‘Born a Woman’: Tribute show celebrates Rita MacNeil’s 1975 feminist album

A group of Cape Breton artists are performing in tribute show celebrating Rita MacNeil’s 1975 feminist album, "Born a Woman."

Not everyone knows it, but the Cape Breton performer many fondly remember for singing “Working Man” was actually a feminist.

“We’re doing a tribute show to Rita MacNeil’s 1975 album called, ‘Born A Woman,’” Molly MacNeil, a facilitator at Open Doors: Cape Breton Women in Harmony, said on Sunday.

“Born A Woman” was MacNeil’s debut album. Unlike the crowd-pleasing hits that came later in her career, it was a record full of songs about women’s rights.

Now, more than 50 years later, Molly and 12 other women are coming together to perform some of those songs.

“This side of Rita - this activist side, this feminist side - it’s not really talked about,” Molly said. “It’s always kind of been a big part of who she was. It was behind there. Behind the Christmas specials and behind the fame.”

Rachel Colford, who is also performing in the tribute show, said growing up in the 1990s she and the rest of the country were familiar with the gentler and, at times, shy side of MacNeil but her feminist roots were a surprise. That’s part of the reason she’s happy to revive MacNeil’s earlier music and the message behind it.

“Whoever you are, whatever background you have you can use your voice and it’s such an empowering thing,” Colford said.

Joella Foulds, a longtime friend of MacNeil who passed in April 2013, said the late singer would love the tribute.

“She really was not permitted to do this and to sing these songs once she had management,” Foulds said.

Foulds said she first met MacNeil in the late 1970s and helped bring her home for the first International Women’s Day concert in Cape Breton. Now, she is performing in the tribute show that will be held inside the Men of the Deeps theatre at the Cape Breton Miner’s Museum in Glace Bay, N.S.

“It means that people more broadly will get to understand the full depth of the person that was Rita MacNeil,” Foulds said.

Tickets for the show first went on sale on Sunday - which was International Women’s Day.