Tag: shirley collins

Folk Alliance Returns, In-Person and Online

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Beginning Wednesday, May 18, the Folk Alliance’s first in-person conference since January 2020 kicks off in Kansas City. Whether tuning in from the comfort of your home via the virtual option, or connecting in person in the hallways of the Kansas City Westin, one thing is certain: it sure feels good to be back with all our folk friends.

SPOTLIGHTS
Spotlight Week is a virtual presentation of talented acts from around the world in one-hour pre-recorded showcases as part of the virtual programming for the 2022 Folk Alliance International Conference.

From May 9-11, eight partners from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Colombia, Canada, and the USA presented 52 acts total from a wide range of genres. Artist highlights include Aoife O’Donovan, Peggy Seeger, John McCutcheon, and Michaela Anne. All performances are available for repeat viewing within the conference platform for the rest of May. Discover the full Spotlight schedule here.

OFFICIAL SHOWCASES
One of the biggest highlights of every Folk Alliance conference is the promise of discovering something you’ve never heard before.

We’re particularly looking forward to The Bluegrass Situation’s official showcase night on Friday, May 20, from 4:15-9pm CT in the Century C Ballroom, featuring Laura Cortese & the Dance Cards, JigJam, Dan Navarro, and Ensemble Iberica.

Stop by and say hello to our editor Craig Shelburne as he emcees the stage for the evening!

PANELS & PROGRAMMING
FAI is always a meeting point for some of the most prominent names in the roots music industry to connect and share updates on the state of the folk and folk-adjacent music world.

This year brings us remarks from keynote speakers Shirley Collins and Madeleine Peyroux, plus the International Folk Music Awards, Peer Sessions for artists, agents, labels, and festivals, artist mentorship meetings, and even Affinity Group sessions for communities like BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, Women, Folks 55+, and Folks with Disabilities. Plus the world premiere of a new work from Saskia Tompkins, FAI’s 2022 Artist in Residence.

You can discover a guide to all the daytime programming and panels here.

Even if you can’t be at this year’s conference in person, it’s not too late to register for the virtual conference. Virtual access is available via a pay-what-you’re-able model allowing you to access official showcase performances within 24 hours of their live set, plus exclusive online-only content like the daily Black Opry Hour. You can discover more here, and the full program for the week’s events is available here.

What are you most looking forward to at this year’s Folk Alliance International conference? What are some of your favorite memories and discoveries from past conferences? Let us know in the comments!

Photo: Raye Zaragoza via Folk Alliance International

MIXTAPE: Kacy & Clayton’s Traditional Folk Favorites

Posted on by Editor

The traditional folk realm spans several countries and numerous styles. But Canadian folk duo Kacy & Clayton know their way around the terrain. That’s why we asked them to gather up a bundle of their favorites. Taking a break from promoting their new album, The Siren’s Song, Clayton answered the call.

Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys — “Ida Red”

This song has its origins in the country square dancing tradition. Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys recorded it in 1938, with the lead vocal provided by Tommy Duncan. I once read that Tommy Duncan got his job with the Texas Playboys through a series of auditions that eliminated 64 contenders down to two — Tommy Duncan and a cross-eyed man who sound just like him. Subsequently, Duncan got the job.

Bert Jansch — “The Waggoner’s Lad”

The first track on the first Bert Jansch album I heard (Jack Orion). That plunky, buzzy guitar sound you hear in the left speaker has had a lasting impression on my own playing. It was only a couple years ago that I learned John Renbourn was the one playing guitar and Bert’s on the banjo.

Steeleye Span — “The Lowlands of Holland”

Gay Woods sings this Scottish tune on Steeleye Span’s 1970 debut album, Hark! The Village Wait. It is a dramatic story of a young lady mourning the death of her husband who died in the navy.

Henry Thomas — “Arkansas”

Something about Henry Thomas’s guitar style has always mystified me. I never tire of hearing him plunk away on bass runs and slap out those big thumb strums on every beat.

The Stanley Brothers — “Mother Left Me Her Bible”

The Stanley Brothers at their very best. Carter on the soaring lead vocal, Ralph taking the tenor, and George Shuffler singing baritone and picking the guitar triplets. I don’t know how many songs they recorded about their mother, but I think it’s around 11.

Willie O’Winsbury — “Anne Briggs”

I find this song very peculiar. The king meets the boy who impregnated his daughter out of wedlock: “And it is no wonder,” said the king, “that my daughter’s love you did win. If I was a woman as I am a man, my bedfellow you would have been.”

Ron Kane & Skip Gorman — “If Your Saddle Is Good and Tight”

Despite growing up on a cow ranch and seeing working cowboys regularly, I’ve never been too keen on riding and roping myself. However, our friend Mike Tod (Calgary, AB) turned me onto the music of Carl T. Sprague, the Original Singing Cowboy, and I’ve since developed an obsession with cowboy songs. I love the humorous side of this old song and the style in which Ron Kane sings it.

Davy Graham — “Mustapha”

Davy Graham is my favourite, and certainly the most influential British acoustic guitar player of the 1960s. I’m not sure where he sourced this song, but I know it has roots in both the Mediterranean and Middle East.

Cilla Fisher — “Blue Bleezin’ Blind Drunk”

Topic Records included this on their 70th anniversary compilation, Three Score and Ten. The title got my attention, and Cilla Fisher’s intense diction and phrasing had me hanging on every line.

Peter Bellamy — “A-Roving on a Winter’s Night”

Peter Bellamy is undoubtedly my favourite singer of traditional material. Though he typically sang songs from his home county of Norfolk, he learned “A-Roving on a Winter’s Night” from a Doc Watson recording. Bellamy’s version of the song is a rewarding homecoming to Britain, after a couple centuries of transformation in the Appalachians.  

The Balfa Brothers — “‘Tit galop pour Mamou”

I love Cajun things and I love these guys.

Nic Jones — “Bonny Light Horseman”

Nic Jones is a master of melody and phrase. His guitar playing and singing are so perfectly unified, hearing him is like being struck by a tidal wave of musicality.

Incredible String Band — “Black Jack Davy”

The origins of this folk song can be traced back to Greece in the 4th century B.C. My favourite version of the last few centuries was made in 1970 by the Incredible String Band.

Jean Ritchie — “False Sir John”

The plain, innocent voice of Jean Ritchie perfectly explains the scandal of this European tale.

The Green River Boys featuring Glen Campbell — “Brown’s Ferry Blues”

For a good part of last year, “Witchita Lineman” was the song my alarm clock played. That Bass VI solo really fired me up for the day. Before his days of international celebrity, Glen Campbell made a couple unsuccessful bluegrass records for Capitol. This song’s from his debut LP, Big Bluegrass Special.

Shirley Collins & the Albion Country Band — “Poor Murdered Woman”

A straightforward re-telling of hunters searching through bushes with their dogs and coming across a woman’s decomposing body.

Transatlantic Telephone: Colin Meloy in Conversation with Olivia Chaney

Posted on by Editor

Offa Rex began with a daydream. Colin Meloy, best known as frontman for the Decemberists, was driving his car around Portland, Oregon, and blasting No Roses by the Albion Dance Band. “I was marveling at the interplay between Ashley Hutchings’ arrangement work and Shirley Collins’ vocals,” he recalls with the geeky glee of a metalhead describing a Randy Rhoads guitar solo. Then he experienced the kind of epiphany that typically strikes more fans than performers: “It was like a light bulb turning on. I wanted to be in the Albion Dance Band!”

His was an impossible dream. The Dance Band, a loose supergroup of English folkies active during the 1970s, is no more. “I don’t have a time machine, but I have a band and I know somebody who sings really beautiful English folk music. Together, perhaps we could not only discover and re-evaluate old folk songs, but also pay homage to that era of music making.”

That “somebody” was Olivia Chaney, a London-based folk singer who straddles the trad and new folk scenes in England. Following the release of her full-length debut, 2015’s The Longest River, she toured with the Decemberists and left an impression on the band, especially its frontman. Open to the idea of collaborating on a folk-revival record (or is it a folk-revival-revival record?), Chaney joined the Decemberists in Portland for rehearsals and recording sessions

Thus was Offa Rex born, taking their name from the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon king. Their debut, The Queen of Hearts, collects new recordings of old tunes, with Meloy and Chaney trading off vocals. Some are fairly well known, such as “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” written by Ewan MacColl but popularized (in the States, at least) by the R&B singer Roberta Flack. Other choices will be perfectly obscure to Yankee listeners, such as “Flash Company,” a 19th-century tune about the dangers of stylish cliques best known from a 1980 album by June Tabor and Martin Simpson that is long out of print.

The Queen of Hearts is a curious album: UK songs filtered through a U.S. lens, a transatlantic exchange between Americans enamored with British folk music and a Brit so thoroughly embedded in that scene that she felt compelled to ask permission from her idols to cover their songs. More than that, it argues for an inescapably political aspect to this music, which is never merely decorous, as it harkens back to a very different Albion of the past. At a time when both Meloy’s America and Chaney’s England are experiencing similar convulsions of identity — Brexit over there, 45 over here — the act of singing these old songs raises questions of appropriation and nationalism that the musicians are still pondering as they prepare for an extensive tour.

For that reason, The Queen of Hearts sounds heavier and timelier than your typical covers album, although Meloy insists they undertook the project primarily for fun. “This was something we just wanted to do, not because we felt there was an audience for it, but because it was a grand experiment and a creative journey.” Will Offa Rex produce an heir? “Certainly, there are more folk songs out there to be sung.”

Tell me about the transatlantic nature of this project. How did that inform the concept of Offa Rex?

Olivia Chaney: The funny thing between Colin and me has been a to-ing and fro-ing of what he sometimes wittily describes as his almost fantasy of this project and then, for me, the reality of actually still knowing, if not working with, some of the people who made some of the records that we both know and love. For example, No Roses, I’d been doing a tribute project to that specific record with some of the people who’d been on it. Ashley and Shirley are both friends. Sometimes it was tough for me because I’d fear their judgment, but sometimes it was a really nice thing because it felt like a hand into the past. Obviously, it was a great honor to be invited by Colin to come and do this, and an interesting transatlantic conversation ensued.

Colin Meloy: The target I was going for was not necessarily realistic, and the aim was not really aping a record from the ‘60s or early ‘70s. What we came out with, potentially in some ways, you could find a place in time for it, but so much of it is also filtered through our influences as people who weren’t necessarily even alive at that time. Inevitably, it becomes something different and new. We were keeping each other in check and created something wholly different than what we had set out to do.

It wasn’t just the re-creation. You were trying to make it about interpretation.

CM: I quickly realized, even though it might be soul satisfying just to sit down and re-create note-for-note the Anne Briggs dual bouzouki/voice version of “Willie O’Winsbury,” nothing could’ve been more boring. You already have that. I think that was also the spirit of the folk revival itself — not only in England but in America. You had this group of standards that everybody was playing with and putting their indelible marks on, even if they were doing, for the most part, similar arrangements. In some ways, the interpretations would be drastically different and, in some ways, it was just incremental steps. I feel like the version of Anne’s “Willie O’Winsbury” versus John Renbourn’s, they’re really closely related and yet feel miles apart.

A lot of contemporary folk groups seem to be confronting that distinction: How do you get past the revival to the raw material?

OC: For me, a bit of a personal irony is that I get called very trad. Even though I grew up listening to a lot of the second revival records, I didn’t, and still don’t, regard myself as trad compared to lots of people in the real deep English folk scene. My interest is in contemporary classical music and other songwriters who were pushing boundaries — that’s often the way I come at trying to reinterpret traditional songs. That’s what interests me. So it was good, Colin and I working together, because we’d keep a check on each other’s agenda and hopefully meet somewhere in the middle.

CM: I don’t know if purism is really the thing because, if we were being purists, we would be in a barn singing a cappella in front of a shitty microphone and …

OC: Colin, we were in a barn.

CM: That’s right. We were in a barn. We had that much going for us. It’s not necessarily purist, but you’re always going for what you feel is right and organic. In popular music, there is a time-honored conversation between the English and Americans — not only in the folk world, but certainly in R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. Both sides of the Atlantic have informed the other. Sometimes the person who seems least qualified to approach a certain kind of music inevitably injects something interesting into it. I feel like there’s so much discussion going on about the dangers of cultural appropriation, and that’s something that we talked about in regard to Offa Rex. I imagine that accusation could be leveled at us. Other than having our token Englishwoman fronting the band, we’re definitely guilty of cultural appropriation. We’ll see how people respond.

Folk music has always been tied to a national identity. Especially at a time when Brexit and other things are changing that identity, this album potentially reflects that change in an interesting way.

OC: I’m obviously very English, but really, in some ways, ethnically or in terms of my upbringing, I’m quite a mongrel, as well. I am interested in a sense in cultural identity — or going back to certain roots of different cultures. Folk music often is such a profound expression of a culture or a people. It’s quite a strange mix of things in that sense, as well, the record.

Do cultural purism and musical purism lead to the same dead ends? Sorry, this is getting really deep.

CM: It is really getting deep, but I think it does. If you put boundaries around everything, innovation becomes more difficult. We’re seeing that, if you really want to get political, in our own country, the idea of shutting out immigrants and immigration will do real harm to the sciences and to culture. We need new input for innovation. Particularly for the fraying relationship between America and England, maybe this is a bridge. We’re going to bring America and England back together. [Laughs]

This music is obviously linked to a certain place and a certain culture. With that in mind, I’m curious about the decision to record in Portland, as opposed to some old farm in Northumbria.

OC: I think there was probably some logistical, practical …

CM: Financial …

OC: Exactly.

CM: We were working on a budget. Also, the environment that you create something in can have a profound effect on the outcome. We rehearsed it in the country outside of Portland, in Willamette Valley — very western America. And then we recorded it in Portland with Tucker Martine. All of that created a flavor that’s going to offset whatever sort of Britishisms are there in the music and create a different color altogether, hopefully.

What can you tell me then about choosing these songs? Did you have criteria in mind for a finished product? Or were they just songs you wanted to sing?

CM: We both just made wish lists from the outset. She came out in the summer and we sat around and listened to a lot of records. Then we went away and listened to each other’s wish lists and hemmed and hawed about things — something’s too familiar or it’s not familiar enough.

OC: There were a few songs that I ended up doing that were almost soloistic, and those ones tended be ones that Colin had maybe not commissioned me to do, but certainly gave me license to do. My fear was that the criticism from my own people on the folk scene in the UK would be that we had done too many of the tried-and-tested classics. But then we both agreed that there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think I would’ve had the bravery to come up with something like “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” I didn’t quite realize it could fit the brief, but Colin was very decisive and clear that he thought that would be a great one to do. I’m really happy that we did it.

CM: That came from a place of relative ignorance. I thought I was really steeped in this music, but now I feel like I’m barely breaking the surface. I was like, “Let’s do ‘Fine Horseman’ and give it the pulpits it deserves.” But Olivia said, “No, everybody does ‘Fine Horseman.’” It’s funny: In America, Lal Waterson’s “Fine Horseman” is as obscure as it gets on a record that been out of print for years — although I saw that Domino is reissuing it. But that song is more well known in England. That was something to keep mind — that certain songs I felt were ripe for re-evaluation were considered too familiar by Olivia. It was really a question of finding a balance. Is this a rediscovery record? Or is it a standards record? I think we did a little bit of both.

OC: With someone like Lal Waterson, when I got off the phone with Colin, I had to ring Eliza Carthy, Lal’s niece. I felt I had to seek the family’s permission, if we were going to do one of Lal’s songs. It was just a funny expression of the situation; we were both coming from such differences places and experiences in relation to the music. Me, coming from a tiny island, I’m inevitably going to know half the people who sang or wrote those songs.

Is that something you did with other songs? Did you feel compelled to seek permission or guidance from the originators?

OC: Yes. I had a really interesting correspondence with Andy Irvine about a few songs I did for a new Kronos Quartet record. Some of it’s trad singers, but some are just artists on Nonesuch Records. I did a version of an old Irish song, “You Rambling Boys of Pleasure,” which I learnt from an Andy Irvine recording. I combined asking him about the origins of that song with talking to him about “Willie O’Winsbury” which, rumor has it, he taught Anne Briggs. Also, I did some shows with Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy very recently and was asking Martin about the song “Queen of Hearts.” I think it’s my issue of needing to seek approval from elders and experts. That’s my big hang-up, and Colin certainly was trying to kindly beat that out of me.

CM: I wanted you to be in the cone of silence and not have any interaction because you would just be intimidated. Inevitably, it would influence the process. But that may be the American dilettante in me. Covering a song, I’d never really sought permission and maybe that’s a bad thing. It is more of an American attitude, although I did appreciate getting some sort of approval from the MacColls when we did “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

OC: I would be pretty terrified as to what Peggy Seeger would actually say about it. I saw her on a BBC program which, Colin, I still need to send you. It’s for some anniversary of the song and they’re interviewing her and playing the Roberta Flack version in the background. Peggy is quite a force of nature, as I’m sure you both know. She basically says, “I don’t really like most of the versions,” and I don’t think she’s a huge fan of the Roberta Flack version, either. But her son, Neil MacColl, is a friend and a wonderful musician, plus he’s a big Decemberists fan. He loved the fact that I was doing the project at all with Colin and thought it was a really wonderful idea. I’m excited to play it for him — just not his mum.

That song was one, in particular, I wanted to ask you about. It always feels like the “Mustang Sally” of folk tunes. Everybody covers it. It’s very popular. But this version sounds very fresh, especially with that flickering drone in the background.

OC: That’s the weird tremolo stop on my little Indian harmonium. It’s really magical, that sound.

CM: It’s got a good psychedelic bent. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it the “Mustang Sally” of English folk music, although I do think that people associate it with the Roberta Flack version. I didn’t know that it was actually written by Ewan MacColl, until I was studying the liner notes of some Atlantic R&B compilation and saw Ewan MacColl had written this beautiful, smoky R&B tune. This is the same guy who had written “Dirty Old Town,” which I had known from the Pogues. So there was this weird line between these two things. I heard Peggy’s version much later, which has this beautiful, almost naïve art approach to it — a piece of folk art in her inimitable way of singing and phrasing. To my mind, this project was an opportunity to strike a balance between those two and maybe make something new there. Olivia did a phenomenal job of that. It was beautiful.

OC: I don’t know about that. But, again, this is an example of where I don’t feel like a pure folkie. Although I know the son of Ewan and Peggy, and work with a lot of those people in that scene and love traditional British folk music, it’s certainly not the only influence on me or the only music I grew up on. I grew up on the Roberta Flack version. I used to lock myself in my room and listen to her record. I was a massive fan. I felt like I really had both strands and very consciously tried to pay homage to both. And, again, I was kindly bullied by Tucker and Colin not to do 160 takes, but actually live with possibly the second or the third.

CM: For many, many versions of “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” the Roberta Flack version is the source material, whereas we really made an effort to take the Peggy Seeger version as our source material. Maybe that’s part of the process, too: Rather than going off the last version of a song that’s been done in an effort to move the needle forward, we went back even further and hoped that would lead us down a different road.

You mentioned not doing 160 takes of a song. Did you have to adjust your process working with the Decemberists?

OC: Yes. Especially since we were working to tape, it was quite an eye opener for me and really challenged the way I approach making music. There were just some really hilarious moments, specifically on “Flash Company.” We’d get to the end of a take, and I would look at everyone and be all kinds of “Oh, God. That was a disaster. We’ve got to do it again!” And they’d all be high-fiving and going, “Yeah. We’ve got it in the bag.” “Are you serious? What the hell?” Then they’d be bummed out by me being bummed out by my own singing, but eventually I’d have a slow epiphany that maybe there was some truth in the fact that actually that first take was quite lovely. It took me a while to get there.

I love the way that song leads into “Old Churchyard.” Musically, it’s a nice moment, but, thematically, it’s pretty powerful to have those two songs tied together and talking about the nature of life and death.

CM: It does work, thematically. In my head, it’s like, “Oh, it’s in the same key and we can drone into the next one.” But it is kind of like a pilgrim’s progress a little bit.

OC: I used to sing that song a cappella at gigs. When I first started singing traditional music, I was not playing folk clubs at all and I’ve never really done the hardcore folk circuit ever. I was just playing strange DIY hipster venues around East London, which certainly wouldn’t be the kind of place where they’d expect to hear an a cappella religious song. It was a good way to shut a room up and get them listening in a way that they might not otherwise. The song has got a very ping-pong transatlantic journey, because I knew that song from the Waterson:Carthy record. The Watersons learnt that song from an old American singer, when they were traveling around America. Of course, it would have originally come from the British Isles, but then become an American folk song. I think it’s gone to and fro across the Atlantic Ocean many times.

CM: Sort of like a game of telephone — with each pass, the song distorts a little more.

Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker: Exploring the Spectrum of Melancholy

Posted on by Editor

The way British singer/songwriter Josienne Clarke describes herself — as the committed harbinger of melancholy — brings to mind the spirit, if not the letter, of Sir John Everett Millais’s haunting painting “Ophelia.” Capturing Shakespeare’s tragic character mere moments before she drowns herself, Millais positions her against a lush landscape so beautiful it contradicts the melancholy writ large across her face. He captures in a frame life’s duality: how the dark exists within the light, how everything contains at least a piece of its opposite. In music, Clarke captures a similar theme, fascinated as she is with the spectrum of melancholy. She and her musical partner, Ben Walker, have a penchant for sad songs, either penning original compositions or interpreting traditional folk tunes that take advantage of the weighted solemnity in her voice. Walker’s arrangements punctuate her writing without adding too much to what she’s saying or leaving her words so bare they freeze. It’s an approach which won them the 2015 BBC Folk Award for Best Duo.

The pair made their Rough Trade Records debut in 2016 with Overnight, which showcases Clarke’s razor-sharp precision for striking upon despondent moments. Paradoxically, they tend to be happier times. On “Something Familiar,” she mourns the loss of an afternoon spent with her love. “For there’s no way of keeping the day we’ve just had,” she sings at the very end, her voice filling the speakers while Walker’s guitar strikes a final note before falling silent and letting her voice linger. Theirs is a realistic perspective more than a strictly melancholic one. If the only certain thing in life is uncertainty, there’s grace in allowing moments to breathe and to be.

If Clarke’s commitment to melancholy seems like an overly serious tone with which to present an existentially plagued perspective to the world, rest assured both she and Walker have a droll sense of humor regarding the whole thing. After all, anyone touting themselves along such lines needs a bit of grit — and a good laugh — to go along with the image. Laughter can exist alongside sadness, much in the way beautiful moments contain their own end.

Your voice sounds so mature and your subject matter is so somber, which belies your age, I suppose. Did this subject matter find you or did your voice find that subject matter?

Josienne Clarke: I don’t really think that melancholy is the exclusive privilege of older people. I’ve always been drawn to the darker songs. Even as a child, my dad used to play me songs like “Man of the World” by Peter Green, which is really, really sad. So I think it started off with that as a nugget for songwriting, and it seemed quite normal to me that song matter should be quite reflective and sad.

How did you two get linked up, originally?

JC: This is Ben’s story.

Ben Walker: I was playing electric guitar in a number of indie bands around London, and a mutual friend was doing some mixing for us. He had an acoustic guitar in the room, and I had a go on that just because I hadn’t played one of those — it was a Martin — in a while. He basically said, "Well, if you play acoustic guitar, what are you doing playing electric guitar in these bands that aren’t going anywhere?" I didn’t really know who played that music, and he introduced me to Josienne, who was at the time playing guitar for herself.

Josienne: I was playing bad guitar for myself, and I felt like it was holding me back, so I definitely had a vacancy for a decent guitarist.

You’ve described your writing style as being quite economical. I’m curious how you two work together as writers, but also how much revision plays into it.

JC: I realized what I was always trying to do is to condense an idea down to its smallest form, so managing to express an idea — and it’s usually something like the pain of existing, some sort of existential despair — into the smallest amount of words I could manage. And that’s usually the point at which I take the song to Ben, when I’ve got a kind of melodic and narrative idea down, and he gets involved in the harmony, which chords should go underneath where, and extra instrumentation.

BW: Sort of trying to get the song to a point where nothing else needs to be added and nothing else needs to be taken away. If you take something off, you notice it’s gone; but if you add something on, it feels like it’s overloaded, so it’s trying to find that balance. You can be as economical with that instrumentation as Josi is with the writing structure and the lyrical content, as well.

It seems like it adds a certain melodic emphasis to make the words shine that much more.

JC: I have a bit of a personal hatred of songs that go beyond five minutes. If you have a seven-minute song, you’re getting the song form incorrect. It stops being a song; it becomes a symphony of words. I feel like, when I manage to get it two-and-a-half, three, three-and-a-half minutes … done. That’s a successful songwriting endeavor.

So we shouldn’t expect any kind of major jam session from you two?

JC: We may get bored with our current set-up.

BW: We may record a jazz odyssey.

JC: We can never say never.

Like a folk opera of some sort?

JC: Oh yeah: ”Fopera.”

Are you familiar with "Texts from Your Existentialist” on Instagram, which plays off the "Texts from Your Ex” phenomenon? There’s a certain kind of humor that arises when you’re dealing with existential subjects, and I thought of your tour’s hashtag #MagicalMiseryTour. How do you bring a bit of light or humor to being the “harbinger of melancholy”?

JC: We’re both a bit sarcastic by nature, and I’ve always tried to keep to the principle of taking the music really seriously but ourselves not so much. So, in a live performance, that kind of conversation between the songs is of a comic nature, you know — not slapstick, but kind of dry and sarcastic. I started doing it originally because it made me feel more comfortable in a performance, but I realized that it kind of worked for the audience, as well. In 45 minutes to an hour of really intense music, they kind of need a little break between those three-minute nuggets of sadness. It balances it out, so it doesn’t feel you’ve been through some sort of trauma.

BW: You have to put yourself in the seat of an audience member, not just from a performer’s point of view, but if you were going to come along and see this: How would you feel sitting through an hour-and-a-half’s worth of music where you couldn’t laugh, you couldn’t smile, you couldn’t feel that anything you were doing? The amount of concentration needed to sustain that … you need a little relief in there.

JC: [Laughs] It also stops us from looking hideously pretentious.

BW: There’s also the thing where, although we do take some elements from classical music, we never do the kind of gig where everyone has to turn up in suits and sit in perfect silence from beginning to end.

JC: Well, that’s what I mean. It’s not a recital.

Turning to the album itself, one of my favorite lines on “Something Familiar” is when you sing, “There’s no way of keeping the day we’ve just had.” It’s like every beautiful thing contains its opposite or its demise. How do you live with that knowledge of everything disintegrating?

JC: I think everyone has to live with it, and I don’t know how people manage to live with it without being able to write songs about it.

I think people know it to an extent, but they don’t tap into that awareness as often.

JC: Yeah, maybe I’m the only one constantly banging on about it. That idea has kind of pervaded all of my songwriting in some sense. I just thought of “Silverline” [off Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour]. There’s a line about “for each pound of joy, there’s an ounce of regret,” and it’s that thing where, for every great moment, there’s also a tinge of sadness that that’s the only moment like that you’ll ever have. There’s a real beauty in it, and I feel like it forces me to make the most of those moments more. That knowledge makes me more inclined to cherish the life that I do have.

BW: Until you realize that all things must pass, there are two ways you can approach it: You can make all things last indefinitely. Yes?

JC: I’m just intrigued that you’re involved in this part of the conversation. [Laughs]

BW: I’m just thinking you can sort of embrace it and say, "Well, let’s just try and make everything last forever," or actually you can say, "No, look, we’re just going to enjoy the moment. We know it’s going to end."

You’re not getting attached to any one moment or any one person; you’re able to appreciate them for what they bring and then let it go.

JC: Yeah, I think that’s what we all have to learn to do, and I’m still learning or I wouldn’t still be writing songs about it.

But we tend to get very attached to things and, in turn, get upset when they’re no longer around for various reasons. I think recognizing moments and people for their fleeting nature is quite beautiful. I’ve really been drawn to your lyricism because it touches on that point more than what I’ve heard in a while.

JC: But I think that plays into the overall concept of the album — the cyclical nature — that everything has an element of change built into it. That’s the acceptance you have to make. It underwrites absolutely everything, everywhere, from the seasons to the moon to the tides to the sun. It’s an inevitable part of existence.

You’re not getting any kind of argument from me on that point. Besides your original songwriting, I know you’ve covered Shirley Collins, Kate Rusby, and Jackson C. Frank, among others. What do you look for in someone else’s music?

JC: We never kind of specified that we were folk musicians. That was applied to us, in a way, and we always liked songs — generally sad ones — but those can come from any genre of music. We have quite a wide interest. Our albums have more than just folk songs on them.

BW: Generally, when we’ve found songs that we’ve decided to cover, you actually hear it and go, "Well the sentiment works, the idea works." You start sparking ideas around and going, "Well, it would be great if we tried it like this." It goes from there, really.

JC: I’ll give you a specific example: Gillian Welch’s “Dark Turn of Mind.” I felt they kind of do it as a straight piece of Americana, but I always felt like I could hear a kind of torch song in there somewhere and I guess wanting to try that to see if I could bring that out of it some way. Obviously, I identify massively with its sentiment, to a point that I feel like I would’ve written it, if I feel like she hadn’t got there first. But we’ll say, on a musical level, I could hear another interpretation in listening to it and that’s why that one, specifically, was more compelling than some of her other songs, perhaps.

BW: We’ve never been ones to do a carbon copy of the original, because it already exists. Why would you do it again? So it’s that sort of thing where you reimagine things, or the classic one for us is to learn it, forget it, and then try and re-remember it.

JC: Yeah, you have to feel you have something extra to bring to it. It’s never going to be the original, but you might be able to add something else that makes it a credible interpretation.

That’s why I loved what you did with “Milk and Honey.” It was really something.

JC: That was weird because I don’t know how I thought of it, but I heard the melody and I thought, "Well, this melody will work with ‘Tis Autumn,’ another standard." I’m not sure I could’ve worked it out, technically. I just knew it was, and then Ben is tasked with doing the technical splicing and putting it together.

Like, "Here’s the idea: Structure it and make it work."

JC: Right. “Can you just make this work? Thanks. I know it will. Can you just do it?”

Going back to this Twitter description you’ve given yourself as the "Harbinger of Melancholy" — what do you do if men stop you on the street and ask you to smile?

JC: I find the phrase “Fuck off” is really … or I’ve got a special face. It’s sort of like “meh.” It happens to me quite a lot. People used to come up after the show and say, “Oh, couldn’t you just do one cheery one to fluff it up a bit?” And, obviously, they didn’t get a very good response to that. I was like, “This is what we do. This is what people come for. We’re not going to do happy tunes. If you don’t like it, don’t come. That’s fine.” But we’re not going to change.

As we’ve discussed, you tend to focus on these moments of joy that contain inevitable kinds of sadness. What brings you both joy? What moments do you look for that register in that way?

JC: I guess the weird thing about it for me is performing. It’s really sad music, but nothing makes me more joyful than singing. It’s the sensation of singing something really sad and completely full of joy, which is kind of a bit dark and sadistic and weird.

BW: I think the performance element of it is the thing that brings us both a lot of joy.

JC: And the process of making the album — when I think of putting that thing with that thing and seeing it form, that’s huge fun. Like trying a thing, taking it back off again, putting something else on. The process for us is incredibly joyful; it’s just the subject matter that’s quite sad.

BGS Class of 2016: Songs

Posted on by Editor

Any given year is damn well over-run with great music — far too much for any one list to encompass. So, for our year-end songs round up, the BGS writers each picked tunes they loved that were not on any of our year-end albums. Maybe we loved the whole record; maybe we didn't. But we sure do love these tunes.

Aaron Lee Tasjan, Silver Tears, "Little Movies"

Aaron Lee Tasjan has a long, varied resumé. A founding member of glam-rock band Semi Precious Weapons and an ex-guitarist for the New York Dolls, Tasjan is now making some of the most interesting country music currently coming out of Nashville. Silver Tears track "Little Movies" is a perfect little slice of what Tasjan has to offer: soaring harmonies, unorthodox arrangements, and smart, compelling songwriting. — Brittney McKenna

Adia Victoria, Beyond the Bloodhounds, “Stuck in the South”

“I don’t know nothing ‘bout Southern belles, but I can tell you something ‘bout Southern hell,” Adia Victoria exclaims on this swampy burner that anchors her debut album, Beyond the Bloodhounds. Giving form to her experience as a Black woman raised in the Seventh Day Adventist Church in the South, she tackles the complexities of southern identity with equal parts grace and grit. Her arresting vocals and hypnotizing guitar make for a sound that’s unapologetically haunting: It’ll stick with you long after the final notes ring out. — Desiré Moses

Andy Shauf, The Party, "Quite Like You"

If Andy Shauf’s The Party is the overarching Saturday night hang, this intensely rhythmic song details a corner of the party through a story of being friend-zoned. We’ve all been there, and you can hear the vulnerability in Shauf’s voice as he lays it out, atop distorted piano riffs. — Josephine Wood

Beyoncé featuring the Dixie Chicks, "Daddy Lessons"

One of the only bright moments in the absolute garbage fire of a year that has been 2016 was the "surprise" performance of "Daddy Lessons" from Beyoncé and the Dixie Chicks at the 50th annual CMA Awards. To some, it may have seemed like an unexpected pairing, but given both the Dixie Chicks' reverence for the twangy Lemonade track (they performed it on their 2016 world tour), the Texas connection, and the two artists' shared histories as "controversial" figures, it shouldn't have been. Less surprising than the performance itself was the new controversy that quickly followed — a coded "Was that really country?" debate that, in some ways, mirrored the troubling dialogue occurring around the soon-to-be-determined presidential election. The performance was a victory for diversity on a stage that greatly needed it, as well as the best "fuck you" to the industry that unceremoniously excommunicated them over a decade prior that the Dixie Chicks, who were invited to perform at the insistence of Queen Bey herself, could have possibly imagined. — BMc

Dori Freeman, Dori Freeman, “You Say”

To call Freeman’s “You Say” simple would do a disservice to the intricacies she weaves with her lyricism and arrangement. Quiet, yes; simple, no. The higher register that marks her vocals on the verses dips down into growling pain on the chorus. “Darling I can’t stop thinking of you/ Like a dog in the hot night, I’m howling for you,” Freeman sings, her pronunciation striking the consonants of “darling” and “dog” in affective ways that create an expansive longing. — Amanda Wicks

Dylan LeBlanc, Cautionary Tale, "Easy Way Out"

Honestly, there's a case to be made for every one of the 10 tunes on this Dylan LeBlanc record to be cited for its greatness. They are all just that finely crafted and fantastically rendered. On this cut, he turns his very pointed gaze inward to explore his own struggles with depression and addiction. "Thorazine dreams are thundering in dangerous weather where, in my head, I'll soon be dead or soon feeling better." Having come out the on the latter side of that equation, LeBlanc knows of what he speaks (and sings) in regard to cautionary tales. — Kelly McCartney

Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, "Peaceful Morning"

Former Vampire Weekend multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij and the Walkmen's Hamilton Leithauser seem, on paper, like two of the unlikeliest musicians to make a thoughtful folk-rock album, but that's exactly what they've done with I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, their debut album as a duo. Standout track "Peaceful Morning" opens with a gentle banjo over an acoustic drum kit and simple piano chords, before opening with a lyric ("I thought I heard the angels, Lord") that could have been plucked right out of a bluegrass song. The song, like the album, is unlike anything else released this year, a vital piece of work from supposed outsiders breathing new life into the increasingly exhausted genre that is Americana. — BMc

Hayes Carll, Lovers & Leavers, "The Love That We Need"

Hayes Carll's dissection of a marriage that slowly falls from passion to plain is the exact opposite of a manufactured Music Row truck song — it may not be manly to admit that (gasp!) men and women both crave stability and partnership to a fault, but it works as a perfect confession on "The Love That We Need." Most love songs paint romance as ending with a dramatic bang, but Carll knows that the metaphor of two lovers, side by side in bed with bodies that never touch, is one that hits most of us where it hurts. It's a moment to help realize that the pain of letting go is better than the paralysis of holding on to something broken. — Marissa Moss

Jonny Fritz, Sweet Creep, "Stadium Inn"

Is there anyone out there with an imagination like Jonny Fritz? You can point out the humor and weird wit in Sweep Creep's songs all you want, but perhaps Fritz's most notable talent is the wild ways he's able to warp his mind to tell stories using building blocks no one else would ever think of or see scenarios that would take anyone else a handful of magic mushrooms to ever access. Case in point: "Stadium Inn," which imagines life beyond the mysteriously stained, always-open drapes of a seedy Nashville motel, set to a honky-tonk-meets-"Superstition" vamp and spatters of down-on the-farm fiddle. Horney honeymooners, hookers, and philandering husbands: It's all here for the taking. And no one serves it up like Fritz. — MM

Joseph, I'm Alone, No You're Not, “White Flag”

You could cherry pick a few songs from Joseph’s full-length debut and manage to come away confused about their designation as roots music. But catch this trio of sisters from Portland, Oregon, performing together on a stage, and you’ll see the rich folk tradition that inspired the bulk of their harmony-driven catalog. “White Flag” is Joseph drawing from the best of both worlds: a rhythmic, chant-like intro, crisp lyrics, strong vocal harmonies, and an upbeat chorus that will seep into your brain and refuse to leave. With its accessible sound and traditional roots, “White Flag” is the perfect gateway song — drawing pop fans into more authentic, traditional sounds and, likewise, bringing traditionalists out of their comfort zones. — Dacey Orr

Levon Henry, Sinker, "Skin of the Lion"

Upon pressing play, you’ll be in an instantly altered state of mind, as Levon Henry sings about releasing a tiger with the song building a musical haze from there. Henry’s sultry vocals combine with repetitive guitar riffs and distorted vocals to create a jazzed-up Tame Impala-esque sound. — JW

Lewis & Leigh, Ghost, "The 4:19"

Some duos sound superfluous — like a person adorned in one too many pieces of jewelry — and others fit together so intensely that it's impossible to imagine on without the other. The latter is the case with Lewis & Leigh's harmonies on their debut LP, Ghost, that always sound like a casual conversation within a complex psyche. It's at its best on tracks like "The 4:19" which is, in some ways, more Elliot Smith than Civil Wars, a work of languorous beauty about finding a place to belong when we're always in motion in the exact opposite direction of our expectations. — MM

LP, Death Valley, "Muddy Waters" & "Lost on You"

These two fantastic tracks tether LP's Death Valley EP to a rootsier sound than she employed on her last record and, MAN, do they do it right. The purposely plodding groove of "Muddy Waters" evokes exactly what it's meant to: a defiant, burdened body slogging through an emotional swamp … but slogging through nonetheless. The wispier cowboy swagger of "Lost on You" — replete with a cattle rustler's whistle — lightens things up, but still stands brazenly indignant in response to a broken heart. — KMc

Lucy Dacus, No Burden, “Troublemaker Doppelganger”

The second track on Lucy Dacus’s debut album (which bears the sharpness of a veteran work) is a bluesy jaunt that deals in dualities. “Is that a hearse or a limousine?” the Virginia native asks in the opening line before declaring, “I saw a girl that looked like you, and I wanted to tell everyone to run away from her.” Expanding beneath Dacus’s honey-dipped vocals is a propulsive riff brimming with so much swagger that you can’t help but nod along. — DM

Mandolin Orange, Blindfaller, “Take This Heart of Gold”

“Take This Heart of Gold” is a pledge — the kind of assurance lovers offer one another when they see that settling down isn’t settling. An electric guitar offers a shimmery rumination to start, and that contemplation only grows with Andrew Marlin’s staid vocals. The focus, as always with this duo, is the harmonies. Emily Frantz’s voice adds a punctuating note on the verses and swells with Marlin’s on the chorus. It’s soft and sweet without the daydream of idealism. This is reality shining through. — AW

Marisa Anderson, Into the Light, "He Is Without His Guns"

While it was a bad year for just about everything else, 2016 was a great year for guitar players. Everyone from William Tyler and Ryley Walker to Bryan Sutton and Billy Strings released strong albums that reinforced the instrument’s place at the forefront of roots music. Arguably the best and most wide-ranging was Marisa Anderson’s Into the Light, which she described as the soundtrack to a sci-fi Western. If that’s the case, then “He Is Without His Guns” scores the high-noon showdown between gunslingers, evoking the dusty ambience of Ennio Morricone and Wild West grandeur of John Ford. — Stephen Deusner

Michael Kiwanuka, Love & Hate, "Black Man in a White World"

Soul singer Michael Kiwanuka brings his rightful lineage and legacy to bear on this standout track from his fantastic Love & Hate LP. Propulsed by hand claps, the song lays out in stark emotional relief the toil it takes walking through the white world as a Black man with lines like "I'm in love, but I'm still sad. I've found peace, but I'm not glad." That's because even the small wins come with far too many losses for people of color. Even so, Kiwanuka takes the wind righout out of the clichéd sails of the "angry Black man" trope by proclaiming, "I've lost everything I had and I'm not angry and I'm not mad." Clear eyes, full heart, can't lose. — KMc

Miranda Lambert, The Weight of These Wings, "Pushin' Time"

A lot of the songs on Miranda Lambert's The Weight of These Wings are only partially and/or questionably autobiographical. This tune, though, is one that fully, unflinchingly is, as it details the beginnings of her relationship with Anderson East (who lends captivatingly tender harmony vocals to the track). It's one of the most beautiful love songs of the year, mostly because it never crosses the line into overly dreamy sentimentality, choosing rather to stay grounded in its appropriately hopeful romanticism. Who doesn't resonate with a line like "I didn't know I could be kissed like that," if not in experience then, at the very least, in expectation? This song is what dreams are made of. And, sometimes, it seems, those dreams really do come true. — KMc

The Raconteurs, Jack White Acoustic Recordings 1998 – 2016, “Carolina Drama (Acoustic Mix)”

This iteration of the Raconteurs’ “Carolina Drama” is a stripped-down, eerie acoustic murder ballad on string-infused steroids, with the guitar more twangy, strings more prominent, and drums notably missing. — JW

Robert Ellis, Robert Ellis, “California”

“California” begins tranquilly enough, with Robert Ellis softly plucking electric guitar and crooning in his juke joint style. But, by the chorus, the whole thing damn near explodes into the kind of haughty indifference one feigns after a breakup. “Maybe I’ll move to California with the unbroken part of heart I still have left,” he sings of the main character’s decision to leave behind shattered promises. The drums enter the conversation at the chorus as pounding echoes and the guitar’s pacing becomes more frantic. Ellis has mined the California hills and discovered gold. — AW

Shirley Collins, Lodestar, "Awake Awake / The Split Ash Tree/ May Carol / Southover"

On her first album in nearly 40 years, Shirley Collins reintroduces herself with this 11-minute medley of traditional tunes that may date back centuries but still feel startling, unnervingly current. “Awake Awake” was originally written in the late 1500s, but it could have been a response to Brexit, shaming a nation for its hubris. “May Carol,” on the other hand, hopes for a better future for us all. That’s what makes Lodestar the comeback of the year: It reveals an artist who loses herself humbly in her songs, allowing history to speak to the present. — SD

Shovels & Rope, Little Seeds, “Buffalo Nickel”

Shovels & Rope are the rowdiest and, arguably, most adventurous roots band around, capable of clangorous punk conflagration, as well as gentle country musings about life and loss. “Buffalo Nickel” is most definitely the former. The song crashes through a brick wall, opening with a pummeling drumbeat and a barbed guitar riff, like a shotgun wedding of “Be My Baby” and “99 Problems.” But even when they’re trying to “shake the noise out of the rattle,” Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst are disarmingly candid about the nature of their collaboration, both musically and romantically, and this boisterous song paints them as bandits on the run, a folk-punk Bonnie & Clyde, playing each note like they’re pulling a Brinks heist. — SD

Sierra Hull, Weighted Mind, “Black River”

Weighted Mind is far from the first time bluegrass fans are hearing from mandolin savant Sierra Hull, but the January full-length from the 25-year-old finds her more confident in her own voice than ever before. “Black River” takes the thick, messy mascara tears familiar to plenty of 20-somethings and transforms them to the stuff of poetry. “A thousand years is but a day, they say. And maybe in a thousand more I will find my way,” she sings at the close of the chorus. One can only hope she will continue to chronicle every step with the honesty and musical integrity of Weighted Mind. — DO

Wilco, Schmilco, “Normal American Kids”

The opening track of Wilco’s 10th album, Schmilco, has all the makings of an instant classic. In this anthem for misfits, Jeff Tweedy quietly croons about his days as a teenage stoner who “always hated those normal American kids” over low-strummed guitar. At a time when the definition of what it means to be American is just as elastic as the definition of “normal,” Tweedy questions it all using wholly American songwriting tropes: malaise, rebellion, and nostalgia. — DM

The Wild Reeds, Best Wishes, “What I Had In Mind”

It’s one thing to have a bandleader with a killer voice. It’s another to have members in the group capable of backing that one standout singer with precise harmonies. But what happens when you have three singers capable of taking the lead? Look no further than Los Angeles band the Wild Reeds for the answer to that question. On “What I Had in Mind,” a gut-wrencher from this year’s three-song release Best Wishes, things start out low-key enough: steady strumming behind a lone, sweet vocal. But, by three minutes into the song, these robust three-part harmonies will have successfully worked even the most stoic listeners into a full-on emotional frenzy. The ebb and flow they foster makes the parting line feel all the more lonely, whether you relate to the lyric or the sound itself: “My hope was strong, but overpowered by a boy whose faith was swallowed by his doubt.” — DO

Songs in the Key of Life: An Interview with Shirley Collins

Posted on by Editor

“It seems such a contradiction, really,” says Shirley Collins with a bright, lively laugh. “I’m such a cheerful person, but I love all these dark songs.” Her new album, a gem titled Lodestar, is full of viscera and violence: drownings and stabbings and poisonings, what might be a bloody disembowelment, and a man dancing on the grave of the woman who rejected his proposal. Most of the songs are hundreds of years old, missives from deep within English history, and Collins sings them with a solemn matter-of-factness that lends heft to the human suffering.

She has been singing these songs for most of her life. In the late 1950s, she joined Alan Lomax on a three-month song-collecting tour of America, which she still speaks of fondly and excitedly. In the 1960s, she was at the vanguard of the English folk revival, recording old tunes in new settings, often a cappella, but sometimes with accompaniment by her sister Dolly Collins. In 1965, she paired with the guitarist Davey Graham for Folk Roots, New Routes, a landmark album that launched several generations of co-ed folk duos.

However, at the end of the 1970s, Collins abruptly stopped singing, recording, and performing. She retired to her cottage in Essex, where she raised her children and kept listening to the old songs. During that time, she developed a reputation as the grand dame of English folk music, inspiring musicians on both sides of the Atlantic, including Billy Bragg, Will Oldham, and the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy (who recorded a covers EP in 2006).

It’s only been in the last few years that she has found her voice again and returned to singing; Lodestar is her first record in nearly 40 years, and it’s one of the best and most welcome comebacks of 2016, a bright spot in a sorry year. The time away has added some grain and texture to her voice, which is lower and less steady than it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s but still careful in its phrasing and sensitive to the material — not just the human horrors contained in the songs, but the long histories they represent.

When you’re singing a song that’s several centuries old, are you thinking about the real people who might have sung it? Are you thinking about characters?

Not necessarily. You connect with the songs, but they’re not personal songs. What you’re doing is passing them on. You’re slightly removed from them, in a way, because we don’t sell songs, people who sing folk music. We don’t sell it. We don’t push it at you. We let you come to it, so I think it retains its essence. You don’t have to sing them in front of an audience, necessarily.

I just feel these people behind me — the people who have sung the songs down through centuries — and they know them by heart. I want to treat them with a warm respect and present them with the best accompaniments I can make, then just let people make up their minds about the songs. Just sing them as straight as I can, no embellishments really. Because that’s not the way we English sing, really. The Irish have great deal of ornamentation in their singing, but the English don’t. It’s just a different tradition. We sing the songs quite straightforwardly, but that doesn’t mean they’re not crammed with emotion. I think they are.

Singing these songs sounds like a very immersive experience for you, like you’re being swallowed up by history.

That’s absolutely right. You focus in on the song and you inhabit it, as well, but without it being pretentious. I can’t bear it when people show off when they’re singing or get too dramatic and overload a song. I just sing it as straightforwardly as I can, but recognizing that virtually every song has a fantastic history. So I feel responsible for doing the best I can with them. That, in one way, is why I stopped singing for so long: I felt I wasn’t doing the songs justice, and I couldn’t quite bear that. It was very difficult.

In what way?

My voice wasn’t up to it, for quite a long time. And I had a very bad marriage breakdown. My husband had left me for another woman almost overnight. I was singing in public every night at the National Theater with the [Albion Band]. We had a promenade audience right in front of us, and I was in such a state of heartbreak that, some nights, I opened my mouth to sing and I would croak. My voice would break or nothing would come out at all. Martin Carthy, who was also in the band, would help me out on those nights. Some nights it was fine, but it just got more and more scary because I didn’t know what was going to happen. I kept trying and trying, but finally I felt I couldn’t put myself through it and I can’t put the songs through it, either. I had two kids to bring up, so I had to find another job for quite a long time. But a friend said to me, "You listen to field recordings of old singers, and you don’t mind their voices being old." No, I guess I don’t. In fact, I love it. So I summoned up all my courage and started singing again. So here I am again and happy about that.

Do you revisit your old recordings? Especially for something like the new version of “Death and the Lady,” which you recorded in 1970.

I recorded that in the first instance with Dolly, my sister who did arrangements for flute and organ. Why did I go back to it? It’s a song that’s haunted me for ages. A musician friend of mine named David Tibet persuaded me, after some years of asking if I would sing at one of his concerts. He kept saying, "Just one or two songs." It was the first time I had sung in public for some time, and I knew I could manage to sing “Death and the Lady” because it wasn’t a huge range. I’d slightly altered the tune anyway. David played it on guitar, and it just felt so appropriate. It’s so dark, and there’s a real sinister quality to it, so I decided to put that one on the album.

Ian [Kearey], the guitarist who also produced the album, he and I meet regularly. It was Autumn and we were rehearsing “Death,” and I suddenly broke into a Muddy Waters version of it. You know “Mannish Boy,” of course. When I got to the verse about death, the verse that goes, “My name is death,” I went, “I spell it D. E. A. T. H.” I don’t think it’s disrespectful, really. It’s such a strong song that it can take it.

These songs provide such wonderful raw material. You can mold it into something new without losing its integrity.

Some purists might not like it, but it worked really well. The thought of death stalking the country is quite relevant these days, isn’t it? There’s so much many horror. Some people think that song comes from the time of the Black Death in Europe, when death really was stalking the land. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. It might be even older.

Were you choosing songs with any particular thematic criteria in mind?

We started off just with the first song, “Awake Awake Sweet England,” the penitential ballad, and it just grew from there. I jotted down one or two songs that I really like and had never really sung, like the “Banks of Green Willow,” which is a favorite of mine. It was collected here in Sussex, but I had never sung it and I wanted to. I had three or four songs jotted down, and then other things just filtered through into my mind. Other songs, like the last one, “The Silver Swan,” we used to sing it at home when we were children. Just the three of us: Mum, my sister Dolly, and me. It’s a five-part madrigal, and I was given the bass part or the tenor part because I had a deeper voice than mum or Dolly. When Ian and all of us were sitting around the table talking about the album, for some reason it just slipped into my head. I just sang it and everybody said, "We’ve got to do that." Every once in a while, there’s a bit of real good fortune and the right song comes to the forefront of your mind. You might have been lodging somewhere in the back of your mind for too long and suddenly it pops up and says, "Sing me! Sing me!"

I’m very pleased that I’ve recorded two American songs. Both were songs that Alan Lomax and I collected when I was over there in 1959. I actually collected “Pretty Polly” in Arkansas from Ollie Gilbert, who was a wonderful mountain singer. That’s a lively song about the American War of Independence — and I’m on your side! Otherwise, the songs are all English.

Do you know a singer named Horton Barker? He was in his 70s when we were there. He was recording a song for Alan called “The Rich Irish Lady,” and he forgot the words. He got halfway through singing it in a very gentle and beautiful way, but then he forgot the words. He said to Alan, "I’m sorry, sir. I can’t go on." And Alan said very gently to him, "Can you speak the words?" And he did. So there’s the complete ballad, half sung and half spoken. I have it and I put it all together with Horton’s tune and recorded it.

That song definitely has an Appalachian flare, especially with the coda.

That’s where it came from. It came from Virginia. And then, of course, we tacked on a fiddle tune from Kentucky on the end, and I will just tell you that, when we were in the studio listening to the playbacks, there was a young engineer there, and he listened to the words of the song — “I’ll dance on your grave, when you’re laid in the earth.” He turned to me and said, "He doesn’t mean it, does he?" And then the fiddle tune comes in hard and strong, and he said, "Ah, yes, he does mean it!" It’s great, because it means we achieved what we meant to.

I’m always surprised by how dark and brutal some of these songs are.

It’s not the most cheerful album, but then so many folk songs aren’t cheerful anyway. The thing is, every single subject was sung about in folk songs, so some of them are very dark and very brutal. It’s extraordinary for many of us that people wanted to still sing them, but they still do. There’s a sort of courage in it: You can sing about murders and suicides and revenge and Lord knows what, and it’s all acceptable. In fact, I find those songs particularly fascinating because they own up to what human beings are.

On the other hand, there are also songs of great beauty. There are gentler ones. I love them all. I’ve always loved old things. I loved history when I was in school. I just love the age of some of this stuff and how it’s clung over the centuries. This is before words or tunes were written down and before there were field recordings. People just sang them and they learned them by heart, because a lot of the English laboring class in the countryside couldn’t read or write. So they had to learn them by heart. The songs must have been important for them to do that. Because of that, there are thousands of songs that are still around.

What I’ve learned from the folk albums of the ‘60s and your recordings, in particular, is that these songs document a history that we can all take part in simply by singing and play them.

It’s a great social history. There’s always that behind it. It’s so valuable. In a way, it’s a bit like archaeology: You dig up the ground and you find something remarkable, even if it’s just a piece of pottery from medieval times. That’s how I feel about this stuff: You find it and it should be treasured. Like the very first song on the album, “Awake Awake Sweet England,” which was written in the 1560. There was an earthquake in the center of England, but it was a big enough one that some of the tremors reached London and toppled part of old St. Paul’s Cathedral. So this chap, Thomas Deloney, wrote a song warning the people to improve their behavior and look to God to become more righteous. This was God’s judgment on them, sending an earthquake. That happened! But I hadn’t ever heard of it until I found it in the book Folk Songs of Herefordshire from 1907, and it was in that book because Vaughan Williams heard it sung by a farmer and his wife in Herefordshire. Where had it been in the meantime? But there they were, this farmer and his wife, singing it 400 years later. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? I’m bowled over by the wonder of it all.

Not only does it survive after so many centuries, but it still seems relevant today. “Awake Awake” could have been written about Brexit.

Nothing really changes. Well, certain things change. Lives are much easier now, but there are certain deep truths that never change. They’re permanent. People are so different nowadays, but deep down, we all must have something in common.

 

Tell me about your trip to America. That seems to have informed Lodestar .

I did have a wonderful time in America when I was there in 1959. I remember hearing the Stanley Brothers for the very first time, I think at a fiddle gathering in Virginia. I was on my feet! There were the Stanley Brothers in their Stetson hats and their smart maroon suits and playing something virtually impossible on a banjo. I was on my feet clapping and cheering. I had never seen anything quite so exciting as that. Those memories are still very vivid, despite it being such a long time ago. The music made such a great impression on me. So did the people I met. I was so fortunate to be on that trip, at that time, when there were still enough people in the mountains singing the way they always had done and playing wonderful old fiddle tunes. That was just the most incredible experience and just reinforced everything that I was starting to learn about traditional songs. It reinforced the wonder and the beauty and the excitement of it.

Where did you travel?

We started in Tennessee, then went up into Kentucky and down to Alabama and Mississippi, where we recorded for the first time Mississippi Fred McDowell. Then we went down to the Georgia Sea Islands to record the people who lived on St. Simons. It was quite a comprehensive trip, and it took us three months. And I’ve been to Arkansas, where we met Jimmy Driftwood, whom I absolutely loved, and Almeda Riddle, who is perhaps the greatest singer I’ve ever heard in my life. She sings some wonderful ballads and love songs, and they’re absolutely haunting.

It was a great experience just meeting people of that generation. I was just 23 when I was there, and I was meeting people in their 60s and 70s. It was such an honor to hear them sing and make friends with them. They were often thrilled, as well, to meet us, especially people like Almeda and Ollie Gilbert. When they sang a ballad, I was able to sing the English version that is still going in England. They were so delighted to know that the songs were still being sung back at home. They spoke of England as the old country. I think perhaps, at that time, they thought the interest in songs and old singers was fading a bit, so it was wonderful to share that with them. About 15 years ago, I wrote a book about it called America Over the Water, so it’s absolutely been kept alive in my mind in the freshest way possible.

One other thing about Almeda Riddle singing: She was right deep in Arkansas, and she’d never see the sea in her life. She sang a ballad called “The Merry Golden Tree,” which is a song about unpleasant happenings on the high seas, set in times of galleons — probably older than that. When she sang the chorus — “As she sailed upon the low and the lonesome low, as she sailed upon the lonely low lands seas” — the way Almeda sang it, you could just see a seascape. She just brought the sea right in front of you, though she’d never seen it. That’s just the power of words and the power of music and the power of the voice. I get goosebumps when I think about that now.

Do these songs change for you or reveal new meanings or significance that you hadn’t caught before?

I think perhaps I appreciate them even more than I did at first because, when you’re young, you’re a little bit superficial, aren’t you? Because you don’t know much. But it all still holds up so wonderfully and I get very emotionally attached to it, too. It’s a great tug of memory for me to go back to when I was a young woman in America and I’d never left home before. It was quite extraordinary, really. I went over on a boat because that was cheaper than flying. Flying was for film stars, and going on a boat was for ordinary people. Quite the reverse nowadays. But I think I still have the more or less same response, but an even greater admiration for it and an even greater emotional attachment to it — which I don’t think I’ll ever lose.

There is one thing I wish I’d learned to do, and that was Appalachian flatfooting or buckdancing. Oh, I wish I’d learned to do that when I was in America. I think it’s magical stuff, but it’s beyond me now for sure.

Photo credit: Eva Vermandel