Colin Randall writes: Salut! Folk’s North America editor Steve Peck took an eastward gaze across the Atlantic to rave about the North Yorkshire singer Natalie Wildgoose (it’s a fascinating piece; please follow the link from her name to read it if you have not already). Now, I return the compliment, introducing our readers to an exciting new American talent. This is my seasonal choice of good listening and will be followed by similar selections from our deputy editor Andrew Curry and Steve ….
Country music and folk have not always been the cosiest of bedfellows.
The BBC tried hard in the 1960s to make it seem otherwise, with the Country Meets Folk radio show hosted by Jim Lloyd and Wally Whyton. It was intended to appeal to fans of the two genres but sometimes ended up displeasing both lots.
Irrational as it was, this schism persisted for years and I was an accomplice in the mutual animosity. You liked folk or country, not both.
West Wisconsin-raised. Colorado-based, Kathryn Ryan is not the first essentially country artist to turn my head.
But her work is a glowing example of what finally shook me out of my own prejudice. With her confident vocals and thoughtful, unselfconsciously emotional lyrics, she tops my choice of recent listening for Salut! Folk’s “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” Christmas parcel.
Ryan’s debut album, eponymous, had been sat in my email box for weeks waiting to be heard. It’s now in the car and I can’t stop playing it.
From that album comes a single, Jesus Forgives, the message being “he may well do so but I ain’t Jesus”.
The song is immediately accessible with a striking chorus Ryan rightly says will sound familiar before the end of first hearing. Don’t take the official video too seriously; the murder and DIY burial of a rotten lover is a metaphor for being unashamedly unapologetic about, and unforgiving of, those who trespass upon her.
I love it but also admire so many of the other.eight tracks addressing themes of love, despair, anger and revenge.
As well as having worked as a nurse, and shown some ability in quilt-making, Ryan is a classically trained cellist. On her album, she plays cello on Winter in Wisconsin, Coffee and Cologne and Michaelangelo and the classical influences unite seamlessly with the folk, country, Americana, a hint of the blues and – whisper it – pop elements. I believe and hope we will hear more of this young woman.
If that covers “something new“, what about “something old“. My wife would tell you I live in the past and it is true that Fairport, Steeleye and Pentangle are never too far from my musical thoughts, But I am going for humour, gritty northern humour at its best.
Around 1970. folk clubs and later arts centres and concert halls began to see singers who also turned their hands to comedy. There was a regional aspect to this phenomenon: Billy Connolly and Bill Barclay from Scotland, Johnny Handle and the Northern Front in the North East, Birmingham’s Jasper Carrot, Fred Wedlock from the West Country, Richard Digance (London’s East End) and Max Boyce in Wales.
And from Rotherham came Tony Capstick. His “grim up north” slice of satirical nostalgia, Capstick Comes Home, set to Dvorak’s New World Symphony as used in a Hovis bread advertisement, was a work of pure genius. It made the top 10 in 1981 and, 44 years on, raises smiles every time I hear it.
The veteran American singer Gordon Bok borrowed, if that is the right verb, the tragic but beautiful ballad of coastal disaster, Three Score and Ten, for his 1975 album, Turning Toward the Morning. Its words were written by a Whitby fisherman, William Delf, to raise funds for those bereaved by a lethal freak storm that battered the east coast of England in 1889.
The Watersons’ version is widely regarded as definitive, and Mike Waterson may well have put Delf’s noble words to its gorgeous tune. But Bok performs it with great depth and dignity and there are days when I feel he made the song his own.
For something blue, I cannot resist the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith. All of 102 years ago, in 1923, she released her first single, Down Hearted Blues. It sold 780,000 in six months, more than a million over time, and it is seductively divine.
I dig so deeply, so often into the music that speaks to my soul that there were numerous contenders for the four categories: old, new, borrowed and blue. I hope my choices bring our readers pleasure, too.
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