It is with deep sadness that I heard the news this morning that Norma Waterson passed away yesterday afternoon (30th January), she was 82 years old. Norma had a voice like no other and had such a lovely personality. She always met you with a warm greeting; it was like meeting an old friend even though I never knew her well. Likewise, on stage, she always came across as a very down to earth woman, building an instant rapport with the audience, interspersing her songs with stories topped off by a voice that held a mountain of passion; she could melt the heart of any.
Norma began her singing career as a member of The Watersons (alongside brother, Mike, sister, Elaine (Lal), cousin, John Harrison and later with husband, Martin Carthy). They were one of the most original folk acts of English folk music that not only provided much of the energy and fire that fuelled the folk revival of the mid-1960s but also influenced and fired the imagination of many that would follow in their footsteps. Not only did they sound different, it felt like they were far removed from the many other groups and singers of that time. The short documentary made by Derrick Knight in 1966 about their life on the road (Travelling for a Living) described them:
The Three Watersons were orphaned in early life and brought up by a fiercely matriarchal grandmother who said they had to stick together. Even today the closeness of the family unit is maintained.
Despite the fact that two of them have married, they all live together in a single, scruffy terrace house, whose centre is a common kitchen, always full of friends and noise. This close, cosy home life is in total contrast to their professional life. In the last two years, the Watersons have become one of the most popular folk singing groups in the country, yet they are far removed from the fashionable exhibitionist folk singers.
Travelling for a Living
Whether as The Watersons, her family group of Waterson : Carthy, supergroup Blue Murder, as a duo with her daughter Eliza Carthy or solo, there has always been an intense intimacy at the very core of Norma’s voice that is undeniably moving and everlasting in its effect on a listener, even over the passage of time.
Early Days
Born in 1939, Norma Waterson was the oldest of the three siblings, Mike followed in 1941 and Elanie (Lal) in 1943. All were born in Hull…their heritage was a fascinating one which also helped shape them.
On their father’s side, they were Huguenot stock. The family had fled religious persecution and settled in Northern Ireland before moving to South Shields. On their mother’s side, they were of Southern Irish, Roman Catholoic stock. A measure of Gypsy blood had been poured in too. The three siblings were orphaned young and raised by their maternal grandmother, Eliza Ward, and close-knit circle of family and friends.
from Mighty River of Song (Topic)
Norma often spoke of old customs and traditions she knew; some no doubt influenced by that Gypsy blood, one of my favourites was how she was taught to leave the dinner table set for one more person…the unexpected guest.
She also provided us with further insight into her influences when we interviewed her and Eliza for their 2018 Anchor album:
“Well, I’ve been on this Earth for nearly eighty years now,” Norma explains. “My grandmother, who brought us up, was half Irish and a travelling lady, and she was very eclectic in her musical tastes. She was a lovely singer and knew a lot of parlour ballads and musical songs she had learned from her childhood, and we all used to sing them. We also had an uncle who played lead cornet as a young man in the Pit bands in the early days of sound cinema; I had another uncle who played the banjo and organ and my dad played guitar and banjo. Most of them liked different things, so we had a very eclectic musical upbringing and there was no music we weren’t allowed to listen to. It wasn’t like ‘oh no you don’t want to listen to The Beatles or Elvis Presley!’ My grandmother didn’t care, she said ‘if it’s a good tune and a good song then it’s a good tune and a good song’. It’s better to let children choose what they listen to, because in the end, they will choose the good stuff.”
The 1950s marked the age of jazz and skiffle, and the Waterson family were not unaffected by ‘the craze’ that swept Britain. While still all holding down regular jobs, Mike and Lal formed the Mariners, a skiffle/folk band whose name was undoubtedly inspired by their port town, which also had strong local community ties.
Mariners “dissolved into” Folkson, joined by their cousin John Harrison who was two years younger than Lal. Their passion for folk music was clearly growing as they also opened Folk Union One, a folk club that featured performers such as Matt McGinn, Louis Killen and Norma’s future husband, Martin Carthy. It seems it was Louis Killen who suggested changing their name to The Watersons, which happened around 1963.
Along with Mike, her sister Elaine (Lal), and their cousin, John Harrison, we heard The Watersons for the first time in 1964 on the Topic anthology New Voices. We hear Norma sing solo for the first time on King Arthur’s Servants, on which she sings, “…he threw three servants out of his house because they wouldn’t sing”. That was one thing Norma and The Watersons were never short of…the gift of song.
Bert Lloyd called it the “Waterson Sound”, and so unique was that sound that we’ve never heard the like since. One of the core principals of the group when they sang together, as highlighted in the Topic Boxset notes for “The Watersons – Mighty River of Song”, was, in Norma’s words:
“If you couldn’t find a note, you sang a harmony”.
It seems the critics struggled to compare them to any other folk group of that time as Norma and Lal soared above Mikes’s bellow-like vocals.
The tracks from New Voices and their 1966 albums The Watersons and A Yorkshire Garland were reissued in 1994 by Topic Records as ‘The Early Days’.
Their proper debut album came with Frost and Fire (recorded by Bill Leader) in 1965 for Topic Records. It took us through the ritual calendar year, and we heard Norma sing solo and unaccompanied the spring-time ballad-carol Seven Virgins (The Leaves of Life). The liner notes drew light to Norma’s delivery: “The Parallel between death and resurrection of Christ and the ritual slaying and renewal of the divine kings of pagan belief (echoed in mumming plays) needs no stressing. Norma Waterson sings it.”
The aforementioned second self-titled album of 1966 saw the group pick up the nickname “Folk Beatles” after Brian Shuel’s striking cover photo ‘With the Watersons’.
The Watersons lineup of Norma, Lal, Mike and John remained until 1968. While it’s easy to romanticise about these bygone days, travelling on the road as touring musicians was far harder then. The M62, which would eventually connect Liverpool and Hull via Manchester, had yet to be built (it was opened in stages between 1971 and 1976). Travelling played a very large part of The Watersons life, so much so that they made a documentary titled Travelling for a Living –
Four young people huddle in the cold and discomfort of an old van as they travel, maybe hundreds of miles, to a singing engagement in a folk club, and back again to their home town of Hull.
In that documentary, we saw them visit Cecil Sharp House, which took eight hours by road. And, according to the liner notes of Mighty River of Song, factoring in breakdowns, “their first expedition to the Padstow May Day celebrations took a good thirteen to fourteen hours”. Their van certainly wasn’t built for comfort either.
So it was maybe no surprise that The Watersons came off the road in 1968 when the family splintered for a period. Lal went to live in Leeds, Mike stayed in Hull, John went to London (where he also learned fiddle from the Sligo playing legend Michael Gorman). Norma went the furthest away – along with her then-partner, she travelled to the British Overseas Territory of Montserrat in the Caribbean, where they broke up soon upon arrival. She stayed there for 3-4 years and worked as a DJ for Radio Antilles. I would have loved to have heard one of her sets from then…she returned to the UK in 1971/72.
Martin Carthy had already met Norma and ‘fallen madly in love’, although she was married at the time and he wasn’t. They met again much later, but he was married, and she wasn’t. As Martin put it, we “continued circling each other”.
Bright Phoebus and Martin Carthy
On Norma’s return to the UK, the endless circling of Martin and Norma ended, and they were brought together for the making of a landmark album by Mike and Lal Waterson – Bright Phoebus, the songs for which Lal and Mike had written while Norma was away. The album was released in 1972 on Bill Leader’s Trailer Records, who was no longer working exclusively for Topic by this point and had started his Trailer and Leader labels. Sadly, although the album was remastered and released in 2017 by Domino Records (along with some brilliant unreleased bonus recordings), it had to be withdrawn following a court case by Celtic Music, who had purchased the Leader and Trailer labels in 1990 and owned the rights to the album.
Recorded in the space of a week in a makeshift studio in the basement of Cecil Sharp House, the album featured a legendary lineup and band that was put together by Ashley Hutchings. Alongside Lal and Mike were Norma, Martin Carthy, Richard Thompson, Tim Hart, Maddy Prior, Ashley Hutchings, Dave Mattacks, Bob Davenport and more. Even Bill Leader played a musical creative part beyond production with the jews harp on the opening Rubber Band track on which Norma also sings. She also sings on Magical Man, Shady Lady, Bright Phoebus and most notably, Red Wine Promises, on which she sings solo. Anne Briggs, although not listed in the lineup, was a close friend of the family and was present for a few days during the recording; there’s a lovely photo of her looking after one of the young children during the recording at the time. As Martin said, “it felt like half the folk world was there”.
While artists slept on Bill Leaders floor, Martin recalled in his interview with Steve Winick how he and Norma stayed up talking until 3 in the morning each night “before going to our respective beds. We were very respectful of one another. There was a job to be done and we were all utterly focussed”.
By 1973, The Waterson’s were gigging again, with John Harrison replaced by Hull-based singer, Bernie Vickers. Bernie was also Mike’s business partner, Mike was a talented builder, painter and decorator, skills that would soon come in very handy. Martin would also soon replace Bernie before their next album, Four Pence and Spicy Ale, was released in 1975.
Martin and Norma had agreed to meet up at Cleethorpes Folk Festival, where he proposed and were married three weeks later (1972). Around this time, Martin briefly joined the Albion Country Band before the band split in August 1973 (he was also an occasional fifth Waterson during this time). Although an album was made by Albion Country Band, it wasn’t released until 1976 on Island Records (Battle of the Field). Financially, it was a tough time; in Martin’s words, the Albion Country Band was “a guaranteed loss maker”. His first cheque of £45 for nine weeks of work wasn’t going to see him far, but they struggled through nonetheless.
There was a desire to find a more settled and quieter home to raise a family. A location a few miles away from the noisy the encroaching M62 motorway was eventually found in the fishing village of Robin Hood Bay, located in Yorkshire ‘proper’. St Ives Farm had outbuildings perfect for converting into dwellings. The plan was to become self-sufficient, although that didn’t work out; John Seymour’s Complete book of self-sufficiency would soon be published in 1976, a guide for the many young hopefuls drawn to the smallholding self-sufficiency dream.
Whilst they saved their money, the stone-built property was slowly converted over five years to house the three families of Mike and Ann, Lal and George and Norma and Martin. During that time, there were also a couple of births…Mike and Ann had two more children, and Norma and Martin had Eliza in 1975, at which point they were all still sharing the one house. It wasn’t a straightforward birth for Norma; it was a placenta previa (the baby’s placenta partially or totally covers the mother’s cervix). Fortunately, George managed to get Norma to Scarborough hospital, which was thirteen miles away in record time…he “drove like the wind”, luck was clearly on their side that day.
While singing with The Watersons, Martin began to appreciate how they “had changed the rules entirely”. Many groups of this period seemed to be based on the American folk music quartet of The Weavers – banjo, guitar and female singer. The way Norma, Lal and Mike sang was how they had always sung together since they were young. Mike’s vocals had a great range, apparently, three octaves, which balanced the beautiful alto vocals of Norma and Lal perfectly. In Martin Carthy’s own words, “their capacity for invention would blow your mind”. Whether in unison or bursting into harmony, there wasn’t another group like them that could pull in an audience in the way they did.
Watersons to Waterson : Carthy
The new lineup of the Watersons featuring Martin Carthy marked a new creative period marked by the release of for pence and spicy ale in 1975, which opened to Country Life which vocally shone like the rising sun. This song seemed to rejoice in their new-found lifestyles. Melody Maker voted it their folk album of the year.
This was followed in 1977 by Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy (Topic), described as a thematic masterpiece. The same year saw the first duet album from Norma with Lal – A True Hearted Girl (Topic).
Bob Davenport’s liner notes for A True Hearted Girl, when talking about the singing of Lal and Norma, bordered on emotional as he referred to them as “…two of the finest singers on the British folk scene…”.
The notes also touched on their new communal life and how tight-knit they all were, including how Mike’s wife Ann looked after all the children and her own and how Lal’s husband, George, drove the band to gigs. Lal’s daughter Maria (Marry Waterson) appeared on this album alongside Norma’s daughter Eliza Carthy; the first of a new generation of singers. He notes:
It is possible that Maria and other children in the family, inclusing Martin and Norma’s daughter, Liza, may become professional performers in other areas of music. If they do so, they will have had the best and most obvious experience a child could have to build on – an acquaintance with its own native music sung in a traditional style.
In 1981 the Watersons released their swansong: Green Fields. After this, they continued gigging into the eighties and then less frequently in the early nineties. There was also some big band projects along the way featuring the Watersons, including a fundraising concert by the ‘Boggle Hole Chorale’ – featuring the Watersons, Swan Arcade and Anthea and Peter Bellamy which later went under the title of Blue Murder for festival appearances and later different lineups.
Eliza began singing with the family in 1988, including one combination of an all-female line-up of mothers and daughters – Waterdaughters. Lal’s decision to stop touring and concentrate on writing songs sparked a series of collaborations although the strongest of these incarnations to emerge was of course Waterson : Carthy who would make their self-titled debut recording sometime later in 1994. Following that debut, Norma released her eponymous solo debut album on Hannibal in 1996 which was also nominated for the 1996 Mercury Music Prize. Featuring Martin, Eliza as well as Danny Thompson, Richard Thompson and Roger Swallow, it included her cover of Black Muddy River by the Grateful Dead:
This was followed by a further solo album in 1999, The Very Thought Of You, which included Fallen Leaves, a song written for Norma by Eliza. Her first solo traditional album for Topic, Bright Shiny Morning, was released in 2001 and was produced by Eliza. In the liner notes, Eliza wrote:
My mother is one of the best singers I know, full of warmth and skill and with almost telepathic intuition. She also has incredible grace for letting us take over and tell everyone what to do!
Eliza Carthy
Norma was awarded the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2003 Queen’s New Year’s Honours List for her services to Folk music.
In 2010, she released ‘Gift,’ the first of two collaborations with her daughter, Eliza. The last, Anchor (2018), was reviewed here on Folk Radio when they were also our Artists of the Month. We followed with an interview in which Norma provided a beautiful and revealing insight into their song choices:
Another is ‘Nelly was a Lady’, a bold Stephen Foster piece from 1849. “Oh my goodness me that song is so prevalent today,” says Norma. “People think that his songs are fluffy, but if you listen to them, there’s stuff going on there that is very prevalent today. That one is poignant and truthful in a way that many modern songs aren’t. It tells a lot of stories if you listen to it.”
In 2016, Norma received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and in 2018.
Norma Waterson has a very special place in our hearts. While her legacy lives on, that smile and voice will be deeply missed.
The intimacy and connection she made with an audience stayed with you long after she left the stage. She will never be forgotten; there will be no other like her.
Our love and thoughts are with her husband Martin and daughter Eliza, as well as their family and friends at this difficult time.
Donations to help support Martin Carthy can be made here: https://ko-fi.com/elizacarthy
Thanks to Topic Records for the Photos
Main Image by Tom Howard, rest as credited in descriptions.