The book "America Over The Water", published in 2004, is SHIRLEY COLLINS' own account of her 1959 journey through the Southern States of America with American folk song collector ALAN LOMAX. It is also the title of the author's occasional reading of extracts from the book, illustrated with a collection of unique photographs and field recordings and enlivened by the many voices (and one dance) of actor Pip Barnes. It was brought to Leeds this month by Opera North's American Connection season for a one-off matinée performance.
SHIRLEY COLLINS is a name from an earlier generation, an important marker in all accounts of English folksong, and in any serious account of creative English popular music from the dawn of John Peel onwards. She embodies a certain voice, a respect for the music of ordinary people, an eclectic creativity in performance and a gentle optimism about the vitality of music in face to face communities.
If "occasional reading" sounds just a little dry, and if COLLINS' role as both embodiment and academic authority on folk music makes such an event seem like an avoidably worthy occasion, then my task is simple. I just need to pass on the word that if you ever get the chance to see this performance you can be assured of a very rich musical experience, full of humour and delights.
For a start you have a beautiful older woman with a smiling face and a warm voice telling you a thrilling story about the olden days. There are deadly snakes, murderers, crazed Baptist preachers, Grammy Awards, 24 flavours of Howard Johnson ice cream and sand dunes in the Georgia Sea Islands crawling with black crabs. There is also a tale of sharing a double-seater privy with a sharp-elbowed old lady with a line in unquestionably filthy songs. One of the highlights is the story of an accidental meeting with a 50 year old black farmer at the end of his working day who shows up just before the tape recorders have been put away and who immediately lays down a blues song that Lomax logged, tersely, as "Perfect".
As we listen to that beautifully told story we see Lomax's old photograph of the performer and hear the precise recording of MISSISSIPPI FRED MCDOWELL's "61 Highway" that Lomax made that evening in 1959. It's impossible, at this moment in the show, not to feel the tides of ghostly history, pain and impossible hope that live from day to day in the hearts and lives of ordinary people. The impulse is to go out there, to sing and to play, to listen to real music and to feel just a tiny bit uncomfortable at the waves of vapid shallowness that sometimes fill our national music charts. It's at this point in the proceedings that SHIRLEY COLLINS' good-hearted humility becomes a friendly caution to us all.
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There are many other insights revealed by her stories, by Pip Barnes's assured imitations of preachers, radio presenters and dancing farmers, by the pictures and by the beautifully recorded music. I was particularly struck by a section on the shape-note or sacred harp singing of Alabama. Slow witted music fan that I am I finally realised where the currently fashionable ensemble singing of bands from Silver Mount Zion onwards has come from. Shrill, top-of-the-voice, elated harmonies of primitive mean, they are just the thing to throw yourself into when the edge of the apocalypse appears.
The show opened and closed with recordings from our storyteller's own repertoire. The magnificently restrained "Just As The Tide Was Flowing", with sister Dolly's portative organ accompaniment played us gently in. There were pictures on a large screen but my front row seat gave me the opportunity to watch the silent narrator involuntarily mouthing all the words as the song played through the house's impeccable sound system. (Alas, she no longer performs as a singer). But even that emotional experience was overwhelmed by the final song "Dearest Dear" which, in context, seemed to be a representation of an intensity of feeling between COLLINS and LOMAX that had been so lightly told in the story itself.
The lasting impression though, is of SHIRLEY COLLINS' observant, enthusiastic acceptance of a strange world over the water, full of contradictions, injustices, laughter and open-hearted hospitality, all threaded together with an unremitting love of people's music. If you can't get to a performance, the book is available through COLLINS' website. A new double CD is also available. "The Harvest Years" was released in August this year, with 41 tracks covering the three fine albums Shirley and sister Dolly made for the Harvest label - plus 3 Albion Dance Band tracks.
www.shirleycollins.com
America Over The Water (2004) by Shirley Collins is published by SAF Publishing Ltd, London www.safpublishing.com
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