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On July 5, British folk singer Shirley Collins turned 85. Despite the quarantine, her neighbors managed to hold a small birthday party for her. Maurice dancers and accordionists in traditional costumes surrounded her, and Collins sat in the shadows in front of the door. Time seems to blink, and she has changed from a young and brave ballad guardian who crossed the American South to a big treasure guarded by young people.
Her new album, Heart's Ease, was released at the end of July, another month later. But Collins and her song can wait. These songs are from a long, long time ago, from the time the song was born to be recorded, and then from paper and pencil, tape recorder material to studio work, and the time between the intervening time is calculated in the past few decades.
Shirley Collins
"I wrote a ballad yesterday," collins, the young musician felt was very unreliable. Folk songs cannot be written "yesterday", and only songs that have survived in time after generations can be called "folk songs".
Not everyone agrees with her views on folk songs, but she has been a collector and disseminator of folk songs for a lifetime with this belief.
Folk songs are the art of time. The meaning of time is not the same for Shirley Collins's generation and the people of today. When she was a child, she was hit by a bombing raid in London, the family hid in a bomb shelter, and her grandfather sang ballads to her and her sister. They are all very old and ordinary songs, but at the moment when the daily order is deprived, these songs leave a very clear impression on them.
At that time, it was easy for children to hear ancient songs. They are passed down by word of mouth, and there are countless versions of a song. Shirley Collins later went to the American South in her twenties with American Alan Lomax, bringing back a large number of tapes, in the same way that she had been exposed to folk songs in her childhood—not on a phonograph, not on stage, but by singing directly to another.
Alan Lomax's father, John Lomax, was the one who discovered lead belly and brought him from the South to New York. Both father and son have devoted their lives to collecting folk songs. Lormax Sr.'s greatest achievement in discovering folk singers was the "lead belly," and Romax Jr. was Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan's most admired mentor.
Sorting out the lifeline of father and son can string together a vein of the American folk song revival movement. "Lead Belly," a song called "Goodnight Irene," became a hit after being covered by The Weavers, and is considered the beginning of a renaissance in the American folk song movement in the 1950s. After visiting his hospital-bed idol Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan embarks on his musical path, a unique path that is set against the backdrop of the American folk movement.
The wave also affected Britain. The revival of folk songs in the island nation is more psychedelic and darker than in the United States, but the general direction is consistent, with the desire to return to the basics and willing to make the voice of the civilians heard.
Speaking of "Good Night, Irene", the Romax father and son got out of poverty because of the copyright income of this song (the elder Romax had been bankrupt in the Great Depression), and happily continued the father-son road trip that began in the 30s and was once interrupted.
Alan Lomax later fled to England for political asylum and met Shirley Collins, a Working-Class British girl. Collins and Lomax were in love. Their american southern song-picking trip took place when she was 24 years old.
When the American South was segregated, every time someone asked her to describe the scene, she would reply: "If I had shown more sympathy for black people in front of some white people, I would have sunk to the bottom of the Mississippi River and turned into a pile of white bones." ”
Shirley Collins received ballads for a lifetime and sang them all her life. Folk are more curious, affectionate and desperate, and folk songs are more violent than the news of yellow tabloids, and more affectionate than the bridge section of rotten romance. Singing a lot, Collins became like a folk song, and then something incredible happened.
Shirley Collins as a young man (right)
In 1971, Collins married her second husband, Ashley Hutchings. The marriage lasted less than a decade, during which Collins collaborated with her husband's band The Albion Country Band on two of her best careers, Love, Death and The Lady (1970) and No Roses (1971). It was just that their marriage ended very suddenly, and Collins described it as "one moment we were holding hands and together, and the next moment he was saying goodbye and leaving.".
Voice and love left Collins together. After the divorce, she lost her voice, could not sing, not only had no hope on stage, but also could not make a sound when she was alone. Folk songs with extremely strong vitality, folk songs that come out of her mouth, just can't be sung out of her body. Collins' silence lasted until 2014. In 2016, she released her debut album "Lodestar" after her return, which was warmly welcomed.
Collins, who had turned into an old lady, sang on stage, and the young girl in her twenties shouted her name. She already had a third generation, and her children and grandchildren had her records, but Collins guessed they never listened.
By the time Heart's Ease was released this summer, people were used to Collins' return. Her voice was younger and more dexterous than it had been four years earlier. The stiff tongue and throat awoke as if the old grandmother had drunk a few cups of pleasure, and her eyes and skin were glowing.
Collins's voice has always been warm and calm, not bright or dull, and the age cannot be heard, like the texture of logs and linen. Her words are clear, and slowly one song and one story can be heard clearly by foreigners.
"Songs that can express her heart may not be written by herself", she has become accustomed to sending her life in old songs. "Rolling in the Dew" is a folk song that Collins learned as a student. After a long stretch of sweetness, the beautiful milkmaid in the morning dew is abandoned. The beauty of love takes up the vast majority of the song, with only the last two lyrics singing lightning-fast abandonment and the woman's curse: "May the devil take you back to me". When Collins is abandoned and doubts his worth, does he also grit his teeth in hatred, preferring to ask the devil to take his husband's heart back into his hands?
The author of Whitsun Dance is her first husband, recording engineer, and poet Austin John Marshall, and the tune is based on "The Week Before Easter." The scene in the song takes place in a place where older widows get together and dance. Their husbands were killed in the war, the land was barren and the hedges were growing wildly. Men dancing Morrison danced in groups across the fields, toward death. The young women danced in their place, living as old women, and they were still dancing.
In Locked in Ice, a ghost ship tells the story of a hundred years of drifting through the voice of Collins. The cargo ship full of wealth and hope veered off course, lost its mission and crew, and was seen again and again by different crowds, but no one could get close to her. "Where the ice goes, I'll go." The mandolin sounded like a string of deep-sea echoes, and all the instruments sounded lonely.
With the next "Wondrous Love" and the last "Crowlink," the psychedelic colors of Collins and The Albion Country Band together reappear. Psychedelic is a subjective musical descriptor, like a kind of ghosting or auditory hallucination effect, a little deviation from the clear deformation, will produce a very different feeling.
New album "Heart's Ease"
Inside the singer, Shirley Collins is a very special example. I didn't sing for decades, I didn't participate in the earth-shaking changes in music during this period, and when I went out of the mountains, I still didn't plug in the electricity, and I still had an old song when I exited, and some people still listened to it with relish.
If you have the opportunity to listen to these songs, you will find that with the change of life forms, the ability of human storytelling to regress, and the imagination of weaving stories into melodies has also deteriorated. There are passers like Collins, quite lucky.
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Liu Wei