Black John makes the garden grow

[haptalaon]

Thank you all for your help yesterday. This morning I had some time to sit with it and look through my records & it came to me.

Watch on YouTube

It's a really wonderful album - a difficult one to listen to. It has a dark wateriness that emanates from the speakers, lulling you with its beauty and then shocking you back into awareness in the words. And her voice is a dream. Morrison re-imagines black lives into the British folk tradition after discovering there were no songs testifying to their presence in history, and no record of what they themselves had sung. Her notes on the stories are on her website.

Morrison is on the board of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, after being awarded their 2021 bursary to develop this project; & the album was produced by members of the Carthy folk family

Comments

[annofowlshire]

I went down a little rabbit hole and have been listening to a little bit of The Rowan Amber Mill (self-described as "woodland folkadelica") in my spare moments I'm not listening to people on this trip. I'll probably backtrack to Morrison eventually, maybe I'll see if I can download some to listen to on the flight home.

So thank you for the indirect recommendations!