Tag: sam lee

Folk Singer Sam Lee Instills Hope and Inspires Action With ‘Songdreaming’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Sam Lee’s musical career grew out of his environmental activism, from the Mercury-winning album, Old Wow, to his ongoing conservation project Singing with Nightingales. The British folk star’s fourth album, songdreaming, released earlier this year, is his most creative venture yet. It’s a manifesto for reconnection with nature constructed from luscious, haunting reinterpretation of the songs of the UK’s Traveller communities.

Its title comes from the summer retreats Lee leads that bring people together to connect to their land and ancestry through song: “Singing to the land happens across the world in Indigenous communities that still have their relationship to nature very much intact,” says Lee. “It’s ceremony, it’s devotional work, it’s prayer.”

We spoke to Lee about songdreaming, how he sources material, queerness, connection to nature, and much more.

Sam, your music is usually based on traditional folk song, but these songs go far further from the source material than you’ve ever taken them before.

I had done a little bit of original writing on Old Wow, but this is an album where almost everything is written by me, some to the point where there’s no semblance of the primary folk song left. And that was a big risk, because I’m quite shy when it comes to thinking of myself as a songwriter. It’s not like I’m a seasoned Johnny Flynn or Anaïs Mitchell. It’s not my training, and I’m a very reluctant writer, because I failed English at school. I’ve always had a great sense of inadequacy.

What prompted you to step out of your comfort zone?

It actually came about in an unusual way – the songs were originally commissioned for a movie, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. It was an adaptation of a much-loved book about a man who walks the entire length of the UK, a portrait of our connection to the land and the healing power of passage-making. I was already a great fan of its director, Hettie Macdonald – her first movie, Beautiful Thing, was seminal for me when it came out in 1996 – so I was really excited to be involved.

We arranged and wrote lots of songs to capture the mood of the film and some were used, but there were all these, dare I say, leftovers? Being the resourceful, waste-not-want-not type, I said, “Well, these all have something in them that is powerful.”

What was your writing process?

I don’t have one particular method, but the way I work is a bit like the way I interact with nature. I’m a forager for sonic and lyrical opportunity, seeing relationships within words in the way that I see relationships within the ecosystem. You start to find what Simon Armitage, Britain’s beloved poet laureate, will call the “neon” moments, things that suddenly shine.

Can you give an example?

Absolutely. “McCrimmon,” the third song on the album, is a ballad I learned from my late mentor Stanley Robertson, who was a Scottish Traveller. There’s a lyric in the original which is, “no more, no more,” but I heard it as “in awe, in awe.” Suddenly a whole song about the state of awe appeared.

There’s another track which is a love song between a fair maid and a plowboy – I recalibrated and reframed it, so it’s a more complicated relationship between species that are in a state of separation. The folk songs say everything already. I’m like someone taking a Shakespeare play, resetting it, maybe adapting some of the language, like West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet.

Which of the songs came easiest?

“Green Mossy Banks,” which is actually about pilgrimage, was so easy to write. It was like, “Oh my god, I’ve been wanting to write this song forever.” And they didn’t even use it in the film!

What is it in that song that you had been longing to express?

The story of the film paints this wonderful portrait of free passage – there’s never a moment where it deals with trespass or permissions or this idea of private land. No barbed wire fences, or angry landowners going, “What do you think you’re doing here?” One could walk from Devon to the borders of Scotland and never have any issue.

But there is no person in England who goes on a country walk and isn’t affected by our punitive, archaic, and utterly unequal private ownership laws. That’s why I was a founder member of the Right to Roam movement. For all its avoidance of politics, “Green Mossy Banks” is a deeply political song. Social and ecological injustice is at the roots of so much of our international crisis.

Is the UK not quite a good place to walk compared to, say the US? The English have ancient rights of way that allow them to walk across private land, whereas try it in the US and you might get shot…

Absolutely. But where does the US get their notion of land rights from? They were inherited as an enhanced version of British law at a time when, in England, if you were caught poaching a hare or something, that’s it, you had your hands cut off, or you were hanged, or sent to Australia.

On the music video for “Green Mossy Banks” we see you surrounded by various mesmerising English landscapes.

It’s a combination of many of the pilgrimages that I’ve made with Chris Park, a druid, and Charlotte Pulver, an apothecary. At cardinal points of the year – the solstices, the equinoxes – we lead communal pilgrimages to places like Stonehenge, or the South Downs.

Are there any songs on the album that were inspired by specific places?

“Meeting is a Pleasant Place” is very much about the Dartmoor landscape, down to the very tor that we filmed the video on. The exact location shall remain nameless, because it’s one of the few tors that exist in a forest, as opposed to Dartmoor’s sheep-wrecked landscape of denuded grassland. It’s deep in beech and oak forests, which makes it especially stunning.

And the song itself came out of a Devon Gypsy folk tune.

Yes, and it contains this rather mystical language that had become something of a mantra to me. “Meeting is a Pleasant Place/ Between my love and I/ I’ll go down to Yonder’s Valley, it’s there I’ll sit and sing…” It’s bad English, but at the same time so powerful in its ambiguity. It could be a love song between two people, but in that Gypsy corruption of the words, suddenly it speaks about something so much bigger. So then I wrote my three verses as a love song to the land.

The appearance of the Trans Voices choir on the chorus turns it into something epic and anthemic…

It’s English folk gospel, as I call it. ILĀ, who runs Trans Voices, is an old friend and when the choir was set up I said I’ve got loads of songs that I’d like to speak to the queerness of land. Folk song often tends towards the heteronormative, and I want to break that down.

In the liner notes you also talk about the queerness of nature, what do you mean by that?

When you look at relationships within the natural world, sexual or otherwise, what you see is massive diversity in roles and identities. In the fungi world, for instance, there are hundreds and hundreds of genders, working collaboratively in community. Humans, too, need to start to recalibrate the way we behave in nature. So much of our subjugation and exploitation of nature has come through a male-dominated worldview and it’s not working.

One of the species you have a great connection with is the nightingale – as well as singing with them in secret woodland gigs every year, you recently wrote a book about their threatened extinction.

Yes, and when I’m with them, for seven weeks each spring, I get this sense of what is it like to be in a relationship that’s falling apart. That heartbreak, saying farewell, and knowing that it has a time limit to it. That’s what inspired the opening track, “Bushes and Briars.” It was the first folk song Ralph Vaughan Williams ever collected, and it’s a lament of a man and a woman who are separating. As somebody who spends a lot of time in bushes and briars trying to keep a relationship with a bird going extinct happening, that’s a space that is very familiar to me.

Coming from a background of singing acoustically, outdoors, how do you work up the big, dense sounds that populate your albums?

I do my writing with James Keay, who plays piano in the band. We both want a richness of sound, so that what are often very repetitive lines and melodies can take the listener on journeys through different emotional states. It’s about trying to paint as big a painting as possible.

As well as strings and horns and pipes, you’ve added a more pan-global feel with a Syrian Qanun, and a Swedish Nykelharpa.

We wanted to create textures that gave a sense of both the ancient and the unusual. I’d never used a Qanun in an arrangement before, though I have used dulcimers before on almost every album, which are part of the same family.

Maya Youssef, Britain’s best-known Qanun player, features on the one folk song that you haven’t changed, “Black Dog and Sheep Crook,” about a shepherd being thrown over by his lover because he’s “just” a shepherd.

I’ve kept its truth and entirety – it just felt so wonderful bringing the tragedy and the melancholy of the Qanun into that song.

So often in this album you’re grieving our detachment from and devaluing of the natural world. But the spirit and purpose of the music, as you describe it, is also to re-establish those connections. What are your current priorities for climate activism?

At the moment, there’s a big campaign to get young people voting, and voting for nature, in the UK. Hope for me is always about having a plan. And there are many brilliant plans out there. It’s about overcoming apathy and resistance and reawakening people to what we have to lose.

I can’t speak to what I think the outcomes will be, I think that’s a dangerous thing to do. But I hope that the album has as many opportunities to instill hope and beauty as there are moments of doom and tragedy.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

BGS Long Reads of the Week // March 20

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the reading material! Our brand new #longreadoftheday series looks back into the BGS archives for some of our favorite reporting, videos, interviews, and more — featured every day throughout the week. You can follow along on social media [on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram] and right here, where we’ll wrap up each week’s stories in one place. 

Check out our long reads of the week:

Ten Years After Crazy Heart, Ryan Bingham Comes Around to “The Weary Kind”

For our Roots On Screen series we revisited the 2009 film Crazy Heart and one iconic song from its soundtrack, “The Weary Kind.” We spoke to writer Ryan Bingham in September 2019 about the Oscar Award-winning song and how it took him ten years to find the solace Jeff Bridges’ character Bad Blake finds in the piece. [Read more]

The 50 Greatest Bluegrass Albums Made by Women

Bluegrass Albums Made by Women

It is Women’s History Month, after all, so it’s worth spending some time with this collection of amazing albums made by women in bluegrass. This piece, inspired by NPR Music’s Turning the Tables series, is a list of albums chosen by artists, musicians, and writers simply because they were impactful, incredible, and made by women. [See the list]

Sam Lee’s Garden Grows Songs and Fights Climate Change

Sam Lee, wearing denim, sits in a cluttered room in front of a bookshelf

An appropriate topic for times such as these, folk singer Sam Lee utilizes re-imagined and rearranged ancient folk songs in modern contexts to advocate for social justice and fight the climate crisis. Beyond that very important mission statement, though, the songs are lush, verdant, and beautifully intuitive to digest and interact with. [Read the interview]

Preservation Hall: Honoring Time’s Tradition

Given that so many of us have had to cancel travel, postpone tours, reschedule vacations and so much more, why don’t we take a long read trip to New Orleans and visit a venerable, undying source of the best in American (roots) musical traditions, Preservation Hall. Since the early 1960s Preservation Hall and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band have cultivated and spread New Orleans brass band jazz around the world — even collaborating with bluegrass greats like the Del McCoury Band. [Read more]

Canon Fodder: Aretha Franklin, ‘Amazing Grace’

We all need more Aretha in our lives — and in our ears! — and we all need a little more grace, too. To wrap up the week, we revisit our Canon Fodder series, which takes iconic records and songs and unspools their intricacies, their idiosyncrasies, and their impacts across decades and generations. Amazing Grace was Franklin’s best-selling album, and the best-selling Black gospel album ever recorded. It certainly deserves the “deep dive” treatment. [Read more]

 

Sam Lee’s Garden Grows Songs and Fights Climate Change

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

A lush, resplendent, living and breathing album, Sam Lee’s brand new record, Old Wow, is something of a garden — and not simply because the opening track, “The Garden of England/Seeds of Love” sets such a tone. In this arboretum, Lee is collecting the most rare and fragile of cultivars — ancient folk songs. He is carefully tending them, gently fertilizing, grafting, hybridizing, and cross-pollinating them with bits of himself, bits of this global moment, and bits of this generation.

BGS contributor Justin Hiltner strolled down New Orleans’ Canal Street with Lee during Folk Alliance International to find a secluded, sunshine-y balcony for a chat about action, queerness, folk traditions, fatherhood, and much more.

My first experience with the new record was the video for “The Garden of England.” It felt so lush and verdant, it immediately made me think of your relationship with nature and the ecosystems you operate in, as well as your environmental activism. How strong of a presence do you think that part of your life — the activism, especially the environmental aspects — carries through the album? It’s visible in a lot of places overtly, but there’s an undercurrent in there, too. 

It’s funny, you use all of the words that I use, “How overt/covert” or “how implicit/explicit it should be.” Since the previous album I’ve gone through a very different journey of who I am, what I am meant to be doing, and why I’m doing music. I’ve come to the acceptance that actually, first and foremost, I’m an activist, not a musician. Music is the medium through which I disseminate, articulate my activism and my beliefs within that.

I’m very thrilled that I can do it in a way that is emotionally guided, as opposed to having to be statistically informed, or having the best persuasive political argument, which I’m terrible at. Through the mediums of song, ancient song, song that’s connected to the land by nature of its ancestry, I found I’ve got these really unusual resources and tools.

Something I like to ask musicians a lot is, how do we make this music relevant? How do we show people it’s not just throwback music or time capsule music? What I heard you describing is that you’ve found a relevance in these old songs for this current moment in geological time, due to the climate crisis, but also socially and politically. 

It is that, but I say it’s more about the essence of the songs. … I’m playing with tradition, but there’s a certain distillation process that I’m using within them, which like any distillation process is also highly adulterative and adaptive. I’m contorting them, but I’m also working with an unusual aesthetic, because that’s all we can do, be artists. I’m taking risks.

Like, with videos like [“The Garden of England”] and the one that’s just come out last week for “Lay This Body Down.” I’m going to use mainstream values and imagery and concept on some deeply ancient ideas in a way that doesn’t really happen very much.  And I’m not saying that’s because I’m pioneering! [Laughs]

I think it’s a vital thing to have to address, how does one tell these stories in ways that are going to be digestible by a new audience? One that actually would never encounter the tradition, in certain ways, because in the UK we live in a very musically segregated society. Most people aren’t thinking about music or that music can change identity, especially on such an ancient level. I’m having to test these things out.

Roots music and eroticism don’t really feel like they go together. “Lay This Body Down” feels so timeless and ancient, but the video for it has this level of eroticism and sensuality that feels current. I may be projecting my own queerness onto it, but I wanted to ask you how much of that eroticism comes from your queerness, or doesn’t it? 

You know, you might be the first person to ask me these questions. Generally music journalists where I come from are uninterested in that, or the ones that are wouldn’t come across me.

I didn’t approach it from a sense of wanting to work with queerness, I love working with dance. I come from a dance background 

And dance is very queer as is. 

It is, but why does it have to be? Because the irony is, and it shouldn’t make any difference, that all the dancers in that video are heterosexual. That doesn’t matter, but it was so wonderful working with men who were actually very comfortable with their heterosexuality, but also in their intimacy and physicality and their sense of body contact. Working and being in that space was so energizing. It wasn’t erotic, it was simply sensual. The funny thing is it comes across as erotic, as homoerotic, but in all honesty I think that’s the viewer’s perception.

 Maybe what I mean by “the video feels queer” or “dance itself is queer” is more accurately, “It leaves the door open for non-normative ideas and feelings.” Is that what you mean? The viewer can sense this because you left a crack open in the door of normativity for people to step through?

You’re absolutely right, and I’m very conscious of that. There’s a very Caravaggio-ness to this film. You couldn’t put any more arrows pointing [toward eroticism and homoeroticism.] I’m also fascinated with the queerness of folk song, particularly in the ambiguity when men are singing from the perspective of women and all those sort of rule-breaking things that were never rules in the first place.

I think it’s only the conservatism, in the sense of boxing what “is” and what “isn’t,” that binary-ness, that starts to do that. When you actually go back into history, those sorts of boundaries [weren’t as present], and I think that’s what I’m celebrating a little bit.

It’s a song about death, actually. These aren’t sexual beings, they’re mortal or immortal or transitionary. Their nakedness is as much about that shedding of materiality of the living and this idea of the trajectory from one realm to the other. They’re all expressions of myself… That’s what these movements are all about, for me.

 That sort of ambiguity you mention, “Sweet Sixteen” felt to me like it was pulling from that tradition — am I reading too much into that? Where did that song come from?

Interesting. It’s not [from that], in fact, for me it’s the most heterosexual moment of my entire career, that song. [Laughs]

Interesting! And right, I heard heterosexuality in it, but also — and again, perhaps this is my projection — more than that, too. 

This is the funny thing about making music, once you’ve put [the songs] out, you don’t own them anymore. They’re not yours. And never would I ever want to make music that was utterly explicit.

The song was a really hard one to choose to do and I don’t know why I did choose to do it. It’s actually more about me being a parent, because I’ve become a dad. In many ways I’m living in a heteronormative set up, even though it is unusual. We’re not together and we don’t live together and we never have, but the itinerant-ness of being a musician and leaving mum doing most of the care requires a little bit of me acknowledging that, through song.

This is my acceptance that I am a bit of that, packing my bag and heading off, away from the family set up. It also holds a little bit of my judgment upon that nuclear family thing, of husband and wife and child at home, and my terror of that. Which, I think has nothing to do with being gay. I think if I was straight I’d probably feel like that, too. [Laughs] It’s very much me trying to channel what a baby’s mother is thinking.

You carry on this tradition of folk singing unencumbered by music, a capella, but that to me, as someone who is a singer and musician, is kind of terrifying. The space that you play with, as a vocalist, on this record feels so vulnerable. What does it feel like to you?

I think I’m quite comfortable with vulnerability. Which is sort of a paradox, in a way, because the point of vulnerability is that it is uncomfortable. I think that space of exposure, for me, is a very exciting place. It’s not exciting because I get to see myself more, it’s because by being vulnerable you have to step outside the realm of protection, of comfort, of security. In that position you can do much more interesting things, finding perspective and placement and by that, a relationality to the world around you.

[Sometimes] you have to be an outsider, and that’s something that, by nature of who I am — by being gay, by being Jewish, by being the kid that never quite fit into any of the places that I was I’ve always been in that position. It’s a place I’ve always been drawn to, most artists are like that one way or another. I’m not particularly exceptional, I’m not saying I’m necessarily special, but that’s something that I’ve certainly been accustomed to.

When it comes carrying on the tradition, I did exactly the same. I went down the deepest root of folk music, but never went fully into those folk scenes. I was always an outsider in the folk world. I was always an outsider in these deep traditions, I was never part of the communities that I’m learning from. Yet, at the same time, you find yourself weirdly in the center of these places as well. This idea of, there is no center and there is no outside. Actually, these are all constructs only in our minds and we are all outsiders in the end.

When it comes to the music — and it’s funny, because I didn’t mix the album, though I was very involved in it — when [producer] Bernard Butler did that we were very aware of keeping the voice up front and center. Maybe there’s a little bit of ego and selfishness that he’s recognizing. That, as a singer, you need to be center. You are your voice. Not because I want to be up front, but maybe because I’m very clear about what I want to say in this record, so I think I have to mark my place in that respect.

Photo credit: Julio Juan

The Show On The Road – Sam Lee

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week on the show, Z. Lupetin speaks with renowned British song collector, sonic interpreter, roots music promoter, and deeply intuitive folk singer Sam Lee.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Lee came to music almost by accident after a former life as a wilderness survivalist and nature advocate. Since, he has become one of the leading voices in Great Britain, saving the treasured endemic music cultures that rapidly disappear each year. His gorgeously delicate and meticulously researched debut, Ground Of Its Own, shot him from hopeful academic to nationally recognized folk star — partly by being nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. Lee has relentlessly worked to save and rejuvenate the ancient melodies and songcraft of Irish and Scottish traveller tradition, Romany rhythms and stories, and connect those traditional melodies to a youthful pop culture that is yearning to know where it came from and where it is going next.

His Nest Collective, an “acoustic folk club,” gathers artists, authors, dancers and theatrical renegades and puts on shows and events across London – making Sam a rare double threat – as both an artist and a promoter of other artists.

His newest release, Old Wow, drops January 31, 2020.

WATCH: British Folk Singer Sam Lee Explores “The Garden of England”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

British folk singer, conservationist, and activist Sam Lee is set to release a new album in 2020. In preparation, Lee provides an appetizer for the project with a video for “The Garden of England (Seeds of Love).” Lee’s writing shines in this release, as the melody and structure have a familiar air about them, sharing in the agelessness common in folk traditionals. The arrangement provides a hypnotic, entrancing bed for the melody and draws the listener in with its constant pulse.

The accompanying video is equally mesmerizing, panning through various shots of presumably British countryside and wilderness. As a preview of what we might expect to come on the album, Old Wow, “The Garden of England” piques all the right interests. The new project will be released January 31, 2020. Watch the music video here.

Photo Credit: Dominick Tyler

The Giving of Voice: A Conversation with Moira Smiley

Posted on by Editor

There’s a video on YouTube of Moira Smiley leading a gathering of more than a thousand high schoolers in her voice-and-body-percussion arrangement of blues great Lead Belly’s “Bring Me Little Water, Silvy.” “Sing with our outside voices!” she exhorts them. No matter where she is, she’s all about singing out, using her voice, encouraging others to use their voices, to sing out loud.

Smiley definitely uses her outside voice, and a few other voices, on her new album, Unzip the Horizon. It’s a bracingly wide-ranging set of original songs drawing on everything from her experience in chorale work to explorations of Eastern European folk music to her time as a touring singer and percussionist with boisterous pop experimentalists Tune-Yards. Tying it all together are with two traditional American songs from the repertoire of blues singer Sidney Hemphill Carter, as recorded in 1959 by folklorist Alan Lomax.

She also enlisted an impressive roster of other voices for Unzip: Leah and Chloe Smith from Rising Appalachia, English neo-traditionalist Sam Lee, folk-and-more duo Anna & Elizabeth, Seamus Egan of the Irish-American band Solas, banjo innovator Jayme Stone, and participants from the Calais Sessions — a recording project with international musicians working with refugees, many of them unaccompanied children, living in hardship of the Calais “jungle,” a makeshift encampment in France.

And then there’s Tune-Yards’ life-force, Merrill Garbus, partnering on the rhythm-forward “Bellow,” which serves somewhat as the album’s mission statement: Please don’t give up. Please don’t hide your voice. So many people did not have that choice.

Smiley has lived by those words, taking seemingly every opportunity to explore musical and cultural avenues. In addition to her work with Tune-Yards, Solas, Stone, and the Los Angeles Master Chorale, she’s been featured on jazz pianist Billy Childs’ acclaimed tribute to Laura Nyro; studied and sung music ranging from the compositions of 12th-century abbess Hildegard Von Bingen to 20th-century sonic revolutionary Karlheinz Stockhausen; and sought and shared songs and sounds in such spots as a rural Ireland, rural Appalachia, and refugee camps in Europe, where she has volunteered with the humanitarian organization Expressive Arts Refuge.

And for more than a decade, women’s ensemble Moira Smiley & VOCO has mixed scintillating vocal harmonies with innovative use of various acoustic instruments and body percussion, their 2014 album, Laughter Out of Tears, diving into songs from Scandinavia, the Balkans, and Appalachia, along with originals inspired by those traditions, a Robert Johnson tune, and a moving version of Woody Guthrie’s ever-poignant “Deportees.”

All of that is artfully integrated into Unzip the Horizon, the work of a significant talent finding new possibilities in her voice, literally and literarily. Or as she and Garbus sing on “Bellow”: You ask me why I sing softer now. Did the world beat me down? This is the way we call the unknown, lift the veil to the other side.

There’s a word that’s in the lyrics of at least four songs on this album: broken. Do you see singing, music as a way to repair breaks in the world?

First of all, I love the word “broken.” And I love the idea of it because, from decay and brokenness, always come the new things. But also it’s that reminding ourselves to look around and see all the ways we’re broken. We’re often pushing forward, trying to ignore what’s broken. I’m interested in the compassion of noticing the broken and, yeah, trying to heal it — and realizing that some of it we can never heal.

And music has a role in that?

I think so. Sometimes I think music is just child’s play and has no power. But when I look out at a group of kids that are moving together, singing, as I do with all this chorale stuff, and feel that pride and joy, that’s palpable. Music does have a way of lifting us up together. That’s obvious, right? I don’t know if it changes the world. I feel super-cynical about it, but also hopeful that I’m making a difference.

It’s about giving voice to people’s stories.

It’s true. There’s a lot of evidence in the traditional songs that you make a difference with the singing. Some of the Balkan songs, a lot of Bulgarian songs are about lamenting the role of a woman — that she’s powerless to say where she goes and who she loves. The songs express the powerlessness and, at the same time, acknowledge the roles of the woman and also empower her.

And music has been a force for overcoming oppression — the “Singing Revolution” in Estonia, the role the rediscovery of folk music helped restore national identity in Hungary and elsewhere as they broke from Soviet domination.

As a force against colonialism, it can be very powerful, and that’s across the board. I was just reading Maria Popova. She does Brain Pickings, every week sends out a collection, writes articles with tons of literary references, everything from Zadie Smith to Camus. She’s incredible. She was talking about how Zadie Smith speaks of “othering,” and the relationship of the “other” to us.

I just wrote another song that talks about anger and fear being in the same room and the polarization we see in our country — anger in the other side because you fear the other side because you don’t understand the other side, which creates a cycle.

What did Merrill Garbus draw from you in your Tune-Yards stint?

She drew on the whole spectrum of my voice and also my physicality, which I loved. I was dancing every night! The percussive aspect of her music got into my bones. The interest I had in body percussion, got to play around for a couple years with her and using the fullest voice was such a pleasure. We were singing at the top of our lungs and dancing, percussively, behind her.

Did you write songs on the album thinking about who would sing and play with you, or did you write first and invite guests after? For example, “Wise Man” sounds tailor-made for Sam Lee.

In that case, the song came first, but I really wanted Sam to sing with me on the album. The song came a while ago and when I was thinking of it — a love story, really — I wanted it as a duo with a man’s voice and thought he would be perfect. I adore Sam.

And “Dressed in Yellow” with Anna & Elizabeth?

I always knew I wanted to have them. I wrote “Dressed in Yellow” on the tour bus with Tune-Yards and always heard Anna & Elizabeth singing those responses. It was really shortly after the creation of the song that they came to mind.

The song sounds like a mix of American “shape note” singing and the playfulness of the kind of things June Tabor and Maddy Prior did with English folk songs in their Silly Sisters duets.

Oh, yeah, totally. It’s in the shape of a child ballad [from England], like “The Devil’s Nine Questions.” [She sings some of it] It’s kind of that ballad form, with the statements and responses, and I threw in a little bridge at the end.

And then Leah and Chloe Smith for Rising Appalachia along with the Calais Sessions performers on “Refugee?”

When I was singing “Refugee,” I forget how the time-line went, but [Leah and Chloe and I] were in touch. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, but were talking about getting together to do something, and that made me realize they’d be perfect, with their social consciousness right out front.

The other parts, with the Calais Sessions, they were doing really powerful, well-regarded work in the Calais Jungle, respected musicians. I had [Anglo-Nigerian percussionist] Sola Akingbola in a friend’s living room with a Kurdish percussionist, Rekan Ibrahimi. Sola is from the band Jamiroquai, and went to Calais to work with the Calais Sessions. That’s a really cool bunch of musicians and they released a beautiful album, too. Everything from Eritrean church songs to Kurdish folk.

You have worked with refugees, yourself, so the inspiration for the song is personal.

I’ve been for the last couple of years going with a group of Americans to teach music, bring medical supplies, volunteer at refugee camps in Europe. It’s called Expressive Arts Refuge. I was invited by Betsy Blakeslee, who has spearheaded this throughout the world. She also worked in the Bosnian war in the ‘90s. She’s interested in using the arts to help others.

When we were in the Calais Jungle, and then were in Athens last summer, there were a lot of Arabic-speaking people there. They also speak their own languages, but Arabic is spoken across cultures, and I came to realize what a vast and ancient music culture that is — and how modern it is. I recorded a lot of young Arab rappers, fully fledged hip-hop artists, but they were also playing ouds and sazzes and all mixed together. That was an eye-opener back into some of the early music work that I’ve done, music from Spain in the 1400s and what happened after that [the expulsion of the Arabic, Moorish and Jewish people]. So here we are again, in a different, but related era of diaspora. What can we learn from the past? How can we be compassionate to each other as these big forces are hurting us and our brothers and sisters?

Do you see yourself as a musicologist or folklorist?

Roughly. I have long worshipped that role, the ethnomusicologist, song collector, for sure. I’ve done it, but I wouldn’t call myself anything official.

But you’ve made a point of seeking out singers and songs all over the world, so you are doing that.

Sitting in a field with the Ethiopian musician Seleshe Damessae, that was one of the earliest mind-blowing experiences for me. Literally, sat in a field in the shade of this tree and he just said, “Okay, I’ll give you some songs.” That was years ago … could have been 18 years ago. Those experiences — in kitchens, at the end of a concert, at a party — that’s where the business is. That’s where the magic happens.

You have the two songs on this album that come from the Alan Lomax archives — “Worried Now,” which is a fairly well-known song, and “Leather Britches,” which is probably less familiar. You play around with both of them in your own distinctive ways.

That comes partially because of this long-time project with Jayme Stone, searching around the Alan Lomax collection. The global jukebox is what Alan named it, and you can look it up at culturalequity.org. Enormous resources. Those two songs are from stumbling around on there. She [Sidney Hemphill Carter] sang whatever she could remember, some blues. And Alan said, “Do you have any songs from when you were a kid?” That’s what came out.

There’s a fiddle tune called “Leather Britches.” When I first brought this song out, I performed it with body percussion and singing for a long time in concerts. It was kind of an outlier for this album, but it’s me playing around — prepared piano and putting weird stoppers on the banjo, more fun and experimental.

Photo credit: DeFurio Photography

Squared Roots: Sam Lee Follows the Footsteps of Alan Lomax

Posted on by Editor

In his work collecting field recordings and documenting oral traditions of roots music, Alan Lomax captured the history of a nation — of a world, really — as it was happening. Lomax learned the trade from his father, John, and carried the torch forward, moving in circles that included Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, and myriad other singers — many of whose names were never known, though their contributions were no less vital in Lomax's eyes and ears. Because his work was necessarily integrated racially, Lomax was the target of investigation and scorn during the mid-century years of McCarthyism and civil rights struggles. He, nevertheless, found ways to carry on with his mission, leaving a massive trove of historical documentation as his legacy.

English folk singer Sam Lee has taken it upon himself to adopt a similar vocation, learning and recording old world songs from Gypsy and Traveller singers in the UK, including Stanley Robertson, May Bradley, and Freda Black. Much like Lomax, Lee gets the job done by keeping one eye on the past and one on the future, using whatever technology he can to best capture these traditions before they are gone. His latest album, The Fade in Time, stands as a testament to his passion and respect for not only the old-time music, but his own duty as its keeper. 

It's pretty well impossible to quantify the importance of Lomax's role in music history. From your perspective, what does his work mean — to you and the broader roots music world?

I think, firstly, it’s important to say I will probably never fully understand or appreciate the impact he made on the world, for that is to understand the enormous social revolution that happened in the U.S. and world over the '50-'60s and before and after. How he brought such a formidable energy and determination to the task of documenting the cultures of America, but also the rest of the world. The care he brought to this endeavour and sense of importance and value … to give voice to the outcasts, the marginalised, the poor, the persecuted, the outsiders. How, through his deep love of people and ability to converse with anybody on their level — combined with his weight as an academic, as a charismatic leader — how he focused the attention of a nation on the treasure on its doorstep.

The responsibility he took in the legacy of his father was such a huge task with cultural divides and technology all working against him. Now, in a time of supposedly progressed cultural assimilation and technology as good as one could ever dream of but facing the cultural ecocide and extinction we see ahead of us, I feel the Lomax journey is one to reflect upon as a reminder of the need to protect, conserve, and celebrate the beauty of self-made, localised, home spun, informed, and unaffected culture on both U.S. and UK shores — but also across the world where the great vanishing is happening, the huge forgetting of the old ways. Lomax married old world creativity with the possibilities of technology and popularisation in a ground-breaking way that’s still possible as long as we keep listening to the old ones!

In the early 1940s, he was pushing against the boundaries of race and class with his presentations, and he felt the establishment push back. But he saw that as part of his calling because a documentarian has to approach the world with equanimity and objectivity. Is that how you view the job, as well?

Nicely put. And, yes, as a "documentarian" (I’ve never been called that, by the way, but I like it, so thanks!) I think the issues are not about the establishment pushing back so much as they are generally very embracing of the work I and the Song Collectors Collective do. The challenges today are about making it financially feasible to execute this sort of research not being in an academic institution and doing it in such a way that serves the communities as well as the multitudinal interests of the outside world.

But, yes, the need for equanimity is constantly there when faced by both the regular failure in the searching for old tradition bearers, the occasional rejection, apathy, or resistance from the communities toward the work due to much more serious social issues they’re facing. But most of all what troubles me is the reactions from some of the institutions that should be endorsing and supporting the work and the establishment within the folk community. Sometimes I think those that are supposedly endorsers of folk culture seem to care so little for the communities that have kept it alive and honouring the keepers of the lore. This frustrates me a little.

Lomax spent most of the 1950s in Europe to avoid the House Un-American Activities Committee. By the time he died, his FBI file contained more than 800 pages. But he never stopped his work. Can you imagine how it must have felt to get tangled in the “Red Scare” or something similar?

It’s funny because the consequence of the Red Scare was that Lomax spent a lot of time in the UK recording our singers and the documents of which have had great impact on the preservation and popularisation of our traditions and repertoire, so it was very much in us Brits' favour. However, the folk singer's responsibility is to be fighting back against institutional or political insanity, and I am lucky that I may never live to experience such unbelievably systematic vilification by the state. In my mind, though, the subtle evils of governmental policy and corporate ravages are as devastating and corrosive as they eat away at community.

Ironically, the effect of the Red Scare was to galvanise the people into a formidable force of solidarity like we have never experienced. I am not sure how huge the collective voice of opposition is today at the slow erosion of our civil liberties. Maybe one already exists, but I hope one day there will be a file on me somewhere. I won’t have done my duty, if i haven’t challenged the regime enough to gain some sort of "listing."

Of all the amazing sessions he documented, which ones would you have wanted to witness?

Ouch! This question hurts to think about. I longed to wonder what sitting in on those Jelly Roll Morton recording sessions would have been like as that was, in my mind, a phenomenal meeting of two worlds and a transmitting of such a principal memory of the birth of a musical genre. But also, having spent a lot of time with Shirley Collins — the English folk singer and ex-lover and collecting assistant of Lomax — she tells me endless stories of their time together recording singers on their porches and, in some ways, I feel like I was there vicariously through Shirley’s telling of stories.

While I was at the Library of Congress in September 2015, I was reading some of his diaries and of the numerous recording situations he found himself in. The one that stands out was an episode of him gathering a whole crowd of Black American workers in this old shack and recording the songs of some of the best entertainers amongst them … each one stepping up, or being pushed up to sing something or play a tune. I am not sure if it was the way he described this dark room crowded with faces piling in to see this single white man record their music, their faces gleaming out from the darkness, the sense of uncertainty and fear, yet also the compulsion to record and commit this precious music that they themselves were probably not aware of its cultural wealth, depth, and evolved brilliance. Everything about the way Lomax described this experience and the joy that came from them tentatively sharing and being acknowledged and their songs valued seemed like such a magnificent mini revolution … this idea of Lomax going to each singer one by one and letting them know how very special they are … I think that is radical!

He clearly understood his place in history, even as it was unfolding around him. Do you have a similar sense, as you attempt to capture the oral traditions of your world?

Yes, I very much do and, with that, goes an immense sadness alongside the privilege. It’s like sitting near a rare white rhino or some vanishing beast, powerful and majestic, feeling the vibrations as it moves and breathes, knowing that when imminent death arrives, no one else will ever get to feel the ground shake beneath it or smell its unique breath, feel its presence. The old singers I get to meet and record are the last of the old world. They are fading custodians who sit at the edge of this great, nearly forgotten tradition and, when I leave, I know I may never see them again as is sometimes the case, returning a year later to find they have passed on.

What is left is a musical and cultural silence filled only with the noise of cheap MP3 downloads, karaoke-style music devoid of any muscle or memory. I guess that is where my responsibility as being the artist steps in and is ever more necessary — to take the essence of what I have experienced and develop it into new, informed, and "acceptable" music that can survive in the modern-day campfires and porches of musical appreciation — the mobile phones, earbuds, and YouTubes of planet Internet.