It took almost 40 years for Shirley Collins to recover her voice, and with it her identity. After realising that her second husband, fellow musician Ashley Hutchings, was cheating on her – an actress wore his jumper to one of their concerts – the folk singer was struck by dysphonia, and could no longer sing. Collins had always thought herself a conduit rather than a performer: in her 20s, she heard two elderly folk singers and was struck by their “gentle dignity”. It cemented her own philosophy: “No dramatising a song, no selling it to an audience, no overdecorating in a way that was alien to English songs, and most of all, singing to people, not at them.” If her work is self-effacing, then Collins’s memoir reveals the strength of character required to overcome the insidious disempowerment she faced within the postwar British folk scene [ . . . ]