THE HISTORIC ALCHEMY OF ANGELINE MORRISON, BRINGING BLACK BRITAIN’S UNTOLD STORIES TO TRAD FOLK
ANGELINE MORRISON knew she was on to something when, in the months before the release of her pioneering collection The Sorrow Songs, she sang Slave No More at her local folk club in Cornwall. “People joined in the chorus,” she tells MOJO as she rests her back against the heater at home. “And afterwards somebody came up to me and said, ‘What was that traditional song about the black man who’s buried with his former master?’ And I said, Well, I have to tell you that wasn’t a traditional song.”
One of the most feted ‘folk’ releases of the last decade, subtitled Folk Songs Of The
Black British Experience, The Sorrow Songs is a masterful piece of wish-fulfilment, Morrison short-circuiting the folk process to tell the true stories of Britain’s centuries-old black community in a superbly-weighted traditional idiom. “I wanted to make sure that the songs had a kind of sound-world that would resonate with the trad community,” she explains. “With folk and with traditional songs, the stories that you find are often the stories that represent the under-represented.
And I thought, Well, that’s where we should be able to go to find the stories of this historic black presence.”
Born in Birmingham, to a Jamaican mother and a father from the Outer Hebrides, Morrison found her path as a child when she accidentally heard Shirley Collins singing Our Captain Cried on the radio. “I’d never heard anything like it before,” she says. “A wonderful, amazing world was conjured up that I couldn’t really fathom.”
As a teenager, she attended a local folk club, where she earned an early boost after a floor-singing spot ahead of a Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson show. “When I went to buy a record afterwards, Norma refused to let
“With folk, the stories that you find often represent the underrepresented.” ANGELINE MORRISON
me pay for it,” she remembers. “She said it’s important to encourage the young singers. It felt like a blessing.”
Produced by the couple’s daughter Eliza Carthy (with Martin singing on Slave No More), The Sorrow Songs’ success earned Morrison an appearance on Jools Holland’s Later…, where she sang Unknown African Boy (d.1830) – a mother’s lament based on the true story of a tiny body found aboard a Cornish shipwreck. However, while there are plenty more marginal stories of black Britons to be told, Morrison will not be telling them for now. Instead, she is working on a second LP with We Are Muffy – her psych-folk project with the Lilac Time’s Nick Duffy – while her next solo album (provisional title: The Luminous Dark) will be something else entirely. “I’ve been reading a lot about alchemy,” she says. “I’m so compelled by that idea about the union of darkness and light and the fact that darkness and light are seen as opposing forces, but if you look at them sideways you can see that they need each other, and they’re completely interdependent. As a way to live and as a way to move forward, integrating the darkness and the light can be really powerful.”