Higher Power
Folk icon continues to bridge the past and the present. By Nick Dalton
Shirley Collins Archangel Hill ★★★★
Domino WIGLP 494 (CD, LP)
Shirley Collins is like a heroine from one of those timeless folk songs that she has been championing since the mid-50s. Graceful, intelligent and devoted, with the air of a medieval maiden as she continues her egalitarian quest to honour the toiling classes who sang the near-forgotten songs that she brings back to the world.
After a 38-year retirement, this is her third album in seven years, not bad considering she’s 87 and her first solo album emerged in 1958. It’s also the third album under the musical guidance and production of Ian Kearey, a founder of hard-hitting folkies The Oyster Band, and with The Lodestar Band, named after her 2016 return, Lodestar.
The result is a coming together of mostly old tunes with a clean, modern musical approach. Collins’ voice has an earthier tone than many will remember from the Shirley and Dolly Collins albums she made with her sister and which appeared at the start of the 70s on the Harvest label alongside Pink Floyd, Edgar Broughton and Deep Purple.
That, however, contrasts neatly with the backdrop. Kearey, as well as playing guitar, is also arranger, working alongside Collins to reinvent ancient pieces. There are memories of Fairport Convention, themselves hugely inspired by the melding of tradition and contemporary thought on Collins’ records, not least Folk Roots, New Routes, with guitarist Davey Graham.
The Captain With The Whiskers, an American Civil War marching song, despite the snappy snare rolls, is a melodic mix of fiddle and banjo while Hares On The Mountain is delicately understated, voice set against gentle slide guitar.
High And Away is the only new song, with words by Lodestar Band guitarist Pip Barnes, created from a passage in Collins’ book America Over The Water, about her five-month trip through the southern US states in 1959 with American song collector Alan Lomax, her partner at the time. Collins is responsible for the tune and Kearey for the arrangement with beautiful acoustic guitar.
Because this is a band there’s a deftly unified sound, largely electrified acoustic, rather than creating a new soundscape for each track. Collins’ vocals are dark but have the unaffected tone of a country girl, respecting the words rather than trying to overwhelm them.
The one track that changes the tone is Hand
And Heart, a recording from a 1980 show at Sydney Opera House, part of a tour that Dolly couldn’t make; Shirley’s then still-airy vocals are accompanied by virtuoso harpsichordist Winsome Evans, the
Australian classical and early music specialist, using Dolly’s arrangements.
It all comes to a moving – and somewhat contemporary – close with the title track, a floating tune, Kearey’s music restricted to guitar chords and some jangling notes as Collins recites a wartime poem about Sussex written by her father.