Possessed by Tradition: Stevie Nicks the Welsh Witch

By Millie Lavington-Owen

Clad in whimsical black silk, with the silhouette of the full moon behind her, Stevie Nicks floats her way into the spotlight. And ‘like a bird of flight’, arms extended, draped in black mesh, Rhiannon 1976 begins on The Midnight Special. Dark and sultry minor chords mirror the lyrical depiction of the mysterious and elusive eponymous character. ‘A cat in the dark / And then she is to darkness’, the woman metamorphoses again into a ‘fine skylark’. The performance culminates in a passionate invocation with Nicks directly imploring the mythical spirit to ‘take me with you to the sky’, crying out a chanting invocation: ‘Rhiannon’. The intensely spiritual performance climaxes in a seeming act of possession. Ancient Welsh Witch of the 12th-13th Century Maginogian lucidly aligns, in a kind of frenzied splendour, with Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks.

After watching the performance, it seems no surprise to read that Nicks has conceded that ‘Rhiannon is the heavy duty song to sing every night. On stage it’s really a mind tripper. Everybody, including me, is just blitzed by the end of it’. The Crawdaddy 1976 interview almost fails to capture, through language, the strained, bodily effort which, visually and vocally, almost completely consumes Nicks in delivering such a performance. T.S. Eliot famously writes upon the acquisition of tradition, not simply bought nor inherited, but ‘obtain[ed] [...] by great labour’. Tradition becomes something struggled towards, borne upon only with great effort. Yet, there is equally an omnipresence associated with tradition, for historical sense cannot be evaded: it informs everything. ‘No artist of any art,’ Eliot expands, ‘has his complete meaning alone’. Nicks not only emulates this in becoming the mythic figure upon whom she writes, - a fantastical mix of eccentricity, beauty and intensity - she actively collapses contemporality and historicity. Rhiannon becomes, as Nicks describes in her Rolling Stones 1979 interview, ‘some sort of reality. If I didn’t know she was a mythical character, I would think she lived down the street’. Or instead of ‘down the street’, perhaps she lives, night after night, upon the stage.

At first, it was simply the name ‘Rhiannon’ which enchanted. Yet, delving deeper, the meaning of the songs quickly gained, for Nicks, historical sense, tapping into the darkness and evasiveness of the folkloric Rhiannon. The birds of wildness, beauty and freedom traditionally associated with Rhiannon in Celtic Myth, transformed in Nicks’ mind into embodiments of music and her own spirit as performer. Just as ‘Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night’, the melodious and haunting chords and lyrics sing out to the audience. Ancient mythology is carried into the present, inspiring the lyrics and meaning of the song, reanimated upon the stage, and made anew. In doing so, tradition grasps Nicks in a tangible way, as it does the keen eyes and ears of the audience, entrancing, invoking the past, calling for the artist to be possessed. The Rhiannon character becomes the medium through which ideas are transmitted. She is actively channelled into Nicks’ live performances. Yet, she provides wider inspiration in Nicks’ own writing. From the ‘Maker of Birds’ Demo to ‘Angel’, included on the 1979 album Tusk, the fantasy genre seems to haunt Nicks. The bird imagery recurs, while Rhiannon’s folkloric reputation for disappearance seems to emulate and personify, for Nicks, heartbreak and the loss of those she once loved.

Though the form within which such customs and lore were depicted is changed, within Nicks, the tradition of fantasy and the figure of the witch are animated once more. For Nicks, tradition is wrapped up in the way ideas are transferred and disseminated. Rhiannon indeed pre-empts her own metamorphosis from manuscript to main stage. With her elusiveness and indefinability, her abstractness as she is ‘taken by the wind’, she becomes the perfect figure through which both historicity and individuality can both, simultaneously, be expressed. Nicks’ writing and indeed her own body, thus, convey both: the fantastical, mythological figure, but coloured with Nicks’ own individual idiosyncrasies. Rhiannon’s spirit becomes song. Nicks, in her frenzied passion, becomes songbird, entangling the singer-songwriter with her deeply enigmatic muse.