As many of you know who watched the BBC Folk Awards know Jim Moray won ‘Best Tradtional Track‘ for Lord Douglas taken from his album Skulk…when we interviewed Jim back in January of last year he explained the song’s origin:
Lord Douglas is a new variant of a Child Ballad called Earl Brand. It’s a ballad with a great plot, and many European versions, but I’ve never heard it sung by another revival folk performer. I wrote a new tune and added and changed a lot of words to get it to sit right.
One of the many things we love about Jim is his constant drive to look at new ways of interpretation, he has been pushing those boundaries for so long now and you have to admire his innovation, enthusiasm and most of all his inventiveness…we certainly do and I can still recall the first time we played Lucy Wan from his album Low Culture…it was a huge buzz…he featured British-Ghanian rapper Bubbz in that track and it made that song something oh so much more powerful!
Here is a recent video he did for Lord Douglas which is just simply beautiful!
and for those who have never heard Lucy Wan then check out this great live video at Cargo:
Listen to Skulk in full below