Shirley Collins and Davy Graham: Folk Roots, New Routes ---Ink Blot Magazine

Shirley Collins and Davy Graham: Folk Roots, New Routes

at a glance...

Hometown: Suffolk, England; Edinburgh, Scotland
First Recordings: 1964

Personnel:
Shirley Collins -voice and banjo
Davy Graham -guitar

Related Artists :
Albion Band, Etchingham Steam Band

Notes:
Shirley Collins grew up in Hastings, a town in Suffolk, England. There she learned folk music the old-fashioned way, from her mother's family. She subsequently broadened this knowledge by working with legendary American ethnomusicologist and song collector Alan Lomax during his travels through America and England, and applied her inclusive understanding of folk music to a wide variety of settings in a recording career that spanned the years from 1959 to 1978. Davy Graham grew up the son of a Gaelic teacher father and a Ghanaian mother in Edinburgh, Scotland, a background that doubtless influenced his own omnivorously eclectic guitar playing.

Shirley Collins and
Davy Graham
Folk Roots, New Routes
Topic, Released 1964

Folk Roots, New Routes was more than just a record when it first came out in 1964. It granted permission to a whole generation of English musicians to blend their indigenous folk music with just about any other material that they could imagine. Collins' gorgeous soprano voice was a picture of purity; she could, and often did, sing the music of rural English people from past generations in the traditional unaccompanied way. But on this record she joined forces with a flashy, eclectic acoustic guitarist who was equally adept at plucking out blues cadences, bebop choruses, and fiery Moroccan melodies. Together they crafted an album that sounded so right that it drowned out the protests of stuffy folk scene traditionalists who insisted that such unnatural genre mixing was all wrong.

Three and a half decades later, the disc, newly reissued by the English label Topic, doesn't sound terribly radical anymore - you can hear music that blends nearly every ethnicity imaginable today in malls and coffee shops. What endures is the drop-dead beauty and understated musicality of Collins' singing, and the undercurrent of sheer that infuses Graham's pristine picking. Music doesn't get much lovelier than this.

If you like Folk Roots, New Routes, check out:
Dave Swarbrick Rags, Reels & Airs
June Tabor A Quiet Eye
Sandy Denny Gold Dust - Live At the Royalty
Bert Jansch Sketches
Richard Thompson Mock Tudor

-- Bill Meyer

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