In 1959, transatlantic journey was nonetheless a distinct segment privilege, not least for a younger, single, working-class girl. Shirley Collins owed her ticket to New York on the SS United States to her romance with the American folklorist Alan Lomax, whom she had met in London a few years beforehand. She was an formidable 21-year-old folks singer from Sussex, he a celebrated track collector and musician 20 years her senior. Lomax had been in Europe for a number of years, successfully in exile from the anti-communist witch-hunt that had blacklisted musicians akin to Pete Seeger, alongside Hollywood stars together with Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin. Even when gathering Spanish folks songs, Lomax had discovered himself shadowed by “the black crows” of Franco’s guardia.
After returning to the US, Lomax invited Collins to hitch him on a song-hunting journey by the deep south, a journey memorably recounted on this memoir – reissued after 15 years out of print, albeit with out the atmospheric pictures of the primary version. It provides a vivid and typically stunning portrait of a rustic but to confront the civil rights period. The couple’s encounters ranged from pentecostal choirs (each black and white) and hellfire preachers to blind fiddlers and mountain ballad singers, a few of them acquainted to Lomax from a earlier journey along with his father. For Collins, this was a brand new world of epic landscapes, rattlesnakes, racism and nocturnal gunfire. St Leonards-on-Sea it wasn’t.
In Arkansas the pair recorded singer Almeda Riddle, who delivered a poignant model of The Merry Golden Tree, a British naval ballad from “the ocean she’d by no means seen in her life”. Searching for the Memphis Jug Band, who had been a preferred outfit within the Twenties and 30s, they discovered a scene of quarrelling musicians and whiskey-soaked squalor. In Mississippi they met (and “found”) 57-year-old Fred McDowell, who arrived in dungarees after a day within the cotton fields earlier than proving himself a formidable blues guitarist, one who went on to take pleasure in skilled glory.
Additionally in Mississippi was the infamous Parchman Farm penitentiary, in whose fields Lomax recorded prisoners hollering work songs as they toiled, whereas Collins endured the undesirable consideration of a guard. Many years later, one tune, Po’ Lazarus, would seem on the bestselling soundtrack of the Coen brothers’ southern jaunt O Brother, The place Artwork Thou?, leadingLomax’s daughter, Anna, to trace down the lead singer, James Carter, by then 76 and residing in Chicago, in order that she might current him with a cheque for $20,000.
Interspersed with Collins’s account of this “southern journey” (although New York, Chicago, California and the Newport pageant additionally characteristic) are chapters describing her upbringing in Hastings. The Collins household have been poor however resilient, and on her mom’s facet arty and politically energetic, with uncles who have been painters and writers. It was a heat, prolonged household whose lives have been filled with singing. Her father was a milkman for an area farmer till conscription took him into the military. He survived the second world battle however his marriage didn't.
Collins and her huge sister, Dolly (who would change into a composer and accompanist to Collins), had a lot of their childhood claimed by wartime. Twice evacuated, they returned to Hastings to observe dogfights above the Channel and shelter beneath the steps from lethal “doodlebugs” (V1 rockets). As postwar youngsters their display screen idol was Laurence Olivier (the pair realized chunks of Hamlet to mimic him), their favorite singers Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray, listened to on the radio whereas their mom was at work – as a communist she thought American pop was a corrupting affect (a view extant in some folks circles).
The alternating chapters make for a jarring chronology however present some putting contrasts. Meals is a continuing subtext, austerity-era Britain with its powdered eggs and watery trifles and a brand new world of steak, hen, unique produce (avocados!) and, in New York, pizza.
At 18, Collins left residence for London and the nascent folks revival, which is all too briefly described right here, together with a capsule account of her later profession, her ascent to doyenne of the people scene, the lack of her singing voice and its latest, blissful return, episodes explored extra absolutely in her 2018 memoir All in the Downs, which adopted her return to music making with 2016’s Lodestar albumand her rediscovery by a brand new viewers.
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