Andrew Curry writes: Despite its progressive sensibilities, folk music isn’t that diverse. Unlike the blues, there are not a lot of non-white folk musicians around. Angeline Morrison is a rare exception, born to a Jamaican mother and a Hebridean father, who found her way into a folk club for the first time when she was 17. Her 2022 record, Songs of Sorrow, is our Album of the Month over at the Salut! Live Facebook site.
Since she started performing she has performed on her own, with some bands (Rowan: Morrison, The Mighty Sceptres and The Ambassadors of Sorrow) and as half of the duo We Are Muffy.
(Angeline Morrison with autoharp. Photo: https://www.angelinemorrisonmusic.com/)
She’s been recording now since 2009, and has made some fine records, but Songs of Sorrow stands out from the rest. The record imagines some of the folk tradition as if some of the songs were about the black British experience. “Reimagines”, because there aren’t that many folk songs in this territory, so Morrison has written songs in the tradition that chart some of the history—some older, some more recent—of black Britons. Sometimes, with shades of the younger Dylan, she has put new words to an existing melody.
The tone is set from the first song, Unknown African Boy (d.1830), a song by a mother about her son, drowned after being taken by English slavers.
The Beautiful Spotted Black Boy tells the story of George Alexander Gratton, an African child with vitiligo who was bought for 1,000 guineas and paraded in a cage at fairgrounds across the country before his early death. Mad Haired Moll O’Bedlam spoke the wrong way to a policeman and was thrown into the grim asylum of Bethlem, where she died in incarceration. These are stories of real people.
And a lot of these songs are grim, which is both sharpened and lightened by the arrangements, which are often upbeat. The Flames They Grow High is about two post-Windrush sisters who were persecuted in their village, and retreated into a private world, but ended up in Broadmoor for committing arson. Some of these stories do repeat themselves.
But at least she manages an upbeat ending. Slave No More tells of a 19th century Mozambican boy, Evaristo Muchovela, bought by Thomas Johns. Muchovela earned his freedom and ended up buried in the same grave in Cornwall as Johns. The song title, “slave no more”, is taken from their headstone.
Interspersed between the songs are some short spoken ‘interludes’, which recreate the kind of open white prejudice that were openly expressed in the post war period, and after.
For example: “when they cook all these fumes come from it. I don’t like it. Nobody round here likes it.” Some of these have Brummy accents, reminding us of the Powellite politics of the ‘60s just when the British Prime Minister has had to deny that he was evoking racist Powellite tropes in a speech.
(Memo to 10 Downing Street: when you’re in a hole as deep as this, it’s really best to stop digging.)
The record was deftly produced by Eliza Carthy, who has brought out the most from these songs, as well as contributing some fine violin touches from time to time. Morrison plays double-bass, autoharp, and, intriguingly, glockenspiel —and the autoharp creates a lightness in some of the arrangements that contrasts with the sometimes dark subject matter. A quick nod to the other musicians on the record, who include Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne on accordion and melodeon, Clarke Camilleri on banjo and acoustic guitar, Alex Neilsen on drums and Rosie Crow on piano. There’s also a vocal cameo by Martin Carthy.
It is one of those projects that could have gone awry, but succeeds brilliantly. As Jon Wilks wrote in Tradfolk, it
is a triumph of research, determination, going against the odds, fabulous songwriting and musicianship, storytelling and, above all, humility.
Morrison started researching the record after the death of George Floyd in 2016, spending time in the library of Cecil Sharp House, discovering that there were few songs in the archive about the black experience in Britain despite a long history. After that she did more research to find the stories of the people she honours here..
The record works because Morrison just tells the stories, playing it as it lays, with the lightest of touches. Of course there’s more to it than this, but the effect is to leave the listener to decide what to make of them, when is the time for the tears, as the different voices build up over the course of the record. Songs of Sorrow was the Guardian’s folk record of the year in 2022, and it deserved it.
—
https://cdnjs.buymeacoffee.com/1.0.0/button.prod.min.js
Feel free to ignore the donation figures suggested by Buy me a Coffee. If you'd like to support our work, just type in your own sum
Leave a Reply