A warm welcome to Wicked Lady Funerals...
Singers, raconteurs, writers,
and doyennes of death positivity,
Leah Cotterell and Narelle McCoy
have been talking about
music and the art of death for years.
It’s a lively topic! After all, in Australia death is a growth industry. And wherever a funeral is being held, in a beautiful church, a crematorium, a private home, or at the graveside, Leah and Narelle have always found that music is what truly unites the mourners in that final farewell.
On this page find a run-down of the Wicked Ladies’ projects and background:
1. Introducing the Wicked Ladies
2. The 2025 debut of "Confessions of a Funeral Singer"
3 The 2023 and 2024 performances of "Whistling Past the Graveyard"
Introducing the Wicked Ladies...
of Wicked Lady Funerals
Leah and Narelle fell into a long conversation about music, death, grief and mourning while working and studying at the Queensland Conservatorium a decade ago. Their two performance projects, Whistling Past the Graveyard and Confessions of a Funeral Singer, resonate with Death Positivity trends around the world and chime to Leah and Narelle’s strong belief that embracing the processes of death, grief, and bereavement, offers opportunities for enriching our lives. By presenting their engaging and moving performances to general audiences in cemetery, community, and museum locations, Narelle and Leah have created safe spaces for conversation and reflection about end-of-life care, death and mourning rituals.
Leah Cotterell
On the way from her first gigs in community theatre in the 1980s to her 2020 Doctor of Musical Arts, Leah established a national profile as a jazz singer before diverging into song writing projects and production. A Women in Voice regular Leah has brought her warm soulful voice to many styles. Her musical memoir The Pleasure of Sad Songs was the subject of a 2015 Conversations interview on ABC Radio National. Leah was awarded the 2022 Letty Katts Fellowship in the Queensland Memory Awards.
Narelle McCoy
Narelle is a writer, musician, academic, archivist and researcher. She is a lecturer in music studies, and an RHD Fellow at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, as well as a presenter at international conferences on the topic of the Irish wake ritual, death and Irish mythology. Narelle was awarded the 2020 Letty Katts Fellowship in the Queensland Memory Awards.
Confessions of a Funeral Singer
From the soulful and sublime,
to the surprising and silly,
Confessions of a Funeral Singer
is a warm-hearted celebration
of the whole glorious hodgepodge
of funeral music in Australia today.
Funeral singers and raconteurs, Leah and Narelle have seen it all, singing folk songs at Australian-Irish wakes, swampy gospel at Buddhist services, rock ballads in Protestant chapels, Baptist hymns in Catholic churches, and an impromptu graveside “Danny Boy” when Spotify failed.
To write this show Leah and Narelle interviewed seven funeral singers. The stories and songs they collected are surprisingly diverse, but all the singers agreed that music is a gift to the mourners, providing space for emotion, reflection, and acceptance of grief and loss.
These stories are framed by Leah and Narelle exploring their academic research, and making their own disarming confessions: Leah admits that she doesn’t cry herself, but relishes bringing her audience to tears through the undeniable power of music, and Narelle, who has made a field study of the keeners of old Ireland, confesses that she can’t sing at the funeral of a loved one, for she simply can’t control her own tears.
Debuting in 2025 at three charming regional community halls, in the program of the Anywhere Festival Moreton Bay 2025, a review described the performance as an “unexpectedly heartwarming exploration of life’s most profound moments” transforming collected stories about funeral singing into “an intimate conversation that transforms seemingly dark subject matter into something wholesome and luminous”.
Audiences leave with the feeling of a warm hug, reconnected with favourite memories that may have felt just out of reach....Confessions of a Funeral Singer is a gentle reminder to always look on the bright side of life [and death], and begs the essential question: “What song do you want at your funeral?”
This project was supported by the Regional Arts Development Fund, a partnership between the Queensland Government and City of Moreton Bay to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland.
Whistling Past the Graveyard
On a beautiful afternoon
among the old stone monuments,
two talented raconteurs share
fascinating reflections about funerals
and the end of life…
In Whistling Past the Graveyard Narelle draws on her research into music and Irish death rituals which intersects with both her family’s Irish Catholic funeral practices in Australia, and improvised community rituals that emerged during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Leah has embedded her Doctor of Musical Arts research on music, empathy, and emotion in the construction of the performance, and shares her experience as a carer for family members living with complex and chronic mental illnesses.
The musical materials are as eclectic as the subject matter, ranging from classical and folk song to emblematic pop songs and of course, together we sing "Amazing Grace".
Whistling Past the Graveyard was performed at the South Brisbane Cemetery (2023 and 2024) and at the Redcliffe Museum (2024). A review of their 2024 performance called the show “...an eclectic mix of heartfelt and light-hearted storytelling, poetry and song...” (theatretravels.org, 2024).