Multi-instrumentalist and singer Angeline Morrison has long been fascinated with ancient traditions. At 16, she fell in love with the Padstow May Day tradition of the Obby Oss after travelling to see it from her home town of Birmingham. It inspired her to move to Cornwall, where she now works as an academic. Her back catalogue shivers with her interests in psych and folk horror, but her main focus now is on the place of people of colour in British folklore. That will culminate later this year in a project produced by Eliza Carthy, The Sorrow Songs – but first, this collection introduces Morrison’s many talents.
Her voice, showcased in the opening a capella, The Green Valley, is sweet but full-bodied. Abundant with meaning and feeling, she tells the story of a woman abandoned after pregnancy with longing, sadness and resilience; its lyrics also suggest factors of race at play. “A contented mind bears no slavery,” she sings. In Our Captain Cried, Morrison’s harmonies are double-tracked with melodies to striking effect; she also plays eerie medieval recorders on The Cruel Mother, strident autoharp on Bonny Cuckoo, and a glistening mountain dulcimer on sacred harp song Idumea. All are produced simply but powerfully by the Lilac Time’s Nick Duffy.
Morrison’s version of the well-known ballad When I Was a Young Girl, about a young woman imagining her death, is particularly affecting, slow and solemn against a drone full of dread. The title track about a girl “as brown as brown can be” with “eyes as black as sloe”, is even better, Morrison immersing the listener in a story full of passion, rejection and revenge as she masters the precision of storytelling as well as its poetry.
Also out this month
Singer and fiddler Lily Henley’s Oras Dezaordas (Lior Editions) explores ballads dating back to the expulsion of Sephardic Jews from 15th-century Spain, alongside original compositions in the minority language of Ladino. Carrying the voices of women through history, and Henley’s work in American roots music, it’s a fascinating and beautiful release. Ye Vagabonds’ Nine Waves (River Lea) is the second album from Irish brothers Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn. Their blood harmonies remain movingly tender, while Irish contemporary classical group Crash Ensemble add stimulating textures to their songs. Bryony Griffith and Alice Jones’ A Year Too Late and a Month Too Soon (Proper) is fun, too, a spirited collection of old Yorkshire songs about wanton lasses, cockfights and collier lads, inspired by characters from their local communities.
