This Sunday (6th August) at 11:15 am on BBC Radio 4 or BBC Sounds, folksinging legend Shirley Collins will be sharing the soundtrack of her life on Desert Island Discs when she gets to select the eight tracks, a book and a luxury item that she would take with her if cast away to a desert island.
Desert Island Discs, first broadcast in 1942 (then a BBC Forces Programme), is a broadcasting institution and treasure trove that has provided a unique record of the changing place of music in British society. The show is hosted by Lauren Laverne, who took over from Kirsty Young in 2018.
Several folk singers and musicians have been featured over the years, including Martin Carthy (2013 – listen), whose luxury item was his guitar (not surprisingly), and his book of choice was a volume of ‘The collected works of Charles Dickens’ (a popular choice of many castaways). Peggy Seeger (2001 – listen) took her Banjo with an inexhaustible supply of strings & pegs (her book choice was ‘A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon’), and Joan Baez (1993 – Listen) chose a personal pouch with a silver lion in it over her guitar and the Diary by Anne Frank.
In May, Shirley Collins released her new album Archangel Hill (her third album for Domino Records.
No one else in this land knows old-song like Shirley Collins, weaving into them on every airing a new genetic code, a new revelation, a new perspective. But Shirley’s spell is not just conjuring up of songs it’s the evocation of the land too. There is a quiet muse in this record, redolent with the chalkiness of the South Downs, the landscape that has knitted itself into the bones of every generation of Collins’. This is an album that swoops like the Downs through the episodes and the musical companionships of Shirley’s road less travelled.
The album was reviewed on Folk Radio by Thomas Blake:
…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.
Details of Desert Island Discs can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001pf7y