Shirley Collins’s next folk revival
FANS of traditional British folk music used to find Shirley Collins’s voice angelic. “Now, the word they use is austere,” Collins said with a laugh. “It’s not a bad word, but it’s not the voice I used to have in those days when I could just sing by opening my mouth.”
These days, it’s fortunate that Collins can sing at all. A traumatic incident, nearly 40 years ago, set off dysphonia, a medical condition which, among other things, hinders any attempt to sustain or beautify a tune. That scotched a career which, from the early 1960s to the late ’70s, placed Collins up with top British folk artists like Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy and the Watersons. Her disappearance from the scene also further obscured the crucial role she had played in the collection of Alan Lomax’s seminal field recordings of American folk and blues musicians in the 1950s.
It was only as Collins was approaching her 80th birthday in 2014 that she started to seriously test the waters of performing again. “I was a singer,” she said in a phone interview from her cottage in the English countryside. “I couldn’t bear to leave this world without giving it one more go.”
The results can be heard in the new album Lodestar, her first recording since 1979. The road to its creation snakes back 20 years, to when a younger friend of hers, the cult musician David Tibet, beseeched her to try and sing again. She demurred, repeatedly. But every few years, he’d nudge her again. Finally, two years ago, Collins said yes to a guest appearance at one of Tibet’s shows in Islington, a north London neighbourhood. “That surprised me as much as anyone,” she said.
The voice Collins revealed at that concert, and on Lodestar, falls several octaves below the soaring one that made her famous on traditional touchstones like The Power of the True Love Knot in 1968. When navigating a tune, Collins now saunters where she once danced. Yet, some listeners have told her that the new wariness and darkness in her vocals ideally suit the grim subject matter of many traditional songs. “People seem to like the gravitas in the voice,” Collins said.
Her love of Celtic ballads comes from her grandparents, who sang to soothe her as a child when bombs were dropping on England during World War II. “Because of that, I’ve always associated these songs with comfort,” she said.
In the 1950s, Collins joined the folk revival scene in London. There she met the linchpin Ewan MacColl. “He told me I shouldn’t wear nail varnish and I shouldn’t sing so many love songs,” Collins said.
She remains grateful to him, however, for inviting her to a party in 1954 where she met Lomax, the American folk music collector. Though he was 20 years her senior, the two soon became lovers. Collins started releasing well-regarded solo albums in Britain in 1959, but from July to November of that Lodestar. year, she joined Lomax on a historic trip to the American South to record musicians in places from Parchman Farm Prison in Mississippi to remote parts of Appalachia. “The people were so kind to a girl who was able to sing the English versions of the songs they were singing to us,” Collins said.
During the trip, she and Lomax discovered Mississippi Fred McDowell, whose songs were later popularised by the Rolling Stones and Bonnie Raitt. “I had never heard such intensity of sound as Fred managed,” Collins said.
“After he finished performing, Alan wrote one word in his notebook: ‘perfect’.”
Yet, when Lomax wrote a 1993 book about their experience, his only mention of Col- lins was that she was “along for the ride”.
“It made me so angry,” she said. “I wasn’t sitting in the car. I worked very hard and was very happy” to oblige. Her anger spurred her to write her own book about the trip, America Over the Water, published in 2004.
Whatever frustrations she expressed there paled next to the emotional blow that caused her dysphonia in the late 1970s. At the time she was in her late 30s and married to Ashley Hutchings, an original member of Fairport Convention. The two were appearing in a musical piece at the National Theater in London when Hutchings announced one day that he was “consumed in love” with an actress in the play and that he was leaving Collins.
“It was such a shock,” she said. “Then it got worse because I was still working in the production and this wretched actress was standing in front of me as I was trying to sing. And she was wearing Ashley’s sweaters! Some nights I would open my mouth and I croaked or wavered.”
Humiliated, she quit singing altogether. To care for two small children, Collins bounced around in jobs during the next two decades, often toiling behind the scenes in various folk societies in England.
In the years leading up to her comeback, younger performers discovered her and fashioned salutes to her sound. Colin Meloy of the Decemberists released an EP in 2006 consisting of songs she had interpreted, titled Colin Meloy Sings Shirley Collins. Last year Graham Coxon of Blur and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth contributed to the tribute album Shirley Inspired.
“From the first note I heard her sing, I was rapt,” Meloy said. “There’s an authenticity there, a pureness. Her voice is attuned to the populist element of folk.”
Collins is grateful that she has regained a place in contemporary music but admits that she is still adjusting to her current voice. Recently, a friend reminded her that “this is the type of voice I had always loved listening to in the field recordings of people in the English countryside or the American mountains”, Collins said. “They were all older people when they were recorded. ‘Now’, my friend told me, ‘you’re one of them’.”