Harry's Seagull - Georgia Shackleton CD
Review by Colin Hynson
After a career playing with various groups such as Addison’s Uncle, Cobbler Bob, the Shackleton Trio and, most recently, Kitewing (a merging of the Shackleton Trio with the Alden and Patterson duo) this is the first solo album by Norfolk–based singer and fiddle player Georgia Shackleton.
Harry’s Seagull is a celebration of the often over–looked Norfolk tradition of folk music and song. It draws heavily on the performers and collectors of traditional songs of the county such as Lucy Broadwood, Walter Pardon and most of all Harry Cox.
The album kicks off with ‘Twenty, Eighteen’, a song collected by Lucy Broadwood, a folk–song collector of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She was different from many other collectors of the time simply because she was a woman. This meant that whilst her male counterparts were collecting songs from men in male–dominated spaces such as dockyards or the local pub, Broadwood collected songs from women by stepping into their worlds. ‘Twenty, Eighteen’ tells the story of a man attempting to court a woman with promises of wealth. She turns him down by saying that all she wants is “a handsome man”. Georgia performs this song with just her voice and a plucking (pizzicato if you want to get technical) on the fiddle.
Then we come to a couple of songs that also come from East Anglian singers and song collectors. ‘Come, Little Leaves’ was originally performed by Walter Pardon. The lyrics are by a poem by George Cooper and it tells the story of the changing seasons from summer to winter. ‘Rambling Robin’ is an adaptation of a song by Peter Bellamy (a Norfolk man and founder member of ‘The Young Tradition’).
When it come to the playing of the Irish harp then the name of Máire Ní Chathasaigh will almost certainly be just about the first to jump into peoples’ minds (maybe Derek Bell will pip her at the post here). She’s won armfuls of traditional Irish music awards and has been a stalwart of the folk music concert and festival for some years. I saw her with Chris Newman at the Cambridge Folk Festival back in the late 1980s and it was a performance that nobody who was there was likely to forget in a hurry.
I have to admit that folk dance is not really something that I’ve ever got into in any serious way. I’ve been to more than my fair share of ceilidhs. I seem to remember having a shot at Swedish clog dancing at Towersey many years ago. That’s about it. Consequently I’ve never felt the need to fully understand the different musical sequences that accompany folk dances. So I’d be hard pressed to tell you the difference between a polka, a hornpipe, a jig, a mazurka etc. However, this first album by the excellent accordion player Nat Brookes has helped me to appreciate the music for folk dance better.
There was an article in the Guardian a little while ago about people getting together in social media groups to reminisce about the ‘good old days’, how everything just seemed better in the past and contemporary life somehow just isn’t up to the job. If any of you feel like looking back to the early 1970s (even if you weren’t actually there) then you couldn’t do much better than listen to the debut album from a duo known as The Woolverstones.
For me one of the great joys of folk music is the sense of place that is evoked by performers and their music. There are songs that, whilst having a universal appeal, belong to one location and that by listening to them listeners are transported there. The pipes of Kathryn Tickell take us all straight to the wild landscapes of Northumbria. Hearing the songs of the Copper Family create a vision of rural Sussex.
My earliest memory of hearing a mandolin was when Vivien Stanshall said the word ‘mandolin’ towards of the end of side 1 of Tubular Bells and then Mike Oldfield played one. Since then, as I moved away from prog rock and concept albums and towards folk and acoustic, I found myself hearing and appreciating the mandolin more and more.