Jim Ghedi on Tour with special guest Cinder Well

Jim Ghedi announces a full-band tour for March and April 2022, during which the amazingly talented Cinder Well will join him. It’s a tour you don’t want to miss, and it’s one you won’t forget (details below).

At the beginning of 2021, Jim Ghedi released In the Furrows of Common Place. There are many standout moments, including his cover of Ed Pickfords Ah Cud Hew, which is unforgettable. Likewise, Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters, inspired by the work of the ‘Peasant Poet’ John Clare, has a rare and beautiful rural earthiness to it. A robust and emotional response to the destruction of common land and the forcing of many into poverty under The Enclosure Acts. Clare’s poem touched on the destruction and changing landscape which seems all the more relevant today:

The greens the meadows and the moors
are all cut up and done
There’s scarce a greensward spot remains
And scarce a single tree
All naked are thy native plains
And yet they’re dear to thee.

Ghedi’s unsuppressed emotion throughout this album is never artificial nor contrived; it’s carried upon a genuine social conscience (read his comments below).

If you’ve not yet heard the album, I strongly encourage you to buy it (you can read Glenn Kimpton’s review of the album here). Likewise, I also strongly encourage you to see Jim Ghedi live whenever an opportunity arises. I saw Jim and his band perform ahead of the album’s release at Woolf II, and it was one of my highlights of that weekend.

Watch the accompanying video for Ah Cud Hew below, which Marry Waterson created.

Jim on Ah Cud Hew:

Ah Cud Hew is a song written by North East folk singer & songwriter Ed Pickford, a song from the narrative of an ex-miner suffering the effects of coal disease, a reflection of his working life, his family & the community he was connected to.

I first heard Ed’s version of the song on a folk compilation given to me a few years back. I remember from the opening line it completely flawed me; I had it on repeat for days and couldn’t shake it off, mesmerised by Ed’s voice and his ability with song, to tell a story with such humanity and lyrical imagery.

Around this time, I was doing research into the history of social injustice, the Miners’ strike and more specifically, the ‘Battle of Orgreave’. Watching Yvette Vanson’s powerful documentary ‘The Battle for Orgreave’ and finding a huge resource over on the ‘Orgreave truth and justice campaign’ website (https://otjc.org.uk/). Somehow Ed’s song really hit a nerve and correlated with themes I was becoming drawn towards, the starting point of political discourse into the breaking down of communities, state and police brutality and a further control and privatisation over the working classes. But the beauty of Ed’s song is he displays this through the personal perspective and the individual’s narrative connecting the listener by the raw emotion of it.

Jim on Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters which takes its name from John Clare’s poem:

“The poem and his life were centred around the time of the land enclosure act in England, where common land was enclosed and lower class farmworkers & labourers and their families were forced into poverty. Subsequently, the countryside across England in the years ahead would be dramatically shaped, changed and managed under the hands of private landowners, ensuring less open access for people. The words in this poem also felt connected to environmental issues going on in Sheffield currently, where local councils were signing private contracts with corporate companies, overriding public protests and allowing the felling of a vast proportion of the cities trees.”

The video was filmed in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland…the album was recorded at Peter Fletcher’s Black Bay Studio far out in Loch Roag on the north-western isles.

Jim is touring in March and April and will be with a full band lineup, playing material from ‘In the Furrows of Common Place’ with “a few other new exciting things in the mix”.

The bonus for this tour comes in the form of the excellent Cinder Well, the brainchild of singer and multi-instrumentalist Amelia Baker, whose amazing and original 2020 lockdown album ‘No Summer‘ we reviewed here.

Like Ghedi, I’m very drawn to Baker’s work; they both share an energy that talks to the listener on a deeper level. It will be an unforgettable tour. It’s not one you are likely ever to forget.

Watch the video for Cinder Well’s Wandering Boy below. The song came to Amelia Baker via the work of John Cohen, who passed away in 2019. He is another figure whose work I love, including his own music, fieldwork recordings and incredible documentary photography. One of his most remarkable photobooks was The High & Lonesome Sound: The Legacy of Roscoe Holcomb. This weighty tome documents the time he spent with the American singer, banjo and guitar player Holcomb. He not only captured Holcomb touring and appearing in public but also with his family and friends. Throughout the book, he also documents the East Kentucky community around them, from miners to church-goers. The book came with two discs containing audio recordings and a film which clearly left an impression on Baker.

Amelia on Wandering Boy:

“I first heard this song from Roscoe Holcomb, in a documentary by John Cohen called “The High Lonesome Sound: Kentucky Mountain Music”. It’s all shot in 16mm film, and the last scene has Roscoe Holcomb singing this song, sitting with his iconic hat and glasses, with a Baptist Hymnbook in his weathered hands. I amended the last verse of Roscoe’s version and wrote my own — to be a little less god-like.”