Shirley Collins

[Guest]

Hi Charlie

I hadn't realised that Shirley Collins had assisted Alan Lomax when he did his field recordings. She's just published a book - America over the water - where she tells the story, see link below.

http://www.themusicindex.com/commerce/system/store.htm

I'm sure she might be an interesting guest for radio ping pong?


Best wishes

Andy
Andy Stephens

[RobHall]

A couple of years back, Shirley Collins took a one-woman show on the road (well, one-woman and a guy operating the tape recorder) in which she gave a whole evening's talk about her experiences with Alan Lomax on his field recording trips. In spite of initial doubts, I thoroughly enjoyed it - the material was fascinating (especially the taped segments that were used as illustration) and it was delivered with great charm.

That's a great suggestion Andy - Shirley Collins would be an ideal ping pong opponent for Charlie.

On a related note, I think I read somewhere that Alan Lomax did a series of field recordings in Europe, but I don't believe that I've ever seen them available commercially - does anyone know the story behind this?

Rob

[NormanD]

I'll give a big vote to Andy's suggestion, Shirley Collins is another of the great known but unheard. I believe she's stopped performing now because of problems with her singing voice, but she's had a deep influence on many (most?) contemporary women trad. singers. AND she was the first person (to my knowledge) to use the expression "Folk Roots" in her 1964 album with Davy Graham.

Here's her web page: www.shirleycollins.com/

A lot of Alan Lomax's European recordings have been issued over the past few years on Smithsonian via Rounder Records. There are the Spanish and Italian Collections, and English, Scottish & Irish recordings.

On the Spanish Collection there's a recording of "Saeta" that later became incorporated into Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain". One CD worth buying is "The Trallaleri of Genoa" (Italian collection) - five-voice polyphony singing by a group of Genoese longshoremen. This had the same impact, for me, as hearing Bulgarian singing for the first time....and from dockworkers?!?!

I'm not sure about the background of his European and other music field trips. I believe Alan Lomax had academic sponsorship for his research but a big motivation may have been his need to spend time out of the USA due to the McCarthy anti-left witch hunts of the early 1950's. I wonder if one of our old lags could shed a bit more light on this (are you reading this IanA?)

There is a sampler CD offering 38 tracks from the various compilations, including Caribbean singers, prison songs, etc. Rounder CD PR1700. Not a poor track, do try to track it down.

Norman

[Charlie]

I will follow up this good idea.

I've seen Smithsonian releases of Lomax recordings from Europe, including Italy, so I think the answer is yes, they were released

[David Godwin]

Shirley is mentioned (as the "lovely English folksinger") in Alan Lomax's "The Land Where The Blues Began", as helping out on field recording trips.

These types of recordings have exercised my mind recently, as I was disconcerted by the foreword in Sam Charters recent book "Walking a Blues Road", which is a compilation, with revisions where necessary, of his articles and sleevenotes etc., covering the time from 1956 to 2004. Apparently, when Sam was engaged in field recording, the players were sometime short of numbers. Sam (and his wife) then took up instruments to fill out the sound, and this was then (apparently without Sam's knowledge) put out as genuine!! Perhaps more amusing is the story in the foreword that Sam put out so many articles under pseudonyns that he has completely forgotten some of these, and is unsure, in some cases, as to whether he has actually written some articles. Hence, he lists some names that he may have used as pseudonyms, and asks that, if anyone knows whether they are real people, then contact should be made with him.

But I like this book. I find Alan Lomax's style a tad smug at times, whilst Sam's prose is more readable that the academic style of someone like Paul Oliver. I find rereading some of these articles certainly worthwhile, and there are some interesting facts that were new to me. I was unaware that the circumstances of the death of Blind Willie Johnson had been researched fully. I always thought that he died of pneumonia, contracted by sleeping on a wet bed, following a housefire. Not so, apparently; he died from malaria, with complications caused by syphilis.

I don't know whether this is the right place for this comment, or whether anyone else has mentioned this book.

[Paul]

I've just found out about a documentary broadcast last Christmas Night on Radio 4

Here's the blurb from the Radio 4 press department


On Christmas Day in 1957 the BBC broadcast songs of Christmas from the British Isles, anchored by the noted Texan folklorist and broadcaster Alan Lomax.
It was a fascinating musical mixture: carols several hundred years old, contemporary folk songs, American spirituals, calypso, Ghanaian high-life (possibly the first African music broadcast on the BBC), dixieland and skiffle, children's carols and glees.
Coming at the start of the British folk revival there were contributions from Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and Shirley Collins.
It was a technical triumph, using live link-ups to Scotland, Plymouth, London, Manchester, Belfast, Derbyshire and Bangor, with Lomax at the centre of the web in Birmingham.
There were fluffs - the well-oiled contributors in the Plymouth studio sang the wrong song; those in Belfast only just got to the studio in time; and the script had to be rewritten live as items over-ran.
Peggy Seeger was detained in Dover at the last minute by the immigration service (because of her left-wing sympathies, which Lomax shared) and a vinyl recording of her had to be substituted - but in the end everything went ahead.
There are sharp disagreements about the value of the material broadcast, with some folk purists feeling that Lomax should not have included ephemeral material like skiffle.
Others feel that skiffle, which had just taken off in Britain, really was the new folk music, a democratic form accessible to anyone with a guitar.
The BBC itself had qualms about Lomax's left wing politics - an internal memo from an editor insists that he should not be given a platform to promote potted marxism; and that he should not be allowed to identify sexual permissiveness with happiness, or the Christian attitude to sex with sorrow and suffering.

Wow. Who says World Music started in the early 1980's. Anyone catch this show?

[davidt]

Shirley was a recent guest on Paul Jones Radio 2 show last year.
She told some very interesting stories about her experiences in the South (of the US), and also revealed her version of Boll Weevil Holler (from the aforementioned Folk Roots New Routes album) was based on Vera Hall's. I must get hold of her book and find out more.
I knew nothing about this side of her career having only previously come across her in the context of English folk music.

I think she'd make an excellent guest for Saturday Night.

[David Godwin]

Paul wrote:-

There are sharp disagreements about the value of the material broadcast, with some folk purists feeling that Lomax should not have included ephemeral material like skiffle.
Others feel that skiffle, which had just taken off in Britain, really was the new folk music, a democratic form accessible to anyone with a guitar.

I recently found a book in a charity shop, called "Skiffle" by (the Rev) Brian Bird, published in 1958, with a foreword by Lonnie Donegan. I was interested to read that, in those days, the BBC had a regular Saturday programme, called the "Saturday Skiffle Club", which subsequently expanded both in programme length and in scope, to become "Saturday Club", which I remember being compered by Brian Matthew. The book describes how Saturday Skiffle Club featured members of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, supported by a skiffle group.

Apparently, the Radio Times of Oct 11 1957 featured a photo of a cassocked clergyman in his church playing skiffle with a group, and on the following Sunday the BBC televised, from St Augustines Church, Highgate, a "Skiffle Mass". This was "vehemently discussed" on a subsequent "Any Questions", with more letters received than any other subject. In fact, the composer of the mass, a Rev Beaumont, is described in the book as a "Jazzuit", a term new to me.

The book ends on a very upbeat note. Apparently one should not be surprised to see "on one's television set, three parsons, complete with guitars and clerical collars, skiffling away merrily".

[Charlie]

When Ian Anderson, editor of fRoots, takes the trouble to send me an email with useful tips or information, I feel a bit of a bully asking him to post the message here in the feedback forum. He often graciously does so, but this time I'm extracting the pertinent bits and doing it for him:

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Saw the Shirley Collins correspondence on your board.

Shirley is utterly delightful. Her book is a great read - you should get a copy.

Oh, and did you know her son manages Asian Dub Foundation?

The wonderful Shirley Collins boxed set that David Suff put out is obviously definitive but might be a bit too much for a sensitive soul like you.

Homework: two original albums on which you may be more likely to find something you can bear and that are considered definitive Shirley Collins works are Folk Roots New Routes with Davey Graham (Decca, circa 64) which was re-issued by Topic (oft quoted as an influence on the likes of Jimmy Page etc). And No Roses with the Albion Country Band (basically all the folk rock luminaries of the day - 1971) which has just been re-issued by Castle/Sanctuary. The version of Just As The Tide Was Flowing on there is a real little (i.e. short!) classic, was collected from one of Shirley's ancestors, and directly inspired the 10,000 Maniacs version which Joe Boyd produced.

Oddly enough, Joe Boyd refers to that No Roses album in a letter in our next issue: "I was also very much in accord with Beale's view that Shirley Collins' No Roses is a superior album to Fotheringay (which I produced) and Richard Thompson's Henry The Human Fly."

IA
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Ian provided me with details of the publisher, SAF Publishing (www.safpublishing.com) who kindly and speedily sent me the book, America Over the Water.

It is indeed as good as everybody said it would be, and I'm sure Shirley would be a great guest.

Amazing that both Oh Brother Where Art Thou and Moby raided the same series of recordings for their million-selling albums.

I do have the 4-CD box set that Ian refers to, which unfortunately I find as unlistenable as most other English folk music, despite desparately hoping I might find something I could bear to play. It does include tracks from the album with Davey Graham that Ian recommends, among which Nottamun Town is the song referred to in a previous feedback message as being the template for Bob Dylan's Masters of War.

I hope Shirley wouldn't mind if I didn't play her music. I get the impression of a humble person with a good sense of humour, who would be more amused than dismayed at my cloth-eared reaction.

[adam blake]

On the subject of blues books: I totally sympathize with anyonw who finds Lomax's style a bit smug and Oliver's a bit too academic. For my money the best blues book by far is Robert Palmer's "Deep Blues". Out of print for far too long, I think it's now available again. Anyone who's interested who doesn't know it is in for a treat.

[nigel w]

THis four star review of Shirley's book appeared in the last issue of Uncut..


English folk singer's historic voyage of discovery into the heart of the American South

You can read Shirley Collins' brief memoir in a single sitting. Yet in that short time, she paints a vivid picture of two lost and contrasting worlds. The first is of Hastings in the years around WW2 as the would-be folk singer grew up hiding under the stairs from doodlebugs and playing games of hopscotch in traffic-free streets. The second is the American south of the '50s, when the 23 year old Collins accompanied the folklorist Alan Lomax on his legendary field trip. The passage of years may have blurred some of the detail, but in reliving the experience she was able to draw on the long letters home, which her mother kept, in which she excitedly described everything they heard and saw and the musicians they encountered. The names alone are evocative of another age. Through these pages march the ghosts of Texas Gladden and Uncle Charley Higgins from the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Primitive Hard Shell Baptists worshiping at an open-air prayer meeting in Kentucky , Forrest City Joe from Arkansas (later sampled by Moby), sacred harp singers in Alabama and a Parchman Farm prisoner, whose potent voice ended up more than four decades later on the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? Most memorable of all is her description of discovering the previously unknown Mississippi Fred McDowell. Such magnificent memories told in a style of appealingly unaffected honesty makes for an absolute gem of a book.

[Mildly horrified of fR]

I hope Shirley wouldn't mind if I didn't play her music

And if she did? And if (some of) your listeners would like to hear it too . . . if only to put it all in context . . . ? Just one measly song . . . would it do so much harm?

Tut tut, Charlie, tut tut . . . whatever happened to R.E.S.P.E.C.T. ? ;-)

[Charlie]

Thanks to Andy Stephens for the original suggestion, and everybody else for the further encouragement.

I am glad to confirm that Shirley will come on the show on 30th April, just before she goes to New York to launch the book in the US with a couple of 'performances' at the Joseph Papp Theatre, talking about the 1959 trip with the aid of Power Point.

You are right to chide me for my ungraciousness, and I am sure we will fit in a song by Shirley too.

[Con Murphy]

Just one measly song . . . would it do so much harm?

Tut tut, Charlie, tut tut . . . whatever happened to R.E.S.P.E.C.T. ? ;-)

As a fall-back, you could play her version of the folk standard Just as the Tide Was Flowing, as a contrast to, say, the 10,000 Maniacs version.


Update: I should read these threads more carefully. I've just noticed that that song has already been suggested. Apologies.

[Pleased of fRoots]

Most memorable of all is her description of discovering the previously unknown Mississippi Fred McDowell.

One of my most treasured Shirley moments was when we (me, Ron Watts - ah, another name to remember! - and others) organised the first UK club tour for Fred McDowell in March '69. We held a welcome party for Fred in a pub in Covent Garden and invited Shirley along - the look of pure joy on Fred's face at meeting her again was fabulous to see - for of course if Alan Lomax & Shirley hadn't chanced on him during their field trip he might well have still been driving a tractor.

Hmm - lots of memories of Fred now flood back: he stayed in my flat in Notting Hill when not on the road, and my country blues band played on a lot of the gigs. I've have a framed poster for the Mayfair Theatre concert on my wall as a Dorian Gray device ever since realising that everybody else on the bill - Fred, Alexis Korner, Jo-Ann Kelly and MC Mike Raven - had all passed away.

I am glad to confirm that Shirley will come on the show on 30th April (snip) You are right to chide me for my ungraciousness, and I am sure we will fit in a song by Shirley too.

Thanks Charlie. I knew you would really . . . ;-)