Andrew Curry writes: Longstanding Salut! readers will know that I’m a fan of seasonal music. Not the stuff we hear in the supermarket or the shopping mall, or some of the drearier carols, but the rich vein of songs about winter and about Christmas that are found across all genres.
I’ve acted on this enthusiasm for the past few years by producing a Spotify playlist of “off-centre” seasonal songs — it’s embedded at the bottom of this post.
In amongst the pop, reggae, soul and jazz, there are some fine folk songs on the playlist that celebrate the season, and in this post I’m just going to pull out some of these here for Salut! Folk.
Ainsley Hammill has been one of my finds of 2025–I saw her performing at the Irish Cultural Centre—and her outstanding record Fable includes a song called The Cailleach. The Cailleach is an ancient Scots mythological figure who is the bringer of winter.
From the sleeve notes to Fable,
As the one who culls the deer and much of nature in preparation for winter, her actions, though seemingly harsh, maintain the delicate balance of the natural world.
There’s a live recording of the song on her Youtube channel, accompanied by Sam Kelly and Toby Shaer.
Kate Rusby has made something of a tradition of making seasonal records, and it’s certainly worth checking them all out wherever you get your music from. It was good to be able to include one of her songs on the playlist—a comic reworking of God Rest You Merry Gentleman.
We’ve written about Siobhan Miller here a few times—we’ve seen her in Inverness at the Dandelion Festival, and more recently in London—the first time she had toured with the full band. Her work includes a mixture of songs from the tradition and her own material, and her seasonal song Winter Fairly is one of her own songs.
There are a couple of seasonal songs on The Magpie Arc’s Glamour in the Grey record, and one of these, Jack Frost, is a version of a song originally written and recorded by Mike Waterson, despite sounding much older. Martin Simpson sings the lead vocals.
Nic Jones’s LP Penguin Eggs is one of the classics of the folk revival. It was also vastly influential. A lot of the songs are about men living tough lives at the margins of society, and The Little Pot Stove is one of two songs about whalers written by the Scots songwriter Harry Robertson included on Penguin Eggs. As we noted when we included it in our Twelve Days of Winter series last year:
The song is about the engineers who stayed with the whaling fleet over the winter to repair them for the next season. The weather was so cold that the tools could freeze to the skin. They would take the ‘little pot stove’ with them so it was warm enough to work.
But let Nic Jones tell the story:
When The Young ‘Uns do their Christmas shows (their 2023 show in London was reviewed by us here), they always include their song Tim Burman. It was written about the Lockerbie bombing at the suggestion of someone who attended one of their gigs. Tim Burman was one of the passengers on PanAm 103 when it exploded in mid-air in December 1988 on the way to New York. It sounds as if it should be a dark song, but somehow The Young ‘Uns manage to make it optimistic. You can listen to it here.
Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage are a Cambridge-based duo who have been playing together for most of a decade now. Their music is distinguished by close harmonies and interesting arrangements, and I love their song First Footing, about the Scots and Northern English tradition, as the New Year breaks, of visiting neighbours’ houses with symbolic gifts marking hopes of health and prosperity in the coming year:
Our ‘Winter Songs’ series from last year can be found on the Salut! Folk site here—or go to the home page on a computer or an ipad and scroll down:
https://salutfolk.com/category/winter-songs
And here’s my off-centre seasonal playlist:
And do visit our Facebook group!
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