WHEN Manus McGuire was invited back to the Celtic Roots Festival in Goderich, Ontario this summer the organisers asked if there was anyone he might like to have accompany him. The fiddler from Sligo who has made County Clare his base for international touring for the past 30 years replied without hesitation. On his previous trip to the festival a couple of years before he’d met and heard a young pianist whose accompaniment style showed great understanding of Irish fiddle music. Might this pianist be available?

The pianist turned out to be Emily Flack and not only was she likely to be available to do the gig, if McGuire wanted to organise a rehearsal beforehand she was more handily placed than he could have imagined, as she was studying at the University of Limerick in the neighbouring county to the south.

It’s little surprise that McGuire detected an understanding of Irish music in his putative accompanist as Flack has been around jigs, reels, hornpipes and slides all her life. Her mother, Denise is one of the eight siblings who form the Leahy family band, a powerhouse of Irish music in Canada who tour across North America and run an annual summer camp where students learn and polish their skills in fiddle, mandolin, accordion, music technology and appropriately where Emily is concerned, piano, singing, songwriting and step-dancing.

“The joke in the family is that all Leahys learn to play the fiddle except me – I dodged the bullet,” says Flack down the line from Limerick, where having completed an MA in Traditional Irish Song, she now teaches piano and is working on her own music between gigs with McGuire, who has made the most of her current location and brings her to Glasgow for the first time this week.

Denise Flack took a break from the family band when she was expecting Emily and was at home for much of the time while Emily was growing up but there were a few tours that she didn’t want to miss and Emily has memories of the time her mum was supporting Shania Twain.

“I was only four or five at the time and I didn’t get to go out on the whole tour but I can remember being at some of the theatres closer to home and getting to meet Shania Twain,” she says. “I couldn’t even go to school and brag about it on the Monday morning because I wasn’t actually at school yet but I remember everything being very big and there being all these goodies backstage.”

It wasn’t long after this when, having avoided the fiddle, she began step-dancing and piano lessons. The former she took to naturally and she became a champion, travelling to Irish festivals across Ontario to compete.

But despite the fact that she’s now teaching the instrument as well as playing it professionally – she’s just returned from Shetland with McGuire as we speak – her early experiences with the piano didn’t bode well.

“I was a terrible student,” she says. “I hated the classical music I was being made to play and after a while my mother came and saw the teacher and said, I think we might take Emily out of your hair for a while. I was overjoyed but eventually I went back and realised that my teacher was just the best. She’d take me through the classical stuff I needed to do to get my grades – or at least up to grade 6, which was as far as I got – and then once we’d done that, we’d work on traditional music. Then, when I started writing my own tunes, she helped me with the fingering and techniques I needed to play these properly.”

When Emily reached high school age her mother went back on the road with the Leahy family band. By this time Emily was singing as well as step-dancing and playing the piano and had done a few gigs as a singer at ceili dances and at Irish music events locally. The Leahys aren’t slow to show off the younger generation’s talents – you can see one of Emily’s many cousins, Xavier, being introduced on accordion on YouTube – and soon teenage Emily was joining her mother on Christmas and summer tours, singing Go Tell it on the Mountain to delighted audiences.

Her teachers at school weren’t quite so impressed that these tours were encroaching on term time but they came round to the idea on the assurance that Emily would do her homework on the road and have it completed by the time she got back. Which, she says, she more or less did.

“I maybe crammed assignments into the last couple of days but I did generally have them done in time,” she says. “Going on the road with the Leahy band was part of my education as well, though, because I was learning about performing and getting used to being in front of pretty big audiences.

The band plays in theatres and at festivals in the States and the theatres tend to be bigger there than they are in Ireland, say, so you’re playing to a lot of people and learning how to be a professional every night. It was great training.”

Great training or not, she was encouraged also to think about having a career to fall back on and while singing her own material is the ultimate plan, she took a degree in Religion, English and History with the idea of becoming a teacher until the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick offered the chance to study for her masters degree.

Before moving to Limerick she toured with her aunt, Cape Breton fiddler and step-dancer Natalie McMaster and was working with fiddler Shane Cook when Manus McGuire heard her playing in Goderich. She’d also met Peter Wallace, of the Belfast musical dynasty the McPeakes, who had offered to produce an album for her. So her connections on this side of the Atlantic were already quite strong.

“My mum’s a songwriter and she encouraged me to work on my songwriting,” she says. “She and her sisters have been really helpful with creative advice.

Plus, coming from Canada, you’re always aware that there are a lot of people to look up to – Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot, all these great Canadian songwriters. It’s inspiring to know they all came before you and at the same time, it keeps your feet on the ground.”

In duo with McGuire, who has a formidable track record having been involved in respected Irish groups including Buttons and Bows and the Brock McGuire Band with button accordion virtuoso Paul Brock, she’s as happy to play piano accompaniment as she is to take centre stage.

“It’s quite diverse with Manus,” she says. “He knows so many great tunes from Ireland but also from Shetland, Scotland and Canada but he’s also great at accompanying songs. So we have a lot of instrumental music we can play and I sing some of my own sings and some traditional songs, in English and Irish Gaelic, and I step-dance. I’ve never played in Scotland before, although I have been to Glasgow just for a visit, so I’m really looking forward to the gig.”

Manus McGuire and Emily Flack play Sweeneys on the Park in Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow on Thursday, October 26.

Rob Adams