Black John makes the garden grow

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

Deep England

On a similar sort of vibe, I am wildly obsessed with Deep England - a collaboration between electronic producers and a choir producing pastoral drone sonics around songs from The Wicker Man and Jerusalem, of course

All of this is, of course, my catnip, but it's gorgeous and my skin crawls with delight. I am desperate for this to come back up on vinyl.