Record Reviews

Bridget St. John: From There / To Here: UK/US Recordings 1974-1982

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Animated by a sense of endless potential and patchwork charm, a new box set collects the influential British songwriter’s work during a transitional period.

By Stephen M. Deusner

Sparrowpit is the fanciful name of a small village in Derbyshire, a small cluster of old buildings located at a bend in the road almost halfway between Sheffield and Manchester. In 1973, the folk singer Bridget St. John settled there and wrote songs for what would become her fourth album, Jumblequeen, the centerpiece of a new box set, From There / To Here: UK / US Recordings 1974-1982. Judging by those songs—which chronicle divorce, grief, confusion, loneliness, and a very gradual recovery of self—she lived there during a period of extreme upheaval. “Her gentle man has left her after just four years of life, it became impossible to call her ‘wife,’” she sings on the song she named for that place. “Now she has no place she can call her home, has to start all over this time on her own.” “Sparrowpit” is a torrent of jigsaw syllables delivered against a runaway melody and a folk-funk arrangement. The music suggests a life moving too fast, and St. John sounds like she’d love just a moment of calm: “If you’d like to help her better, got to take her under your wing.” She might as well be singing that directly to the good people of Sparrowpit, asking for all the peace and quiet such a quaint village promises.

Jumblequeen is an album about emotional wounds, about feelings too extreme to corral or even identify. So why does St. John sound like she’s having so much fun singing these songs? “Sparrowpit” is almost jubilant, like a game she’s playing with the listener, especially when she dives into her lower register. Even on the saddest songs, though, she savors certain details, certain turns of phrase. She dispenses wisdom casually, especially on the devastating “I Don’t Know If I Can Take It.” Even at such emotional extremes, these songs make space for hope and possibility, as though St. John knows she’ll leave Sparrowpit stronger and more clear-headed than ever. “I want to be where someone loves me best of all,” she declares on “Want to Be With You,” and she makes it sound like the most perfectly natural desire of all, and a perfectly achievable one, too. Jumblequeen is, as its title implies, a piece-by-piece self-portrait by an artist who’s not quite sure how the final puzzle picture will look—but she relishes the process just the same.

Along with the dusky timbre of her voice and the bounding eccentricity of her phrasing, this is a crucial part of St. John’s appeal as a singer and songwriter: It’s not that she makes sad sentiments sound happy, but that she finds a kernel of creative joy in confronting such hardships. She seems to love turning pain into something useful, or beautiful, or fun. In other words, she doesn’t write simply to express herself. She makes music to move through the world. From There / To Here, which collects Jumblequeen along with several discs of rare and unreleased tracks, traces St. John’s movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s, recounting her story of moving halfway around the globe to find a community of like-minded souls, trying but failing to keep record labels interested, working with various producers and collaborators, and gradually settling into a more grounded life as a mother.

St. John was supposed to be a star. In 1968 John Peel started playing her music on BBC radio, in particular her single “To B Without a Hitch,” and he even started a new label—Dandelion Records—just to put her songs out into the world. Her ’69 debut, Ask Me No Questions, featured just her voice and her crisp guitar picking, and her second album, 1971’s Songs for the Gentle Man, added softly psychedelic flourishes of strings, horns, and flute. Like John Martyn and Kevin Ayers, St. John pushed against the strictures of British folk-rock, incorporating American country and R&B elements into her music, which made the press take notice even when the public did not. Dandelion had rocky promotion and rockier distribution, and the label folded mere months after releasing St. John’s third album, 1972’s Thank You For…, essentially marooning her and her potential hit single, “Nice.” Those albums were compiled on the excellent, if dully titled, 2015 comp Dandelion Albums and BBC Collection, which serves as preamble to From There / To Here.

If Sparrowpit is the “There” in that title, then the “Here” is New York City. After Jumblequeen performed no better than her previous albums, St. John was dropped by yet another label and moved across the Atlantic. She found a musical home in Greenwich Village, then more than a decade past its folk-revival heyday but still a bustling neighborhood for musicians, and she booked sessions with new collaborators and even recorded an album’s worth of material with Stuff, a popular crew of session players. It would take 20 years before those songs got a proper release on the 1995 comp Take the 5ifth, which is the second disc in this set. It shows an artist casting in all directions for inspiration, as though a new country presents a new set of possibilities. “Moody,” her first demo recorded in America, opens with a springy bossa nova riff, then blossoms into a lush arrangement with a chorus of saxophones and an electric guitar solo. But St. John wrings as much sound from the two syllables in that title, which only makes the key change at the end sound all the more ecstatic.

Occasionally Take the 5ifth and the unreleased demos on the set’s third disc sound a little too slick and professional, which distracts from her vocals and robs the music of its intimacy. The Stuff recordings in particular are moored in the marina of yacht rock, a curious development for St. John, but it brings out something in her voice and pushes her in new directions. She adopts an accusatory tone on “Chamille,” her voice like barbed wire in such a silky arrangement, and by rounding out her vowels and drawing out her consonants, she tries to stop time on “Song for John,” a eulogy for the Beatle, written and recorded in the wake of his death in 1980. What could easily have been a maudlin ballad quoting “Working Class Hero” and “All You Need Is Love” instead becomes a weirdly affecting eulogy not for the man but for what so many saw in him, all the possibilities he perhaps reluctantly represented. “This is more than a light put out,” she insists. “This was more than fire dying.”

That sense of endless potential is what makes this music so lively and rambunctious nearly half a century later, and it’s perhaps why a new generation of folk artists—including Ryley Walker, William Tyler, and Steve Gunn—has found inspiration in her work. She thrives on all these different sounds and styles: an artist in love with all the possibilities of music, the infinite ways she might sing a single syllable and all the subtle gradations of emotion a melody might convey. That makes From There / To Here a patchwork set, but St. John has always been the queen of jumble.

Source: Bridget St. John: From There / To Here: UK/US Recordings 1974-1982

Review: At 17, Nora Brown Taps Into Past Generations With Her Banjo

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On Long Time to Be Gone, her third full-length album, Nora Brown’s approach is imbued with an irresistible authenticity and energy, a style clearly steeped in history.

By Spencer Grady

From the instruments Nora Brown plays and company she keeps, to the research and knowledge enabling her to fully occupy the music she interprets, it’s evident the bloodlines of banjo lore run thick in this young prodigy’s veins. Just 15 when she recorded Long Time to Be Gone, her third full-length album, Brown’s approach is imbued with an irresistible authenticity and energy, a style clearly steeped in history, its origins firmly rooted in pre-Civil War song and inhabited by the not-too-distant echoes of the ancient instruments of West African griots.

Black and white photo of Nora Brown sitting on a leather sofa playing banjo

Nora Brown (photo by Benton Brown)

A collection of traditional tunes and Appalachian instrumentals, Long Time to Be Gone finds Brown, now 17, showcasing several banjo models (including her great-great-grandfather’s 1888 Ludscomb and one belonging to her late mentor John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers) as well as her penchant for airy up-picking, pinched harmonics, and spacious two-finger techniques. Avoiding the percussive clutter of many showier gutbucket exponents, her notes hang decorously in the cavernous space of St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church, where these cuts were captured. The environs of the historic Brooklyn Heights church lend an indisputable atmosphere to an album that appears to incubate every hammer-on, slide, and blues-derived lick, allowing simple melodies to gestate, blossom, and bloom on tracks such as “Southern Texas” and the micro starbursts of “Miner’s Dream.” This unfussy approach extends to Brown’s occasional vocals, which, on the closing medley of “Little Birdie – Rye Whiskey,” recall the understated, but subtly evocative, tones of Sally Anne Morgan.

Even when the frailing becomes frenetic and the pull-offs feel particularly spring-loaded, as on the blustery “Po’ Black Sheep” (performed on a fretless banjo made by Brown’s father), there’s still that kernel of serene clarity at the tune’s core, where more obvious contemporary clawhammer tyrannies and ostentatious flummery cede to something altogether more matter-of-fact and meaningful.

 

 

Long Time to Be Gone is a quietly important record — not simply an enthusiastic chunk of reverence to an old-time ethos, but a work that marks its teenage creator as not only a fine musical talent, but also an educator and evangelist, a living, breathing vessel for the nurturing of a rich and remarkable tradition.

 

Nora Brown’s Long Time to Be Gone is out Aug. 26 on Jalopy Records.

Source: ALBUM REVIEW: At 17, Nora Brown Taps Into Past Generations With Her Banjo

Record review: Angeline Morrison “The Brown Girl and Other Folk Songs”

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‘The Brown Girl’ is one of those rare records that feels perfectly weighted, entirely free of anything extraneous…the whole thing feels lighter than air.

Angeline Morrison
Angeline Morrison

By Thomas Blake

Folk music has a unique kind of liveliness that springs from its adaptability, pliability and ambiguity. No two interpretations of a traditional song are alike because no two performers share precisely the same experience. As a black singer working in a category of music largely associated with white voices, Angeline Morrison’s perspective is – due in part to historical marginalisation – particularly uncommon. Morrison is a vocal advocate for increased diversity in British folk music: later this year, she is due to release The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience, an attempt to redress the imbalance of history by writing black people’s stories back into the UK’s musical heritage. But first, we get to hear The Brown Girl and Other Folk Songs, Morrison’s more orthodox take on a collection of ten traditional songs.

Recorded in Cornwall, where the Birmingham-born Morrison has long been a resident, The Brown Girl is an intimate experience, musically minimal but full of warmth. A cappella opener, The Green Valley, is a beautiful introduction to her singing, which has a clarity and sweetness that belies the moral twists and ambiguities at play in the lyrics. Although this and most of the other songs here do not deal with explicitly black protagonists, lines like ‘Am I bound or am I free?’ take on deeper layers of meaning in Morrison’s rendition, proof of how vivid and mutable folk songs can be.

The multi-tracked vocals of Our Captain Cried have a bewitching and otherworldly quality and also serve to emphasise the song’s multiple perspectives, while the title track sees her joined by co-producer Nick Duffy (of the Lilac Time) on spidery acoustic guitar. It’s a combination that brings to mind Shirley Collins’ work with Davy Graham or, more recently, Stephanie Hladowski and C. Joynes’ album The Wild Wild Berry.

Morrison has dabbled in folk horror, 60s-style psych and hauntology in her Ambassadors Of Sorrow guise. This affinity with the more eldritch reaches of the British musical landscape is there in abundance on the spooked recorders of The Cruel Mother and the drones of When I Was A Young Girl. The Well Below The Valley revels in its dark themes of infanticide and incest: Morrison’s voice is eerily confiding, strangely present, insistent even at its quietest. The brutal violence of Lucy Wan is rendered with a soft immediacy that makes it all the more chilling. Morrison has stunning control over the emotional depths of these songs. Her musicianship is equally impressive – Idumea (an eighteenth-century hymn written by Charles Wesley) floats on a rippling gauze of dulcimer, and a brisk, autoharp-led run-through of Bonny Cuckoo is bright and blossomy.

The Brown Girl is one of those rare records that feels perfectly weighted, entirely free of anything extraneous. Every multi-tracked harmony or subtly plucked string has its place, and the whole thing feels lighter than air. That is a remarkable achievement, given the gravity of the subject matter in many of these songs, the layers of history they have accrued over time, and the wholly new perspective Morrison brings to them. By the time of the final, contented exhalation that puts a seal on the closing track, Must I Be Bound, it’s almost as if a satisfying but mysterious journey has been undertaken, one that will lead ultimately to many further destinations.

The Brown Girl and Other Folk Songs is out now.

Record review: Serious Sam Barrett’s “The Seeds of Love”

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By David Pratt

Just prior to the first pandemic lockdown, in a local folk club very much given to promoting the traditional rather than contemporary, you could hear a conversation, admittedly one heard before at this venue, in which one of the participants bemoaned the fact that there were currently no young performers “truly keeping the tradition alive”.  Notwithstanding the plethora of other examples which could be given in evidence against this assertion, the protagonist had clearly not anticipated a recording from Serious Sam Barrett, who with his latest offering, The Seeds Of Love, a collection of traditional love songs of England and Scotland, has surely released what will be one of the traditional folk albums of the year.

Raised in Addingham, a Dales village, his ties and affinity with Yorkshire have clearly been evident in his work.  Initially performing in and around Leeds in 2004, the experiences and knowledge garnered from being brought up in the Yorkshire folk club scene and being exposed to what he describes as “the wonder I have felt listening to people sing traditional songs in a raw, warts and all style” have obviously seeped deep into his consciousness, and this is reflected in the respectful way he interprets and delivers the traditional songs on this album.

 

An appearance at SXSW in Austin, Texas, in 2010 followed the release of his debut album Close to Home in 2009, and after extensive touring in the US, together with the much-lauded 2019 release Where The White Roses, Sam’s stock and reputation have risen.  The Seeds Of Love was once again recorded at The Stationhouse in Leeds with producer/engineer James Atkinson, in between periods of Covid lockdown, and, judging by the quality of music inherent on the album, perhaps perversely, the enforced lack of gigging and touring may well have not only given him quality time and breathing space but also provided additional opportunities to enhance his writing skills.

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