Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage – Ink Of The Rosy Morning
Topic Records – 1 April 2022
Making the best of a bad situation, when the pandemic struck, Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage revised plans for their third album Ink of the Rosy Morning and recorded the album while holed up in an old seaside schoolhouse in Hastings. They stripped arrangements back to basics with just two guitars and emerged with a collection of mostly traditional numbers subtitled A Sampling of Folk Songs from Britain and North America. The album opens with their voices mingling on gorgeous harmony for the twin fingerpicking of A Winter’s Night, more strictly A-Roving On A Winter’s Night, an Appalachian folk tune learnt from the repertoire of Doc Watson, followed by some nimble fretwork with Hannah singing lead for the equally traditional Appalachian murder ballad Polly O Polly.
The pace slows as Ben takes over lead vocals for When First I Came To Caledonia, the wistfully reflective lost love Cape Breton ballad from whence the album title comes, the Caledonia here referring not to Scotland but the coal mines in Glace Bay. They remain in traditional pastures for the following two tracks, beginning with a bluesy take on Hannah’s rendition of Lovely Joan, which she recalls her mother singing to her and her sister. It’s a song of Norfolk origin that, atypical of the genre, has a young woman getting the better of the passing gent who plans to bed her, but she steals his horse and ring as he readies the hay. Ben takes the lead, with their voices intermingling, on a similarly slow-paced forlorn False True Love.
The only self-penned material comes with the minimally intricately played A-Life A-Lie, a song formulated as the unspoken response (sung by Hannah) to the previous number.
The following three selections are again all traditional, first up being a gentle slow waltzing reading of the Cornish folk tune Sweet Nightingale, another sexually euphemistic tale of attempted seduction, though, unusually, it does have a happy ending with the pair getting wed and, as suggested by how she “sings in the valley below”, her finding sexual liberation and ecstasy.
Of Scottish origin, Earl Richard, a variation on Young Hunting and sung by Hannah, is essentially the sister song to False True Love, in which, informed by the nobleman who’s bedded her that he’s in love with another, kills him and has her servants throw his body in ‘the deep draw-well’ only to be taunted by the bird that witnesses the murder. This version ends with her wishing she could shoot the avian accuser. The tale told in the lengthier Young Hunting reveals how the Earl’s body is found, and she is burnt at the stake, but not before trying to blame her maid for the murder.
There’s another feathered fellow in the last of the three, a reworking of the familiar and also euphemistic Lark In The Morning, the pair alternating the verses and with a revised light and fluttering tune inspired by the skylarks over the fields in Cambridge. Sung by Ben with Hannah harmonising, they end with a cover of River Don’t Run. Written by Richard Guard and Anna Crockatt and learnt from the recording by their friend and folk singer Nick Hart, it’s a contemplative, reflective, fingerpicked song about Paradise Row in Agar Town and the Fleet River. The small Agar Town was demolished in 1864 to build St Pancras Station, and the river diverted underground, it’s a still resonant message about the price of progress, the loss of the narrator’s birthplace echoing the loss of his intended bride.
Created by circumstance perhaps, Ink of the Rosy Morning showcases the dexterity of Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage’s guitar playing and the unaffected beauty of their voices, both individually and in harmony. This is their most immediate, beguiling and, dare I say it, finest work yet.
Ink Of The Rosy Morning is out April 1st on Topic Records.
Read more about their 2022 tour dates HERE.
Pre-save here: https://hannahandben.lnk.to/inkoftherosymorning