Tag: traditional folk

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

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“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

STREAM: Katie McNally, ‘The Boston States’

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Artist: Katie McNally
Hometown: Boston, MA
Album: The Boston States
Release Date: October 21

In Their Words: "In many ways, The Boston States is about my identity as an American playing Canadian and Scottish music. My family emigrated from Prince Edward Island on one side and Quebec on the other, but growing up in Massachusetts, I never felt like I had a real claim to those places or culture. It finally dawned on me that the music I make has a very real and historical connection to the Boston area and the Canadian immigrants here.

Maritime Canadians are familiar with the phrase 'the Boston States' — it’s how their parents and grandparents refer to New England, where many of their relatives came to live and work in the early 20th century. Along with them, came their music and dance and the wellspring from which I draw a good deal of my repertoire and fiddle-playing.

Traditional music is intrinsically tied to its geography and, in selecting repertoire for this album, I was careful to choose tunes that came from the dance hall fiddlers of Boston; the tunes represent an immigrant music and an American music, a music of passage back and forth between many worlds — from Scotland to Canada to New England and back again. It is all of these things at once and, by tying them together, I've come to understand my place in the long line of Canadian-American musicians in the Boston States." — Katie McNally

STREAM: Ben Glover, ‘The Emigrant’

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Artist: Ben Glover
Hometown: Glenarm, Northern Ireland / Nashville, Tennessee
Album: The Emigrant
Release Date: September 30
Label: Proper Records

In Their Words: “Over the past couple of years, I have been going through the process of getting my U.S. Green Card, so the reality of emigration/immigration was very present in my world. Contemplations like 'What and where is home?' were never far from my thoughts. Around the same time, my interest in Irish roots music and folk ballads was rekindled. My head and heart were back in that musical world. Having to deal with the issues of immigration while going back to the music I grew up playing is how this record was born. The project is my story — it’s who I am at this time in my life.” — Ben Glover

A Right to Be Here: Amythyst Kiah’s Innovative Place in Tradition

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On a cool November evening, the crowd of regulars filters in at the Down Home — Johnson City, Tennessee’s beloved listening room and bar. The performer waiting to the side of the stage is no stranger to this crowd, cycling between tuning her guitar and greeting friends as they make their way to their seats. When Amythyst Kiah takes the stage and the warm applause settles, she lays down a thumping bass line with her acoustic guitar. Soon, a few bright treble notes layer in, building up a minor chord that completes the gritty and skillful backdrop. Kiah begins to sing with a relaxed sense of ease and a steely intention, and the listeners lean in. “Ooh, Lordy, my trouble so hard / Don’t nobody know my trouble but God.” Though few audience members would know the song’s origin, the emotion moving in it is familiar and immediate.

Trouble was a familiar subject for Adele “Vera” Hall, a singer who learned African-American spirituals and blues in her family and community in rural Alabama. When Hall sang on record for folklorists John and Ruby Lomax in 1939, she had already endured the death of her husband — a coal miner who died in a gunfight more than a decade earlier. Hall made her own way, earning a living as a cook and washerwoman, and since her childhood days, she was known to be one of the finest singers in the area. When Hall sang “Trouble So Hard,” perhaps she knew that future generations of singers like Amythyst Kiah would put the song to good use, just as Hall had throughout her life. Of the hundreds of singers John Lomax documented for the Library of Congress, he remarked that Vera Hall had the "loveliest untrained voice [he] had ever recorded."

Praise from folklorists like Lomax is not what makes Hall’s singing so valuable. For those hearing Kiah perform, the testament is in the air and among them, a strong voice reaching back through generations to present a song that folks can still relate to.

Kiah is an important and innovative presence in contemporary traditional music. Describing herself as a “Southern Gothic, alt-country blues singer/songwriter,” Amythyst has a repertoire that honors tradition while crossing genres to illuminate many common threads. A theme of “vocal integrity” unites her varied influences which include Son House, Dolly Parton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Florence and the Machine. Accompanying her singing with guitar and clawhammer banjo, Kiah stands out among Southern artists, a uniqueness which has led her to perform at national venues such as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and on programs like Music City Roots. Amythyst released a solo record titled Dig in 2013 and her current project brings together traditional and original music set for a five-piece blues rock band — Amythyst Kiah and Her Chest of Glass. The group will release their debut EP in Fall 2016.

Tell me some about your upbringing in Chattanooga and how your first music came about.

I grew up in the suburbs, so I was close to the mall and all that — suburban sprawl kind of thing — that’s sort of where I grew up. I played basketball and did the typical suburban life stuff. But when I was 13, I’d been really interested in wanting to play an instrument for a while, and my parents wanted to encourage me to play an instrument, play a team sport, and make good grades — to be a well-rounded individual. Once I got my guitar, I started getting into writing and really getting into listening to music — a lot of rock, singer/songwriters, that kind of thing — and so, during that time, I pretty much dropped sports, transferred to a creative arts high school. I wish I could have gone there so much earlier, but I got there when I got there and it was a great change. I got really heavy into writing and playing music when I was in high school and I was a closet musician. I played a couple of talent shows, but I really just played for fun and I kind of kept to myself as a kid. 

Actually, my first performance where it was a large group that was very much validating my existence as a musician — other than my dad saying that he liked what he heard — I wrote a song for my mom … for her funeral. It was a few months before I graduated from high school that she died, so I wrote a song for her and sang it at the funeral. That was an eye-opening experience for me: Maybe I could write songs and people would actually want to hear them. I had a lot of good feedback.

We ended up moving to Johnson City when I was about 19, just to kind of start over. I transferred from the college I was going to in Chattanooga to East Tennessee State University and had absolutely no idea what I was going to do for my career. I didn’t really have a path. I just knew I was supposed to go to college. I was reveling in all these really cool classes like philosophy. I was really enjoying myself, but not knowing what I wanted to do. So I ended up auditioning for bands the next semester — the Fall before, I had taken a bluegrass guitar class and I didn’t know anything about traditional music. I just liked the idea that I could take a music class where they appreciated learning by ear because, when I took classical guitar in high school, what discouraged me was the fact that I had to learn how to sightread and do all the formations and all that kind of stuff.

So I took that bluegrass guitar class with Jack Tottle, who is an amazing human being; it really meant a lot to be able to take that course because it changed my perspective on a lot of things. From there, I joined a Celtic band and did Celtic rhythm guitar and then I found my place in old-time music. That was around the time I learned about the Carolina Chocolate Drops — I had taken Ted Olson’s class about American folk music and was fascinated with the intermingling, how multicultural the music actually was. I think part of my hesitance to finding my place was that I’ve always listened to all kinds of different music, and sometimes, if you don’t see people like you, sometimes you wonder or people make you feel like, “Well, do I belong here?” I was having those kind of feelings with some people. I’d had lots of praise and lots of support, so I’m really grateful for that, but there were always those few little people who put doubts in my head about my presence.

Once I read about the history of this music and how Blacks and whites both played this music — that this is something that is integrally a hybrid — I was like, “Well, hell, I have just as much right to be here as anyone else!” From then on, I was just like, “I’m doing it.” Roy Andrade reached out to me and asked me to be in the first-ever Old-Time Pride Band because he heard my voice and felt like he really wanted me to be part of it, and from then on I just did old-time. I ended up switching my major, once they got it approved, to Bluegrass and Old-Time Country Music Studies, and I graduated in 2012. During that time, I picked up solo gigs alongside the school band stuff, so that’s all part of my transition from playing mainly contemporary stuff into solely old-time stuff for a while, and now I’ve transitioned back into doing contemporary stuff. But it still has that old-time, roots influence.

I really admire your music, because your personality is so evident in it and your own experience has shaped it. That’s so much a part of good music — period — but also traditional music. I was reading through your list of influences, and there wouldn’t have been a Sister Rosetta Tharpe or an Ola Belle Reed or so many of these figures if they hadn’t taken a step to put their own personality and experience in the music. You said you’re doing a lot more songwriting now and transitioning with your new band, Amythyst Kiah and Her Chest of Glass. Talk about that.

It’s interesting because, first of all, the guys in the band, they’re also part of another local band here called This Mountain and they’re an interesting mix. It’s kind of in the middle of folk and rock. They’re a hard sound to describe. They remind me of Radiohead — alternative rock with acoustic instruments in it. This Mountain asked me to open for them a couple of years ago at the Hideaway over here. That was my first time playing a solo show in Johnson City. That turned out really well, and then they asked me to play with them at a festival in Savannah, Georgia, called Revival Fest because two guys in their band weren’t going to be able to make it. So we got together, put together a 30-minute set, then we went and played in Savannah.

We were well-received and I thought, “This is pretty cool!” Basically, the music in this band, a lot of it is stuff that I played acoustic, but with electric arrangements. For our EP, there are three songs that I’ve written that are going to be on there, and then there’s some stuff that I’ve done that come straight from old-time. Not all of them transitioned over, but two big ones are Vera Hall songs — she’s really become one of my favorite singers. I’d like to take more of her songs and do more work with them. We do “Another Man Done Gone” and we do “Trouble So Hard” in the band. Obviously she sang a cappella and, as a guitarist, I always feel like I need to add some guitar stuff, so I added guitar arrangements to both of those songs. Then when I brought them to the band. At that point in time, they had mainly just been solely following me on what I do on guitar because I establish rhythm, bass line, and the riff. When they came in, they were kind of just following me, which is fine, but then we got to the point where it’s like, “Hey, what if we did the intro of a song with just piano or just drums?”

So I’ve gotten into arranging songs more because I have to remind myself that I’ve got other instruments here now. I don’t have to do everything. It’s nice because you get four different perspectives on the same song and it really opens you up in new ways, maybe trying things that you never thought you’d try before. But the way everything kind of flows right now is that it’s blues rock, but it’s also danceable — it’s like blues-dance-rock. I’ve gotten into writing songs in a blues style mainly because, for me, songwriting has always been very difficult. I can write a poem — I can write a short prose piece or a poem piece, but when it comes to putting it to music, I think of melody and chord arrangements first. That’s what happens when I listen to a song. Once I come up with the melodies, I’m like, “What the hell am I going to sing about?” because I feel like I’ve already expressed my feelings in this melody and in this song, so what else do I need to say? So that’s always been difficult. 

But, when I got into blues, I started realizing that this is perfect. The main focus is on the emoting, and you’ve got a few choice words to describe what you’re feeling. For me, I like singer/songwriter stuff and the storytelling aspect of that, but I guess my brain doesn’t necessarily work in telling stories. I more or less like to express feelings. With a song like “Hangover Blues,” I’ll create three verses and they tell a really short story. I don’t know if it’s an attention span thing or what it is, as far as words go. I feel like sometimes, if I write too many words, it might take away from the emoting of the music. It’s something I always struggle with.

That’s so characteristic of really good traditional songs like the blues that you’re talking about — that economy of words and expressing the feeling with your voice.

That’s where I feel most at home.

So much of your songwriting is about speaking your truth. You talk about writing for your mother and what a brave step that was. What kinds of emotions do you find yourself writing about now?

In the beginning, a lot of the stuff I would write about would be kind of along the lines of “me against the world.” Those aren’t songs that I’ve recorded because I wrote them years and years ago. But, as time has gone on — especially after playing old-time music — a lot of the songs I was drawn to were about loss and heartache, death … lots of things that affect us to the core as humanables. There’s something very cathartic about playing a really sad song because, when it’s finished, it’s almost like you’re dealing directly with something that’s kind of scary and that you know is going to happen at some point in your life. To go through all those emotions in song is the safest way to be able to experience those things. It’s almost like preparing yourself, reminding yourself that bad shit happens, but at the same time, you come out of the song, and you can appreciate what you do have a lot more.

So now, the new songs that I’ve written, they’re actually a little more lighthearted than the stuff I’ve written in the past. “Hangover Blues” is one that’s on the EP and it’s about recovering from a hangover, but also being like, “I had a damn good time and I would do it again.” That’s one of my more lighthearted songs. Then “Wildebeest” is inspired from the sort of quintessential blues theme of “My woman pissed me off and I want to get back at her.” It’s a jealous lover kind of song. That one’s got some little parts in there that are meant to be lighthearted and comedic, but at the same time, the title also ties into the idea that, even though we are human beings, despite living in I guess what you would call a civilized society, we still have these primal urges. It’s a reminder of the fact that we are animals. I feel like keeping that in mind — that we are susceptible to those things — I feel like expressing that helps check the ego a little bit. The idea that people don’t see that they’re part of nature baffles me. You can be spiritual and still realize that you’re also part of nature. But some people separate themselves from their environment and, when people do that, you see what happens: Mountains get removed, tree forests are cut down because people don’t see themselves within the cycle of life. Just because we have logic and cognitive thought doesn’t mean that we live above and beyond everything. We are, in essence, destroying ourselves by doing this. Songs like “Wildebeest” … I like to remind people that we’re very much part of something much bigger.

You can take this wherever you want to, but I’m wondering what you hope to accomplish through your music. You’ve talked about expressing your emotions and I think you represent a lot of communities in an innovative way, and also you are honoring these traditions and carrying them forward. What impact do you hope to make with your music?

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately because music has always been something very personal. Sometimes it’s easy for me to get lost in my own brain and not necessarily think about the kind of impact that I’m having, but I’m thinking a lot more about that lately. For me, being a queer woman of color in Appalachia, pulling from these different roots-based ideas and then making these connections with electric music and traditional acoustic music and bridging the gap there, as an Appalachian person, I feel like I can bring a perspective to a wider audience and hopefully inspire people that look like me or love like me to tap in and be like, “Hey, this is really cool. This is something that I could do.” I just feel like, in a lot of ways, intersectionally, I’m the exact opposite of what would be considered typical for what I’m doing and I needed to see someone like that when I was playing music. I just feel like I want to, in some way, inspire other people. Their voice should be heard, and that contributes to the diversity of the people who are from our area.

Sam Gleaves is a folk singer and songwriter from Southwest Virginia. His latest record, Ain’t We Brothers, is made up of stories in song from contemporary Appalachia, produced by Cathy Fink.

Hard Holiday: Robbie Fulks and Most of the Mekons on the Island of Jura

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Aside from swimming and light aircraft — one of which is certain doom and the other certainly expensive — there are only two ways to reach the island of Jura, one of several off the western coast of Scotland. You can take a car ferry from Islay, which lies to the south, but it requires a roundabout trip that, while scenic, will take you hours out of your way. More direct passage involves steeling yourself with a shot of the local whiskey and boarding one of the wooden dinghies — called a rigid inflatable — that take the trip across the choppy waters several times a day. Captained by locals long inured to the queasy bounce of the waves, these tiny boats accommodate a modest party and rock vertiginously on the water. Most passengers disembark on the island green-faced and rubber-kneed.

That’s how Robbie Fulks and most of the Mekons made the shaky passage to Jura, where they spent four days recording an album of acoustic ballads and gritty shanties, all full of seafarers weary, wracked, groggy, and often simply lost amid the waves. The Mekons are all British — Scots and Welshmen, specifically, although several now reside in the landlocked American Midwest — and as such are accustomed to some extent to such rough travel. Fulks, however, is an American, which gave him a very different perspective. “The trip was plotted a little sadistically, I thought,” he writes in the liner notes to the album, simply titled Jura. “Many in our number were, or looked, ill.”

Humans have been making that passage for centuries. Trod upon by Vikings long before the arrival of Christianity, Jura was home to Scottish farmers, mostly poor and stubborn against the rocky soil, but they were eventually forced off the land in what is called the Clearances. Landowners evicted their tenants to make room for sheep, whose wool was used to make uniforms for soldiers in Napoleon’s armies. The sheep remain, outnumbering the island’s human population. “A lot of people went from Jura to South Carolina, I think,” says Susie Honeyman, the Mekons’ violinist and expert on Scottish islands. “It’s really difficult to live there anyway, because the soil isn’t very good and people were starving.”

Since then, the island has claimed a small populace, among the famous of whom is George Orwell. In the 1940s, while writing 1984, he moved to a remote cabin a rough seven-mile hike through the woods from the main settlement. The island may have inspired that notoriously dystopian novel, but it was not kind to Orwell. The weather irritated his tuberculosis, nearly killing him. And, says Honeyman, “He nearly died in the Corryvrecken Whirlpool when he attempted to row across it with his son!”

Fulks and the Mekons arrived there in the middle of a long and arduous tour of the Scottish Highlands, including stops in remotes villages on islands that rarely see popular entertainment. “The Mekons being who they are — which is a bunch of highly disorganized individuals with multiple interests — it turned out that two of them weren’t sure they could go,” explains Mekons co-vocalist/co-songwriter Sally Timms. “Jon suggested asking Robbie Fulks to come along, and he — being either game or deranged at the time — said yes.”

Conditions on the island, Fulks soon discovered, weren’t exactly comfortable. The wind blows sharply, finding seams and holes in even the heaviest coats. The constant drizzle of rain renders everything damp, gray, muddy. The island is roughly the size of Chicago, with fewer than 200 people inhabiting a small settlement that includes one shop, one pub, one distillery. The one inn at full capacity, several of the Mekons took to cabins far from town, like lepers banished from civilization. “We stayed in these remote little cabins, but they weren’t even buildings really, at least not by American standards,” says Jon Langford, one of the band’s numerous vocalists, songwriters, and guitar players. “I think Robbie was shocked by the absence of soft toilet paper, towels, washing machines — things you might think of as bare essentials in the rest of the world. But they don’t need them on Jura.”

“It’s cold and it’s wet and it’s stunningly, dramatically beautiful,” says Honeyman. “It’s not a soft holiday.”

Fulks and the Mekons recorded at Sound of Jura, formerly a schoolhouse owned and operated by Giles Perring who, in the 1980s, played in a band called Echo City with Honeyman. Prior to their arrival, the band had spent weeks planning songs, penning lyrics, testing melodies, and dreaming up arrangements, so that when they got there they could have something resembling songs to rip up. Even at the earliest stages, they knew the album would have a nautical theme. “We’re going to an island, so we’re going to write songs about islands and sailors and fishermen,” recalls Timms. “We always like to have some kind of theme. It helps to hang things on. But we had only a notion of what it might be like on Jura.”

The music reflects the place: These are songs about hard lives on or, at least, near the sea — lives defined by depravation and tribulation. Sung by Langford, “Incident at St. Kitt’s” is a dark, choppy chantey that traces news of a gruesome tragedy from one port to the next, from one ocean to the next, until it’s subsumed into seagoing lore. “Stiff drink! Stiff upper lip!” they shout in unison. That news might have reached the alcoholic and self-justifying narrator of Fulks’ “Refill” or even the pitiful rake in his new version of the Mekons’ classic “Beaten & Broken.”

Says Langford, “We tried to leave ourselves open to where we were, so we knew there were going to be boats involved. As soon as we got there, a lot of the lyrics got kicked out. Place names were brought in, along with snippets of overheard conversations. That’s how we work as songwriters. We’ll just tear the whole thing up at the last minute. Don’t sing those lyrics we’ve been working on. Sing this thing that basically a transcript of a conversation we heard in a pub the night before.”

Jura got into their bones, even as they tried to keep it out. So the resulting album that bears the island’s name sounds evocative of the place itself, with a queasy acoustic drone saturating every song. The drone of the harmonium evokes flat, rocky land — beautiful but hard, boggy, and rocky — inviting you to explore its raised beaches and low mountains, but trapping you in mud once you get there. “We didn’t know we were going to play harmonium on the album,” says Timms, “because we didn’t know there would be a harmonium until we got there. Giles just happened to have one. It’s such an archaic sound. It’s perfect to go with the other acoustic instruments.”

Honeyman’s violin takes to the sea, lending quiet, slow laments like “Sail on Silver Seas” and “I Am Come Home” — both sung by Timms — their gently rocking motion. A susceptible listener might get seasick listening to them, but it’s not an altogether unpleasant sensation. “I’m not quite sure why it’s got that particular character,” says Honeyman. “Certainly, we were aware of our surroundings. The song is quite slow, and everything in Jura is quite slow. When you’re going on boats, you can’t go fast. It’s not like going planes. You just go the speed you can go.”

Jura jolted these musicians into a different gear and made them adjust their speed. That may be the island’s greatest charm, and it means the album shows no signs of hasty assembly. Rather, much like the island that inspired it, these songs make acoustic austerity sound lush and generous and rich. “I think something quite coherent happened quite accidentally,” says Langford. “It’s like this is the only way it could have sounded. We didn’t hit upon something. It was just the sound of us at that time and in that place.”

Mekons photo by Derrick Santini

Squared Roots: Sam Lee Follows the Footsteps of Alan Lomax

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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.

Marked by Places: An Interview with Sam Gleaves

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Whether you grow up in the mountains or the city, the geography of your youth never really leaves you. It informs and influences you, even when you might not think so. Sam Gleaves certainly knows this to be true. His southwest Virginia upbringing defines almost everything he is and wants to be. As a songwriter, he's dead-set on sharing those stories, those values, that music with the rest of the world. And his new Ain't We Brothers release does just that.

I have a hypothesis about the different lenses that we all look at the world through: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, sexual. I feel like, though we're informed by all of them, we each have a primary lens that colors our vision and blazes our trail. Which do you think is your primary filter?

I was born and raised in southwest Virginia, so my family and the way they speak and the tradition of storytelling and the traditional music I grew up with is my first lens.

So maybe a social or cultural lens?

Yeah. In a way, I think we're all marked by the places we connect with and identify with. So, for me, home is Wythe County, Virginia. Country music … I like it best when it speaks plainly, like the people I knew do. That's my first lens, I would say. Then, being an openly gay singer/songwriter is another. I always feel like I'm traversing the line between the traditional music that I love — which has been handed down and many voices have shaped it — and the new music that I want to write about contemporary stories and what's happening now in the mountains. That has a newer feel, but it uses old language and old sounds and old ways of speaking.

For all of us who are queer, it's a part of who we are, but certainly not all of who we are. So how important is it for you to strike a balance between the visibility of being out and the striving toward anonymity — as in, “We're just living our little queer lives … nothing to see here”?

I'm really fortunate to have had a family that loved me unconditionally and that never burdened me with any kind of shame. That is the number one thing. If you're a writer, you have to reflect on your own experience. You have to look at painful things. You have to be honest about what you're feeling, which is a real challenge. I try to do that, as a writer. Lee Smith, one of my favorite novelists, said, “I refuse to lead an unexamined life.” I believe that.

My family loving me for who I am and raising me to … it was okay to be an artist. My mom's a writer. My dad's a writer. My grandmother's a singer. My dad's a great storyteller, also, and my grandparents all told stories. It gave me permission to be who I am. So, when I sit down to write, I don't think, “I'm going to write a gay love song or a gay country song. Isn't that edgy?” [Laughs] I don't think of it that way. I think of it as writing about my own life and I don't have to be ashamed. I can be honest because that's how I look at every day of my life — not only in my writing and my music, but each and every moment. That's a gift from my family.

It's also the gift that music gives all of us. It's a medium that both transcends and transforms, if we let it. You can sing your truth and it's about whatever it's about to you, but somebody else can hear it and it relates to their truth, as well … even if it's, as it always is, a completely different experience.

Yeah. I think so. I think that people are hungry to hear stories about working class people. Real stories. Songs that are absorbed in community and not in self. I think people are really hungry to hear that kind of music. And that's what traditional music does because it has to serve a people. Of course it's an emotional outlet for the singer, but it's also serving a community. That's what I love best about old songs and that way of … there's a long tradition of protest singing using old hymns and stuff that people were familiar with because you can latch on to it, somehow. I hope that people will listen to the music first and leave their preconceived notions at the door — listen to the music and the stories and then evaluate how it relates to what they believe and where they're from.

Let them get into how they feel about it rather than what they think about it.

Yeah. Which is why I have to be kind of cautious. Like, I was saying, “I'm a gay, traditional musician.” But I don't want people to think that's what I'm putting out front. I'm putting it out front as an activist, because I believe that you have to. It's not a dirty word. But, then, I've been a musician longer than I've known about my sexuality. [Laughs] My first identity really is as an Appalachian musician. So I hope people will look at it all inclusively.

Well, “Ain't We Brothers” is a great example. You simultaneously draw and challenge the traditional idea of manhood in, showing that the singular difference between Sam Williams and his co-workers in the mine is who's waiting at home at the end of the day. Interestingly, it reminds me of a Marge Simpson quote: "Our differences are only skin deep, but our sames go down to the bone."

Yeah. That's the truth. Wow. I've never heard that before. That's powerful.

It has stuck with me. I have it written down somewhere because, hey, Marge Simpson is a prophet. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Thanks for saying that. I wrote “Ain't We Brothers” in 2011, not long after Sam Williams' story had come to attention. My friend Jason Howard wrote a great article about Sam — then, his name was Sam Hall. I just thought he does have more in common with the fellow miners he's working with than he does differences. And what gives them the right to say he's less of a man when he's being brave, living with his partner and not hiding, making difficult decisions that impact every single moment of his waking life.

People say, a lot of times, that LGBTQ people endure micro-aggressions. Every day, you have to make your decisions differently. He was being brave and open. And he was more of a man. That's how I felt. Integrity, to me, is what defines a person, regardless of gender. That's what I was trying to say in the song. I was really pleased, when I met Sam a few months ago — he and his partner Burly at their home in West Virginia — that they identified with the song and they liked it. That meant a lot to me.

The other fascinating thing about what you're doing is that you're coaxing out the similarities of struggle between LGBTQ folks and other communities that have been oppressed throughout history. And what's always been so surprising and hurtful to me is that those oppressed communities are rather often the ones turning around to oppress us.

Yeah.

So I love that you're drawing those parallels. It's the same struggle.

Thank you. I believe very much in the philosophy that's taught at the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee, that all oppressions do intersect somewhere. You can't go far without finding a commonality with somebody who's up against it. I do believe that. That's another thing that intuitively comes out in your writing because it's what you believe. So that's been an intuitive part of the process for me.

I'm not from the coal mining community, but I learned that history in my Appalachian studies background at Berea College. And I realized that my daddy working for the railroad was hauling the coal and, every time I turned a light on, I was part of the system. You can't escape the working class, especially because I was brought up to value hard-working, blue collar people like my dad.

Of course. You talk a lot about your heroes, and rightfully so — Joan Baez and Cathy Fink and lots of folks. But who are the contemporaries you look to — the other artists who are helping shoulder the present and future of this music you're working with?

I just did a double-bill with Amythyst Kiah. She's incredible. She's from Chattanooga and she calls herself a Southern Gothic musician. I love what she does. She knows country-blues. She knows country music. And she applies that to a modern, kind of alternative sound. She's making great progress, and it's great to see her representing a lot of communities.

My friend Saro Lynch-Thomason is a great ballad singer, originally from Nashville but now living in Asheville, North Carolina. She's incredible. She knows the history of music and labor, inside and out. And she sings ballads with all the heart and knowledge of the old singers.

And my partner, Tyler Hughes. I love his music greatly. He's a wonderful, old-time banjo player. Plays autoharp and guitar, kind of in the style of the Carter Family. He grew up in Wise County, in southwest Virginia. I love his music because he's so in touch with the older way of life, and humor in music, and dancing … the aspects of it that bring so much joy to it that kind of get swept under the rug sometimes, I feel like. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Yeah, a lot of stuff gets swept under the rug. But that's why we're here. Like you said, activism through art. It's all one thing, in the end.

Yeah. I think so, too. I sure do.

Photo credit: Susi Lawson