Folk
Folk-singing has been off the popular agenda for so long that it seemed ready to go as underground as original rave culture, but recent arrivals like the young singer-violinist Eliza Carthy have persuaded at least part of the pop audience that the music has some breath in it yet. As with so many marginal areas of an oversubscribed world of music, though, the weight of hundreds of years of singing and songs is enough to discourage the uncommitted. Maybe the answer is to update by the gentlest of assimilations. It's doubtful if Martin Carthy, Eliza's father, has any agenda with his new solo record, Signs of Life (Topic), since this gentle man prefers to make the music speak for itself. But the audacity of setting Elvis Presley and Maurice and Barry Gibb songs besides ancient broadsheets is almost shocking.
Carthy has been the doyen of his kingdom for so long that folk's amen corner have probably taken him for granted by now. His association with the deepest modern roots of English folk, the revivals of the middle 1950s and 1960s, the electric movements of the 1970s and subsequent return to unadorned acoustic playing, has been conducted with a conviction that can be spine-tingling. In his sleevenote, he writes how his first acquaintance with one of the songs, "Prince Heathen", "was a day which shook my world", and the savagery of the piece is mitigated only by the furious beauty of the performance.
Not that this is angry music. It uses protest simply as another vein in the story. The timelessness of English folk songs has soaked into Carthy's bones to the extent that he sounds like the vessel for keeping alive the multifarious voices that have preceded him. That state of grace is such that he can start the record with the old Bee Gees hit "New York Mining Disaster, 1941" and make it sound like a survival from a different time altogether. Perhaps it's even more surprising to find him singing "Heartbreak Hotel", which he remembers as the first record he ever bought, but Presley's song fits into the disc in another way - in its musing on death.
Folk music is full of death, not as melodrama but as a shadow that ordinary people lived with and came to accept in their various ways. In "Georgie", a woman pleads for her condemned spouse; "The Bonny Hind" is a sister who comes to the most tragic end; and in "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" (Bob Dylan's rendition left Carthy thunderstruck) the song sits up and asks us why it has to be this way. "John Parfit", an injustice more recent and much closer to home, is a companion piece of dour rage. In the heartbreak hotel, too, people go to die of loneliness.
This is Carthy's most sombre record, and though there is some lightness in the likes of "Hong Kong Blues", one sometimes wishes for one of his more ribald songs such as "Three Jolly Beggars". He has pared his guitar stylings down to a root simplicity which is in such close harmony with the delivery that it feels indivisible, and with only Eliza's violin for company on a few tracks, the music is penny-plain but fertile as the earth - a sign of life that Carthy's traditionalism embraces without blinking.
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