Heritage plays a big role in musician's work

Like many musicians, Steve McDonald started playing the piano at age 5 and shifted to pop/rock in his teens.

Unlike many musicians, however, the life and music of the New Zealand rocker took a dramatic shift when a friend sent him an ancient-looking scroll with a brief history of the name McDonald. He "was so taken by the powerful history of the whole clan system," he said in a telephone chat from California, where he's on a concert tour that will bring him to Utah this weekend.

"The history stretched back to 1260 A.D., and it fascinated me. There were so many amazing stories of the Scots struggling to maintain their culture and their autonomy. And these were my people." He realized two things: he had to find his own roots, and he needed to set the stories to music.

McDonald set off to Scotland to do research. "The Clan Donald was very receptive and gave me a mountain of information," he said.

He learned that his own grandfather was born on the way to Australia, via Nova Scotia, having left Scotland around the time of the Clearances. It was a time when English landlords found that sheep gave them a higher return from the land than people, so the people were moved out. "I don't know that my family was actually evicted, but I think they saw a brighter future elsewhere," he said. The family moved to New Zealand around 1899. He remembers his grandfather as "a real Scotsman, a tough old Highlander."

McDonald's research led to a foray into Celtic music, or, more specifically, Celtic/fusion/rock music that has resulted in five CDs and has become his signature sound. His most recent release is one called "Ballads and Battles," featuring mostly original and a few traditional Scottish songs.

The first of those CDs, titled "Sons of Somerled," became hugely popular in Utah, and McDonald first visited the state to play a concert at Fashion Place Mall, where a local store was recognized as one of the top distributors of the album in the country. McDonald returned in 2000 for a concert at Kingsbury Hall for the annual Clan Donald convention.

He will come back again on Friday for a concert at the Sandy Amphitheater and to participate in the Payson Scottish Festival on Saturday.

The Friday concert will be a benefit for the Clan Donald, to provide help in building a USU Genealogical Library at Ft. Connah, in St. Ignatius, Mont. The fort was established in the 1800s by Angus McDonald, a fur trapper from Glencoe, Scotland, who settled in Montana.