THE SONG SOMMELIER

Grab a rum punch, sit back, relax and be taken on a journey, starting in a south Yorkshire pub and taking in wild Cornish coast and Scottish Mountains. Oh, and drifting ice across Canada. With Kate & Shirley!

Yorkshire folk singer Kate Rusby (‘The Barnsley Nightingale’) has made no fewer than five Christmas albums - yes five. Kate likes Christmas. Her first seasonal album Sweet Bells was released in 2012 and her latest, Holly Head was from 2019. Kate is on a merry mission to spread the word on the solemn beauty of the English Christmas song - a tradition of seasonal community spirit practiced from the impromptu singalongs of South Yorkshire pubs to the 19th century carols of Cornwall. The results are quite wonderful, as you’ll agree if you’d care to stop everything and spend four and half minutes in the company of The Holly King (track four in the selection). 

It looks like Kate has taken 2020 off for Christmas, but then for this year there is the wonder of Shirley Collins. Born almost four decades before Kate and arriving on the English folk scene in the late 1950s, Shirley is associated with the English Folk Revival of the 1960s and 1970s. Often accompanied by sister Dolly (piano and organ), Collins’ renditions of traditional songs are about as English as Englishnish can be. 

While I have been vaguely preoccupied with the idea of a post based on a transatlantic face-off between the USA and the UK as to who does the best Holiday/Christmas music, I haven’t quite been able to get beyond listening to Kate and Shirley’s seasonal offerings. It’s the austere beauty of it that’s got me by the Christmas baubles, if you will.

So, Kate & Shirley’s Folking Good Christmas it is then, and don’t we just need it. What a year it’s been! If ever a year need Christmas, a? Just last December, I tuned in to Kate Rusby appearing on the BBC Front Row podcast, performing Christmas Is Merry (beautifully) and explaining her obsession with the yuletide song and the relief it brings to the working class communities of South Yorkshire and Cornwall, and then BOOM, along comes the dreaded COVID-19 menace that changed everything for those communities and made hard living that much harder. We need some comfort.

Shirley Collins' return to the global music scene could perhaps not have been better timed and has been one of the stories of the year. Arriving in the midst of our pandemic summer, Heart's Ease came to comfort us, with new versions of songs Shirley had first sung in her twenties. But there were a couple of chilly numbers on there that struck me as perfect for a cosy, fireside winter playlist, so here they are: The Christmas Song and Locked In Ice, along with Cherry Tree Carol (from way back in 1964) and The Moon Shines Bright, recorded much more recently with sister Dolly. 

I’ve never quite penetrated folk music, and haven’t really tried to if I’m honest. As with classical and country to some extent, it feels like a whole other world, one that could easily absorb the rest of one’s listening life. In that sense, it’s intimidating. Finding a way in is not easy. But for me, the Christmas song is what does it, so I’m grateful to Kate Rusby for making it such a major part of her repertoire, and to Shirley for making my favourite Christmas Song of the year.

So, we would like you to let everything go (2020 for a start!), grab a rum punch or mix yourself a stiff whisky and ginger, sit back and relax and be taken on a journey, starting in a south Yorkshire pub and taking in drifting ice across Canada, wild Cornish coasts and Scottish Mountains. This idea of the traditional folk song is not exclusive to Englishness. Our neighbours do a fine job of their own take on the Christmas song, or if not then the winter song - and there can be few more beautiful specimens than Jenny Sturgeon’s Frost and Snow, from the Scottish folk singer’s recent The Living Mountain album. 

This is a Christmas special folk knees up hosted by Kate and Shirley with some very special guests, including the amazing Sam Lee (duetting with none other than Liz Fraser on The Moon Shines Bright), Siobahn Miller, Lady Maisery, The Watersons (of course), Belshazzar’s Feast, Bella Hardy and Spiro. Plus some short interludes from the music of two recent folk collectives: Spell Songs was a project put together to render The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane (another discovery of 2020 for me personally) into song. In this collection we include The Snow Hare. Finally, Burd Ellen’s new release puts a new twist on winter music, and we complete the show with The Cutty Wren from before Kate closes us out with a Yorkshire Merry Christmas. 

We wish you a long life and another good year. 

For more:

Jenny Sturgeon’s The Living Mountain is on Bandcamp

The Ballad of Shirley Collins is a 2017 British feature documentary directed by Rob Curry and Tim Plester, try and see it somewhere!