Harbottle & Jonas – The Sea Is My Brother
Brook View Records – 22 February 2019
As the title suggests, the husband and wife Devon duo David Harbottle and Freya Jonas have taken a maritime theme for their fourth album. While predominantly self-penned, it opens with a violin-accompanied cover of Mike Silvers’ paradoxically upbeat, infectious refrain arrangement of Was it You? Ewen Carruthers’ song imagining Captain Scott’s last thoughts as he awaits death on Antarctic ice in 1912.
The first of the original numbers is David’s rhythmically swaying Fr. Thomas Bynes, Freya’s harmonium anchoring the true story of the parish priest who, refusing a lifeboat, sacrificed himself to remain aboard the Titanic and absolve his fellow passengers as they faced being drowned, though, strictly speaking, given it struck an iceberg, the ship didn’t, as the lyric has it, run aground.
It’s not the only shipwreck on the album. Written and sung by Freya, the closing track, Saved Alone, is a slow, dirge-like, violin accompanied account of Anna Spafford, who lost her four daughters in the 1873 sinking of the SS Ville de Havre, the chorus line ‘it is well’ taken from the hymn It Is Well, With My Soul, subsequently written by her husband. Though not directly telling of a disaster at sea, coloured by military beat drums and trumpet her rousing Headscarf Revolutionaries is the third song this year (following Reg Meuross and The Unthanks) about Lillian Bilocca, the woman who led the campaign to secure better safety standards in the fishing industry following the loss of three trawlers from Kingston-upon-Hull in the space of as many weeks and her subsequent blacklisting by the industry.
Another woman linked to the sea whose heroic exploits have been well-documented in song is lighthouse keeper’s daughter Grace Darling, and David adds to the list with A Lady Awake, a fingerpicked traditional folk styled ballad recounting her part in rescuing all nine sailors when, on 5 September 1838, their ship, the Forfarshire, sprang a leak and foundered while sailing from Hull to Dundee.
Not all tragedies are set at sea. Sung by Freya, Lost to the Sea is David’s simply strummed first-person song about the 21 illegal Chinese immigrants, who were drowned when trapped in the sinking sands by the incoming tide while harvesting cockles in Morecambe Bay, strings and drums building musical momentum towards the end and around its ‘gone, gone, gone’ chorus.
The loss of an entire south Devon fishing village, Hallsands, washed away in the early 1900s when its shingle was dredged to extend the Plymouth dockyard, Hall Sands is the duo’s fiddle and drums-driven rollicking setting of John Masefield’s prophetic 1903 poem, the chorus lifted from contemporary John Galsworthy’s more optimistically defiant poem Wembury Church. There’s a coda of sorts later in the album with Elizabeth Prettejohn, Harbottle’s lively instrumental featuring Andy Tyner’s trumpet, commemorating the village’s last resident who defiantly remained in her hillside home until her death in 1964.
Lovers parted are a familiar staple of nautical songs, and the album makes its contribution with Liverpool City (where the pair actually met), a shantyesque sway-along in which the narrator’s torn between the lass who’s won his heart and the “call of the lonesome, longing sea”, the song clearly a spin on The Leaving Of Liverpool as well as referencing Joni Mitchell’s A Case Of You.
That siren call is also at the heart of the Jonas-penned trad-folk styled title track, named for an inspired by Jack Kerouac’s lost autobiographical novel (written in 1942 and later published in 2011) about the bond between man and the ocean, carried to a swelling climax on fingerpicked guitar, concertina, violin and cello lines.
Amid all the melancholy and tales of maritime tragedies, the duo also find room for a more upbeat, playful number, the album’s single traditional contribution, David on vocals for a trumpet embellished jazz’n’shanty stomp through The Saucy Sailor Boy that might have made for a better closing note than ending on a return to gloom with Saved Alone. That, however, is a minor quibble on an album that is awash with strong songs and excellent musicianship and fully deserves to carry the duo aloft on a wave of acclaim and success.
Harbottle and Jonas also feature in our latest Folk Show which can be heard here.
For details of their upcoming tour dates visit https://www.harbottleandjonas.com/