SHIRLEY COLLINSSweet England(Fledg’ling)
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Jim O’Rourke fans: Were you chagrined when he told the Wire that one of the reasons he’d moved away from Chicago was that people here didn’t know enough about British folk music? Well, here’s your chance to redeem yourself in his eyes! Shirley Collins (who often performed with her older sister, Dolly) was one of the leading lights of the English folk revival of the 1950s. Sweet England, her 1959 debut, is one of two albums drawn from 37 songs she recorded in two days (!) in the summer of 1958, when she was just 22 (the other is called False True Lovers); at the time she was working as an assistant to American folklorist Alan Lomax, who ran the sessions. Accompanying herself on five-string banjo, she rips through tunes from the canon that she grew up hearing in Hastings (Sweet England is “Greensleeves” free, though) and tosses in a murder ballad for good measure. Her voice is high and reedy, clarion and pure—she sounds very serious despite her age, and it’s hard to imagine she’s ever hit a sour note in her life. Collins’s later albums lean toward grim songs about the dead and the unfortunates soon to join them, but Sweet England includes plenty of relatively light fare like “The Tailor & the Mouse” and “Hares on the Mountain.” In the liner notes to this CD reissue the singer, now 75, is borderline penitent, insisting she was inexperienced, the recording premature, the material inconsequential. But she has nothing to apologize for—maybe it’s just one of those things, like when you cringe with embarrassment looking at a picture of yourself as a kid but everyone else can see what a charmer you were. Sweet England is a remarkable document that marks the beginning of a remarkable career.
BEN RAYNER & THE PRICKSCranking to Sonic Youth(self-released)
