(Courtesy
photo)
The scene from Carolyn Murray’s CD cover for ‘Peninsula
Child’ features the beautiful Kingston Peninsula she knows,
loves and sing about. |
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The bright moon is climbing the skies of Long Reach,
The stars softly shining above Crystal Beach
And it's time for those brown eyes to close for a while,
Go to sleep, sweet Peninsula Child.
Poetically beautiful, heart-touchingly sung, Carolyn Murray's Peninsula Child CD
will repaint any mind pictures you have of the Kingston Peninsula in even more
vivid hues.
Born in North Sydney, Cape Breton, Carolyn moved to the Kingston Peninsula in
1970 to teach music at Macdonald Consolidated School and immediately fell in
love with the area and its people.
That love is reflected in her debut CD's 10 tracks, which includes two
instrumentals and eight songs, that was released recently at a launch party at
St. Bridget's Hall. All, except one, were composed by Carolyn. The words to My
Mother's Grave, rural in their simplicity yet charming, were written as the
Victorian age gave way to the 20th century by John A. Lennan (1863-1945) and,
with his grandson Bill Lennan's permission, set to music by Carolyn.
Its lyrics, although a tribute to a beloved mother, are elegantly descriptive of
the area's beauty - the peninsula Carolyn left in 1995 to teach in St. Stephen
but returned to three years later, this time to teach at Springfield's Belleisle
Elementary. She retired in 1999.
Her past five years have been filled with composing music, stories, poems and
songs, and traveling to Mexico and Europe as part of a ministry leadership team.
Always, however, she returns to 'her Peninsula' until, as she sings in River St.
John: "In old Long Reach churchyard I'll lay when I die, I'll rest by the
River St. John."
Praises of the peninsula's beauty also occur in Kingston Creek, Ode To the
Kingston Peninsula, Kingston Peninsula Blues and of course Peninsula Child which
Carolyn wrote for her own peninsula child, Charles Murray - one of four: two
sons and two daughters. One daughter, Stephanie (Murray) Mainville, a superb
violinist, accompanies her mother on six of the CD's tracks. The other two songs
are School Reunion and the exquisitely
Carolyn Murray |
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beautiful Song For Margaret. The two
instrumentals are The William Pitt and Eleanor's Waltz.
Among her other accomplishments is a historical musical performed by Macdonald
students during New Brunswick's 1984 bicentennial and a Christmas Cantata,
Everybody Loves A Baby, written with her daughter Stephanie, which won the
Kingston Bicentennial prize. Also, the song Absent Friends, written by Carolyn
for a St. Stephen graduating class, was recorded and aired by CBC Radio and she
wrote and arranged myriad musical pieces for school choirs and ukulele groups.
The Peninsula Child CD, on which Carolyn plays her own piano accompaniment and
sings hauntingly beautiful harmony to her own leads, is available through her
website http://