...I chanced upon an intriguing looking L.P. with a deep blue border haloing an antique looking sailor and his young son and the words 'Sea Songs and Sea Shanties' printed on the top.
...From the first time I heard The Watersons sing 'Plains of Mexico' or A.L. Lloyd sing 'Coast of Peru', I was utterly enthralled. I had no precedent for this music whatsoever, but it seemed to be a direct mainline to certain psychic atmospheres I liked to inhabit that were both romantic and barbaric. ...There was something that smacked of the salt water about these songs. I responded profoundly to the desperate vitality and intuitive salutary gruff of the performances, but had never heard anything like the sandpapery bray of Burt Lloyd singing 'Blood Red Roses' ...or the really fucking peculiar nasal cadences of Mike Waterson's lead vocal on 'Boston Harbour'
...Imbedded in the fabric of the music, themes, melodies, delivery and language, seemed to be everything I held precious; the eternal call of the lonesome vocalist. The universality of the characters and the death defying situations they are condemned to play out eternally. The songs seemed to act as alchemical agents where you start with the base matter of the language and the very basic scenarios that reflect very basic human concerns (fidelity, obsessive love, death fantasy, incest, infanticide, submitting yourself to something other, abandoning your True Love to go and fight some remote foe across the barbarous blue) and the realisation that transcendence can be achieved by inhabiting the characters and internalising and playing out the predicaments with sincerity with acceptance of the possible fatal consequences. Eternity awaits. The glory chord can be struck and sustained.
Alex Neilson, sleeve notes to Stepanie Hladowski's The High High Nest 10"
As overly romantic as the effusions he expresses here are, I definitely recognise something of my own deep rooted love of this music in what Alex Neilson is saying here. I might want to add a few categories to the list he gives, which seems to miss something of the social, communal character of much folk music. I'd also add a pragmatic, no-nonsense, popular Christianity to that list. Still, at least he didn't try and claim it for Paganism. Seriously, every time I see a music reviewer trying to assert a clear binary opposition between Christianity (which is clearly present in a number of songs) and a hazily defined 'paganism', I want to shout 'Syncretism!' at them. 'Pagan' elements are - sometimes - maybe - present in some folk songs, but if so, I don't think they can be so clearly separated from the Christian underpinnings which are clearly present in many more songs, including some of the most beautiful and moving. I doubt very much that anyone singing folk songs in the last few centuries would have ever thought of themselves as somehow unChristian. Any elements of paganism would be absorbed into and understood within an overtly Christian understanding of the world, even if that 'popular' Christianity might be somewhat distant from what the Church taught.
Anyway, my own discovery was rather more prosaic. The third folk CD I bought was A Collection, a dozen songs taken from Martin Carthy's first half dozen albums, two apiece. Eliza's Red Rice was the second folk album I bought, so I assumed I'd also like her Dad's stuff too. Sitting in my parent's kitchen, as the first track, 'The Trees They Do Grow High' started to play, my initial reaction was bafflement, worry that I'd spent good money on music that wasn't actually much to my taste. Too astringent, too spare in it's approach.
But then, by the time 'Cold Haily Windy Night' reached it's brutal finish, I'd already warmed to it. And after listening to the whole album a couple more times, I was converted - completely infatuated with Martin Carthy's powerful singing and pared down guitar playing. It was at that point that I think I realised I'd found what I've ever after thought of as my music. This was my musical home, so to speak. While I might continue to listen to other styles, other genres, this music - specifically English folk music, although I know you can't ever keep things so separate as that, and nor would I wish to police borders, musical or otherwise, in any such way - was the music which spoke to me above all others. In fact, I could go further, and reduce it just to Yorkshire, the English county in which I've lived most of my life (if not just at present), also home to the Watersons. Ask me which is my favourite folk music, and it will always come down to that mighty river of song that the Waterson/Carthy families have so generously given us over all these years. That's where I belong. It's my home.
So, thinking again, perhaps my discovery of this music - and what it has come to mean to me - was just as romantic...!
