Obituary: Jane McGarrigle was never far from her sisters

Anna McGarrigle was sitting at the piano alone in her niece Martha Wainwright’s home in Outremont earlier this week, tinkling the ivories and feeling melancholic. Anna was on the phone talking about her older sister Jane McGarrigle, who died Jan. 24 at the Jewish General Hospital, from complications from ovarian cancer. She was 83.

Jane was the eldest McGarrigle sister. Kate and Anna were the stars in the music world.

They are among the most acclaimed singer-songwriters ever to come from Canada, a reputation established the moment their self-titled first album came out in January 1976.

Jane wasn’t in the band, but she was never far away. She often sang with them, was one of the producers of the 1982 Kate and Anna album Love Over and Over, and managed the duo for several years.

With her sisters, Jane co-wrote the beautiful track Love Is on the 1990 Kate and Anna album Heartbeats Accelerating. The three composed the scores for the Quebec family films Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller and its sequel The Return of Tommy Tricker.

“Today I’m incredibly sad. … I’m sitting in Martha’s apartment,” Anna said. “She has a piano here, so I’m trying to write something. It might be a song. It’s a series of chords. It doesn’t have any lyrics yet. I’m not sure what it is. It just sounds like a complaint of some kind, something sad.”

Anna said Jane was an “incredibly gifted musician,” a sentiment seconded by others who knew her. She was primarily a keyboard player, who began her musical career at the age of 14 playing the organ at l’?glise de St-Sauveur-des-Monts near their family home.

Peter Weldon, her partner of around 10 years, recounts the story of Jane as a teenager playing the Jerry Lee Lewis rave-up Great Balls of Fire on the organ during a funeral, which caused quite a commotion.

Jane’s business savvy helped Kate and Anna big time, particularly in the early 1980s when they were no longer with Warner Brothers Records, Anne said. Jane got them a deal with Polydor and the European multinational released the album Love Over and Over in 1982. She was known as a tough negotiator.

On the phone from his home in Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles, Rufus Wainwright — Kate’s son — said his aunt Jane was “formidable and formidably hilarious. Of all the sisters she was the funniest. She had this grand sense of humour.”

Wainwright said Jane was always very much the older sister, literally and figuratively.

“She had this maturity about her, this adult quality which I think a lot of us in the family really relied on,” Wainwright said. “She knew how to be the adult in the room when needed. She was really the one that was the most like my grandmother Gaby and once Gaby was gone, she became the matriarch. And now we’ve lost our matriarch, unfortunately.”

Wainwright said he would often go to Jane for musical advice.

“She had an incredible musicality and she was a great piano player,” Wainwright said.

Jane married Town of Mount Royal native David Dow in the early 1960s and while Kate and Anna were starting out in the folk scene here, Jane and her husband headed west, moving to San Francisco. They eventually settled with their two children in the Lake Tahoe area.

But Jane returned to Montreal at the end of the 1970s and it was around that time that she began managing her sisters. She also often toured with them, singing backing vocals and contributing on piano.

Jane and Anna wrote the 2015 book Mountain City Girls, a memoir of their family and their roots in the Laurentians.

The Globe and Mail called it “a non-regretting, red-wine read full of anecdotes and antiquity, with the well-turned phrases of a generation who took care of language.”

The last time Jane performed publicly was with the reunited Mountain City Four, a folk quartet that was formed in the early ‘60s in Montreal and included at the time Kate and Anna on vocals. They played a magical concert in September 2022 at Ursa, the venue run by Martha Wainwright, and Jane was in great form on piano that night.

Weldon said he and Jane would play songs together almost every evening in their apartment on Academy Rd., just off of Westmount Park, and they’d host a weekly musical salon with various old friends from the folk scene. Jane had moved her baby grand, which she’d had for decades, into the apartment.

Weldon said he was blown away by her musical knowledge, saying she could whip off nearly any classic song from the American Songbook.

“I learned a hell of a lot,” said Weldon, who was playing bass while she played the piano at those home jam sessions.

The family has a rough demo recording Jane had made in the ‘70s in California of a song she wrote, Big City Children. Despite the poor production quality, it’s impossible to ignore the power of the song and the vocal performance.

“She was a really underrated singer,” Weldon said. “She had a really nice voice. And she could yell like Jerry Lee Lewis.”

Jane is survived by her children, Anna Catherine Dow (Robert McMillan), Ian Vincent Dow (Kathleen Weldon); her grandchildren, Gabrielle McMillan, Islay McMillan, Anna Sophia “Fifi” Dow; her sister, Anna McGarrigle; and Peter Weldon. Kate McGarrigle died in 2010.

Funeral services will be held Monday, Feb. 3, at 11 a.m. at L’église Saint-Viateur d’Outremont, 1175 Laurier Ave. W. in Outremont.