do that, and our English lawyer suddenly saw sense when my Scottish lawyer (an absolute dragon) decided that she would explain to him that he was violating British law by refusing to deal with Scottish legal documents. It took her maybe 10 minutes (I suspect that she told him that she would ask the court of session to deal with him, and of course that court would not accept his qualification as a lawyer because he had clearly not studied Scottish law). And suddenly everything was moving fast instead of not moving at all.

Seriously. And you think your cranky opinion is worth being published. They've been married for a long time now and have two children. The first bit of trouble must have gone by - still no divorce. Karen must be an exception from all the modern and awfully shallow women who are ashamed to take their husbands names.

"her being ashamed to take her husbands name" ... no more probable than her husband being ashamed to take her name.

I just love her. Saw her in a London church couple of years ago, can honestly say it was the best gig I have ever been to.