Shirley & Dolly Collins - The Harvest Years

Customer reviews
Press release

CD Album (2)
Component 1
1.    A Beginning
2.    A Meeting - Searching For Lambs
3.    A Courtship - The Wedding Song
4.    A Denying - The Blacksmth
5.    A Forsaking - Our Captain Cried
6.    A Dream - Lowlands
7.    A Leave-taking
8.    An Awakening - Whitsun Dance
9.    New Beginning-The Staines Morris
10.    Rambleway
11.    Ca' The Yowes
12.    God Dog
13.    Bonny Cuckoo
14.    Nellie The Milkmaid
15.    Gathering Rushes In The Month Of May
16.    The Gower Wassail
17.    Sailor From Dover
18.    Young John
19.    Short Jacket And White Trousers
20.    The Bold Fisherman
Component 2
1.    Death And The Lady
2.    Glenlogie
3.    The Oxford Girl
4.    Are You Going To Leave Me?
5.    The Outlandish Knight
6.    Go From My Window
7.    Young Girl Cut Down In Her Prime
8.    Geordie
9.    Salisbury Plain
10.    Fair Maid Of Islington
11.    Six Dukes
12.    Polly On The Shore
13.    Plains Of Waterloo
14.    Fare Thee Well My Dearest Dear
15.    C'est La Fin/Pour Mon Coe
16.    Bonny Kate
17.    Adieu To All Judges And Juries
18.    Edi Beo Thu Hevene Quene
19.    Black Joker/Black White, Yellow & Green
20.    The Gallant Hussar
21.    Hopping Down In Kent

Many remarkable and exciting talents emerged from the English folk song revival of the 1960s and ‘70s, amongst the finest of all were Shirley and Dolly Collins. Through their extraordinary half-dozen records, the sisters helped to introduce many innovations into the English folk revival. In 1964, Shirley recorded the landmark jazz-folk fusion of Folk Roots, New Routes, with Davy Graham. The quintessentially southern English song collection Sweet Primroses on which she was accompanied by Dolly’s vocals and portative organ was released in 1967; and the following year, an exuberant collaboration with Mike Heron and Robin Williamson - of the Incredible String Band - resulted in The Power Of The True Love Knot. All these recordings strove to marry a deep love and understanding of this country’s folk music heritage with a more contemporary attitude to musical settings. Championed by John Peel, their work soon came to the attention of Harvest records - EMI’s new “underground” label.

Shirley and Dolly Collins were brought up in Sussex, in a family with a deep love of traditional music. Their uncle, the writer F C Ball, encouraged them to hear a wide variety of music, especially the work of Monteverdi and Purcell. By the mid-1960s they were keen to attempt to marry ‘Early Music’ instruments with the songs Shirley was singing in folk clubs. Shirley recalled in a 1988 interview, “Dolly and I used to go along to rehearsals of Musica Reservata, and got to know the musicians. It was suggested, and we all agreed, that it would be a good idea to wed English traditional tunes to these wonderful Early instruments that were so rough and not perfectly tuned. We just took it from there.”

Anthems In Eden – the Collins sisters’ first recording for Harvest in 1969 - featured as one side of the lp a suite of interlinked songs describing the break up of relationships in rural England brought about by the huge numbers of young men slaughtered on the battlefields of Europe during WW1. “When the maypole, which had once been the centre of so many village greens, was replaced by the memorial stone.” The piece, first titled Anthems Before The Fall was originally recorded for BBC Radio 1’s ‘My Kind of Folk’ in August 1968. The glorious and unusual ensemble of early music instruments - rebecs, sackbuts, crumhorns and all - proved once and for all that the guitar was not the only appropriate accompaniment for folk song. It is to the tremendous credit of Harvest that they were prepared to underwrite such an ambitious project. The album had a terrific impact upon recorded folk music. Several leading critics have suggested that it is impossible to imagine that electric accompaniment for traditional song, as successfully purveyed by Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, could have developed quite as it did without the pioneering Anthems In Eden.

The second side of the album featured material drawn from Shirley’s repertoire at the time, accompanied by Dolly’s arrangements for the ‘natural orchestra’.

Their second album for Harvest - the starkly beautiful Love, Death & The Lady, captures some of their finest recorded performances. Harpsichord, piano, Medieaval woodwind and stringed instruments are beautifully woven around Shirley’s singing into a rich musical tapestry. The sympathetic production by Austin John Marshall maintains an exquisite tension between the vocals and the musical settings. Shirley recalls that the recording sessions were completed in a few days. Dolly remembered that the recording was not as solemn as the austere sleeve photographs might suggest, “we could be quite jolly in the studio, between takes, even though the songs are very sad.” Both sisters were suffering from recent emotional upsets and Shirley’s choice of material for the record reflects their mood at the time.

Although radically different in mood from its predecessor, Love, Death & The Lady employed several of the musicians who had previously worked on Anthems In Eden. Christopher Hogwood (harpsichord), Alan Lumsden (sackbut), Adam Skeaping (bass viol and violine) and Roderick Skeaping (bass viol) and Eleanor Sloan (rebec) were members of the late David Munrow’s groundbreaking ensembles – Musica Reservata and the Early Music Consort of London and amongst the leading performers of Early Music in Britain. Terry Cox from Pentangle was invited to play percussion. Dolly’s splendid arrangements were centred around the piano and harpsichord.

Dolly Collins had studied composition with the renowned British composer Alan Bush. Alongside her work with Shirley, Dolly was to be the arranger on Peter Bellamy’s masterful ballad-opera ‘The Transports’ and his un-recorded suite ‘We Have Fed Our Seas’. Her distinctive arrangements were also to be found on records by the Incredible String Band, Ian Matthews, Marc Ellington, Chris Darrow and Tony Rose amongst others.

In 1971 Shirley released the magnificent No Roses recorded with the 25 musicians of the Albion Country Band - a further experiment that grew into a triumph and another benchmark of British folk-rock.
During the mid-1970’s, Shirley and Ashley Hutchings led the all acoustic Etchingham Steam Band with Terry Potter, Ian Holder and Vic Gammon around the folk club and festival circuit. The ensemble’s repertoire was drawn from the traditional music of Shirley’s beloved Sussex. With a growing repertoire of music for dancing (and a few additional musicians) the Etchingham’s evolved into The Albion Dance Band - a crusading, brave dance band performing traditional material on a curious mixture of modern (electric) and mediaeval instruments. The ensemble recorded The Prospect Before Us for Harvest.

When Harvest decided in 1976 to reissue the Anthems In Eden collection, Shirley proposed that she record a new set on songs to accompany the suite. The new Amaranth tracks were produced by Ashley Hutchings and employed the services of many of the Albion Dance Band musicians and Christopher Hogwood from the original Anthem’s Harmonious Sweet England Band. According to one dictionary the amaranth is an imaginary flower that never fades, although horticulturalists will not doubt remind us of amaranthus caudatus – more popularly known as love lies bleeding. At the time Shirley intended Amaranth to be her final recording and selected the new material to cover all facets of the music she loves best.

Few singers of the English folk revival have attempted as much on record as Shirley Collins – her voice an extraordinary combination of fragility and power, the arrangements always intriguing yet subservient to the story. “I like music to be fairly straightforward, simply embellished – the performance without histrionics, allowing you to think about the song rather than telling you what to think.” For Shirley and Dolly traditional song has always been a very direct link with the past of ordinary labouring people. Their recordings always sought to unite that deep love for folk song with a feeling for contemporary arrangement. The Harvest Years draws together, for the first time, all the material recorded by Shirley and Dolly Collins for the Harvest label.

Sadly 1978’s For As Many As Will was to be the final recording by the Collins sisters, as Shirley retired from singing in the early 1980s whilst Dolly continued with her composition including a full-scale secular mass. Dolly Collins died in September 1995. Their recorded legacy has continued to influence succeeding generations of musicians. Following the publication of her memoir, America Over The Water, which tells of collecting folk song in the Southern States with Alan Lomax, Shirley is currently much in demand as a speaker on all aspects of the folk tradition. She was awarded an MBE in the 2007 New Year’s Honours List, an Honorary Masters Degree from the Open University and in 2008 the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for her exceptional contribution to folk music.