folk music
Joe Muggs
This is almost too much to bear. This sprawling 37-track collection begins with the sainted 78-year-old Dolly Parton providing a jaunty spoken narration of her family’s history in music and the church. It’s old-school Disney documentary in tone, but because it’s Dolly you listen, and with her endless countrified charm she tells a story of generations of banjo players and preachers of the Appalachians – and reminds us that these, her forebears, were immigrants.She doesn’t use the word, but just how she talks about the landscapes reminding them of home in England and Wales – in a time when Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Among the many things that make the folk community such a warm and welcoming “family” is that you know which side you’re all on, to paraphrase the title of the song written by Florence Reece, wife of a United Mineworkers official during the bitter struggle known as “the Harlan County War”, almost a century ago. Collected by Pete Seeger and sung by the Almanac Singers, it is kept alive by Billy Bragg any many others.I doubt it’s in the repertoire of Le Vent du Nord though there’s surely a French-Canadian equivalent, but the same feeling of camaraderie and solidarity prevailed at Cecil Sharp Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tucker Zimmerman is singing a number called “Don’t Go Crazy (Go in Peace)”. At 83, he performs sitting down. Surrounded by support band Iji, who act as his pick-up, he approaches the song in a whispery, affable voice. At the start of his set he was assisted to his seat but, knees aside, he’s not frail. He’s just laid back, a Sixties original, strumming gently. “Don’t go crazy,” he sings, “Go with the flow, go in peace.” Although he’s advised us to not think about politics, it’s hard not to. Yet his hour-long show soothes, offers a window into some of what’s best about America.Tucker is one of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This other major work by the writer of the English folk horror landmark The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Robert Wynne-Simmons, is more restrained than that unsettlingly erotic, dreadful conjuring of rustic demons and collective evil. He argues on his sole directorial feature’s Blu-ray debut that it isn’t folk horror at all, simply an Irish folk tale in pre-Famine days “when magic had a value”.The Outcasts (1982) is earthed in the boggy mud and lush green of West Ireland, where innocent Maura (Mary Ryan) is bullied by her siblings in a stone home seemingly pulled from the ground. Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If there’s a rough-hewn tinge to Laura Marling’s eighth album, then there’s a wildly valid reason for it. It was written shortly after the folk singer-songwriter had her daughter, and was recorded in a home studio with the baby ever present – either in between naps, or with her bobbing around in the bouncy chair while Marling strummed and sang.It’s a drumless record with an acoustic softness, written quickly and produced roughly which gives an authenticity and low maintenance feel that is welcome in the slickly filtered instaworld we all currently inhabit. Later set to strings by Rob Moose Read more ...
David Nice
Nobodaddy, taking its title from Blake’s violent dark-god “Father of Jealousy”, is much more than a dance piece, and Michael Keegan-Dolan, whose company was formerly known as Fabulous Beast, is more than just a choreographer, with unique takes on the total work of art already to his credit.This is no exception, and may mark a new zenith. There's material enough for more than one happening. Typically, Keegan-Dolan weaves around an individual loss more Blake poems, the Irish rebellion of 1798, folk-based songs of exile in collaboration with the wonderful Sam Amidon, and reflections on the Miami Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lighters at the ready, because here comes the flood. Drawn from 16-track tape, 1/4in reels and lo-fi sound board cassettes that are now a half century old, the 27 CDs of 431 performances, 417 of them previously unreleased, of Dylan and The Band’s 1974 arena tour of the US, is a set that challenges the listeners’ staying power perhaps more than it celebrates an epochal tour.Sure, the 1974 tour was an important milestone in the Dylan story, and a coda, of sorts, to the story of The Band and Dylan’s trajectory away from the turbulent zenith of 1966. They were like two stage sets colliding: Read more ...
Joe Muggs
In a discussion recently a friend compared generative AI to self-driving cars back in 2017: the makers were convinced, perhaps rightly, that they had solved 99.9% of the problem, and therefore would have a viable product within the year. The problem for self-driving cars back then, and generative AI now, is that the last 0.1% is something special. Intractable.It’s worth holding on to that as more and more playlists are flooded by uncannily realistic impersonations of country, disco and what have you. We are about to get glutted by a technology that seems all encompassing, but there remans an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Ne pleure pas, Jeannette” is a version of the 15th-century French song "La pernette se lève." It tells the story of Jeannette, whose parents want her to marry into the gentry or royalty. She, however, is in love with Pierre. He is in prison. She vows to be hanged at the same time he is. In France, “Ne pleure pas, Jeannette” is a nursery rhyme. Versions have been recorded by Les Compagnons De La Chanson and French children’s TV favourite Dorothée.“Aux marches du palais” is also French and has been sung by (again) Les Compagnons De La Chanson, Marie Laforêt, Nana Mouskouri, Yves Montand and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the world of popular music, tangential connections to success are profile-raising. They offer an immediate connection to an artist. It is beholden on me, then, despite not knowing it when I first enjoyed this album, to mention that rising Grammy Award-winning Americana star Molly Tuttle appears. She is guitarist-vocalist Sullivan Tuttle’s sister. It speaks to the solid pleasures of City of Glass by Santa Cruz quartet AJ Lee & Blue Summit that the song in question, “I Can’t Find You at All”, written by the Tuttles' dad Jack, is not outstandingly ahead of the restSinging mandolin-player Read more ...
Tim Cumming
She has one of the most distinctive voices in folk and contemporary British music, impossible to forget once heard, and impossible to ignore. Even – or especially – as Linda Peters, singing, aptly enough, “I’ll Show You How to Sing” on a fairly obscure 1968 single with Paul McNeill.A lot of songs have gone under the bridge since then, and Thompson’s standing as one of our great singers has not been diminished by the singer’s struggles with spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that robs her of her voice, but not her music, spirit, wit, love or humour, all of which are in abundance in this new set Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Almost exactly five years ago, I was transported by Singing It All Back Home, the third album from Naomi Bedford and Paul Simmonds. I gave it four stars, which in retrospect was perhaps a little ungenerous. Now at last comes a new opus from the duo, Strange News Has Come to Town, the making of which was “a long march across hard ground”, obstacles including the pandemic, as well as personal health and money issues.The self-drive of 21st century music-making makes “entry” into the world seem superficially easy but recording is only the first tiny step. Getting the music out there, reaching the Read more ...