Shirley Collins
Archangel Hill
Domino Records
26 April 2023
The folk songs that Shirley Collins sings are often small, condensed things, full of the bright strangeness of the Sussex countryside she calls home and the half-remembered stories of the wider English landscape. She is a folk singer in perhaps the truest sense: largely untutored but with an uncanny ear for melody, not outwardly political but always aware of the working-class roots of her material, seemingly at ease with the ever-changing nature of her medium. But that only tells part of the story because Collins’s career has always been defined in terms of vast swathes of time, set against a backdrop of sweeping personal and cultural change. She once entirely lost her singing voice, not for a week or a month but for 38 years, a period of silence precipitated by events in her own life. But even 38 years is the blink of an eye in the history of musical expression: perhaps the biggest influence over her singing has come from the Copper family, the Sussex singers who performed, generation after generation, for over 400 years, interpreting and adapting songs that may have existed for much longer.
Archangel Hill is her third album since returning to the studio half a decade ago, and the insanely high quality of those two records shows no sign of letting up. While Collins’ voice may have changed since the days she spent performing in folk clubs in the 1960s, not much else has. She still surrounds herself with some of the finest musicians on the scene – now, instead of the Albion Band or Richard Thompson, she is backed by the current iteration of the Lodestar Band: Pip Barnes, Ian Kearey, Pete Cooper and Dave Arthur.
There are some songs on here that will be reasonably familiar to many folk music fans: Hares On The Mountain and Oakham Poachers sound fresher than ever. Lost In A Wood is a slightly different version of a song she first recorded (under the title Babes In The Wood) on her 1967 album Sweet Primroses: here, its melancholy subject is brought into even sharper focus. An older live recording of Hand And Heart (accompanied by her late sister Dolly), from 1980, is notable less for how much Collins’ voice has changed and more for the consistency of her overall artistic vision.
Archangel Hill is less austere than 2018’s Lodestar and perhaps less complex than Heart’s Ease (2020). Songs like opener Fare Thee Well My Dearest Dear seem outwardly simple, but Collins’ voice manages somehow to convey both resignation and deep longing. The Captain With The Whiskers offsets sentimentality with youthful sauciness. The band get to show off on the jaunty instrumental June Apple and the brisk dance tune Swaggering Boney, while Collins’ almost conversational vocal style is shown at its best on The Golden Glove.
The album’s more unusual moments are also some of its most rewarding. High And Away, an original with lyrics by Pip Barnes, is partly taken from an account in Collins’ recent book of a 1959 meeting with Arkansas singer Almeda Riddle. It’s a wonderful moment of musical serendipity, where you can see tradition changing and stories cross-pollinating before your eyes. How Far Is It To Bethlehem? is a surprising and tender rendition of a carol that started life as a rhyme in a Christmas card by Frances Chesterton (wife of G.K.). Best of all is the title track, which ends the album. Backed by a wandering melody plucked out on impressionistic strings, it is a spoken hymn to Collins’ home county and seems to contain all the wisdom that she has accrued, all the history that has made her folk songs some of the most important and enjoyable in the English tradition. It’s not so much that she is making up for all the time she has lost: this album and its predecessors seem almost to relish their maturity. Either way, at 87, she is still making some of the finest music of her career.
Archangel Hill is available to order on Dom-Mart grass green-coloured vinyl with signed postcard, standard vinyl, CD and digitally: Dom Mart | Digital |