And the Larks They Sang Melodious

For Shirley Collins on the Occasion of Her Ninetieth Birthday

The English folk singer and song collector Shirley Collins turns ninety on 5 July 2025. In honour of that occasion, I’m posting the following appreciation.

I have shared some of these observations before. I repeat them in the hope that, like a half-decent folk song, they have some life in them yet.

---

Nine Julys ago, I had the honour and pleasure of participating in the University of Sussex graduation ceremony at which Shirley Collins was awarded an honorary doctorate. In the days leading up to the ceremony, as I prepared my speech, I spent a long time listening to Shirley’s music, often while driving around the beautiful South Downs of Sussex.

I found myself thinking about the relationship between song and place, about how we forge, maintain and sometimes lose connections with the places in which we live, work and travel. I was feeling this keenly at the time as I prepared to move to the other end of the country to begin a new job.

Some of my thoughts during those days are posted below. First, I’m sharing the text of the speech I gave at Brighton Dome on 20 July 2016 ahead pf the conferment of Shirley’s honorary doctorate.

My speech for Shirley Collins’ honorary doctorate

Shirley Collins is a Sussex-based folksinger, folklorist and educator who has contributed enormously to the dissemination of the traditional music of the British Isles and North America.

A major figure in the English Folk Revival of the 1950s and 1960s, Shirley Collins also played an important role in the collecting and recording of folk and blues music in the southern United States. This work, undertaken with acclaimed folklorist Alan Lomax, led to the creation of a valuable archive of vernacular music and introduced the world to figures such as Mississippi Fred McDowell.

As a singer in the UK, Shirley Collins was innovative in her choice of material and her stylistic approach to traditional song, alternating conventional performances of English and Appalachian balladry with fusions that incorporated early music, classical, jazz and rock arrangements. Among her landmark works from the 1960s and 1970s are the albums Folk Roots, New Routes (with guitarist Davy Graham), Anthems in Eden (with her sister Dolly Collins and the Early Music Consort) and No Roses (with folk-rock group the Albion Band). These and other works are considered highly influential in terms of song preservation, reinvention of tradition and the introduction of British balladry to new audiences.

Shirley Collins’s performances are marked by her clear and unaffected singing style. She has described her approach to performance as ‘singing with the same voice you speak with’ and has expressed admiration for those traditional singers who have been able to communicate directly and simply but still with individual style. This style can be described in her own words as ‘straightforward, not necessarily unadorned but very lightly adorned … you’re not selling the song, you’re just singing it’.

This straightforward approach can be found in Shirley Collins’s singing, even when it is accompanied by less conventional instrumentation, as on the 1971 folk-rock album No Roses. As an example of this, I’d like to share a clip of a personal favourite from that work, one that some of the Music graduands sitting here will have heard me play in my first year popular music class. The song is ‘Claudy Banks’, associated with the Copper Family of Rottingdean.

After withdrawing from her singing career at the end of the 1970s, Shirley Collins turned to lecturing, broadcasting and writing. She has given public talks on her experiences of song collecting in America, on the traditional music of Sussex and on gypsy singers in Southern England. In 2005 she published America over the Water, a book detailing her fieldwork with Alan Lomax.

Shirley Collins has been awarded the Gold Badge of The English Folk Dance & Song Society, made patron of the South East Folk Arts network, and awarded an MBE for services to music. She continues to be a touchstone for a wide variety of contemporary musicians, as evidenced last year by the release of Shirley Inspired, a triple album of songs associated with the artist, performed by a diverse range of contemporary musicians. She shows no sign of slowing down, having recently returned to the recording studio to produce a new album of English traditional songs and having also completed a second autobiography.

---

Revisiting Shirley Collins’ song catalogue

In the days surrounding the graduation ceremony I posted a series of reflections on social media about Shirley Collins’ music and the places it reflected and evoked. They form a log of my feelings at that time as I grappled with an inspiring song catalogue and an upcoming move across the country.

17 July 2016: Shirley Collins & Davy Graham, ‘Nottamun Town’

I started my celebration of the song catalogue with an interpretation of ‘Nottamun Town’, from Shirley’s boundary-pushing 1964 album with Davy Graham, Folk Roots, New Routes.

Graham was the globetrotting, finger-picking composer of 60s guitar standard ‘Anji’. Collins was the Hastings-born, London-based folk singer with the clear, unaffected style that had drawn praise from the likes of Ewan MacColl and Alan Lomax, with whom she’d toured the American south in the late 1950s collecting songs from Bessie Jones, Mississippi Fred McDowell and many more.

‘Nottamun Town’ (Roud 1044) was an old hard-times song—possibly referring to Nottingham—that would be revived by Bert Jansch and Fairport Convention and used as the basis for Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’. This version perfectly showcases Davy’s alternately ringing and pinched, swinging, blues-inflected style alongside Shirley’s crystal clear enunciation of the doomy lyric. On one level, a cold blankness that lets you know that this is a straightforward story, truthfully told; on another, an eerie beauty and a rhythmic pull that draws the listener in to the well of old weird Anglicana.

18 July 2016: Shirley Collins, ‘The False Bride’

This comes from Shirley’s first record for the legendary Topic Records, an EP from 1963 entitled ‘Heroes in Love’. A note on the rear sleeve informs the listener, ‘These songs are not about folk-heroes in any epic sense; just ordinary young men transformed by love’. That phrase ‘transformed by love’ encapsulates so many of the magical, tragic, sometimes farcical mutations that are related in the multilayered folk tradition.

‘The False Bride’ (Roud 154)—also known as ‘The Week Before Easter’ and with variants as ‘I Once Loved a Lass’ and ‘I Courted a Wee Girl’—narrates a typically doomed transformation, as a young man reflects, increasingly despairingly and suicidally, upon the nature of love. Or is it perhaps just his own inexperience and inadequacy, twisted through solipsistic narrative into a woman-blaming fatalism?

Shirley sings it in her unblaming, neutral tone, at service as always to the telling of the tale. As she would explain many years later in a wonderful interview with Michael Berkeley, the ways these songs should be sung is ‘straightforward, not necessarily unadorned but very lightly adorned, and you’re not selling the song, you’re just singing it. It’s just straightforward, plain, simple but subtle.’

Shirley accompanies herself here on 5-string banjo, another simple and subtle device that echoes the techniques used by many of the American folksingers she and Alan Lomax had recorded in the late 1950s. This version of the song is also inspired by a Lomax-related recording of the great Sussex singer and custodian Bob Copper, included in the LP series The Folk Songs of Britain. One of the song’s verses would also provide the title for No Roses, the classic 1971 folk-rock album Shirley recorded with the Albion Country Band: ‘I went down to the forest to gather fine flowers / But the forest won’t yield me no roses’.

As well as the stark simplicity of this recording, I love the record sleeve of the EP, with Shirley looking up and to the side at the words ‘of Sussex’.

19 July 2016: Shirley & Dolly Collins, ‘Geordie’

This recording of ‘Geordie’ (Roud 90) comes from Love, Death & The Lady (1970), the second album that Shirley recorded with her sister Dolly for the Harvest label (the first being the classic Anthems in Eden). It’s a melancholy record, as most attest, with many tales of doomed romance and class conflict. ‘Geordie’ is a great example of the latter, the tale of a man condemned to hang for wanting to feed his family.

As related on the Mainly Norfolk website, this was the third time Shirley had recorded the song. This rendition is notable for the addition of Early Music instrumentation, present throughout the album and its predecessor. The cool, unruffled vocal cuts a straight course through the sad story while the various instruments weave in and out of the arrangement, occasionally threatening to sail off in rebellious counter directions, but ultimately staying true to the thrust of the song. There have been many great renditions of ‘Geordie’ (or ‘Georgie’, as it also appears) captured on record and video. This is one of them.

20 July 2016: Shirley & Dolly Collins, ‘The Sweet Primeroses’

During the University of Sussex graduation ceremony at which she was awarded an honorary degree, Shirley Collins spoke movingly of a life spent in song: as listener, folklorist, custodian, singer. From humble beginnings in Hastings as a daughter of working class, left-wing art lovers and granddaughter of keepers of the oral tradition, to travels in the American South in search of musicians and songs, to her career as singer and writer, the life story unfolded like a compelling ballad.

Modest and mindful of the other graduands receiving their awards, she closed with notes of congratulations and a message of hope for her young listeners. Connecting her life story to theirs, she said ‘I hope you find a passion that sustains you and brings happiness and fulfilment in a more peaceful world. And if things go awry from time to time, just remember these lines from a Sussex folk song: “There’s many a dark and cloudy morning turns out to be a most sunshiny day”’.

Those lines come from ‘The Sweet Primeroses’ (Roud 586), a song associated with the Copper family of Sussex. It became the title of Shirley’s 1967 album, a work described by David Suff as ‘a landmark recording of the English folk-song revival’. It’s a gorgeous rendition, given extra poignancy by the accompaniment of Dolly Collins on portative pipe-organ. In her speech, Shirley stated her wish to share the honorary degree with her late sister.

In her 1967 liner note to The Sweet Primeroses album, Shirley wrote of the title track:

A last song from the Copper family, whose songs sound to me like national anthems – or like national anthems should sound. All the Southern countryside is here, with a grave, stylised account of a formal meeting on a particular midsummer’s morning, the heartbreak of parting tempered with a stoical optimism. Dolly’s arrangement has some of the Coppers’ spirit and some of “the pretty little small birds too”.

For my part, it was an absolute joy to meet Shirley and her family and guests and to spend a good part of the day in their wonderful, welcoming company. It was a day I remember fondly still, not only for the role I was able to play in the event, but also because one of my PhD students graduated that day along with a cohort of undergraduate Music students who I’d enjoyed teaching immensely and several of whom I am still in touch with (I was speaking with one of them just two days ago). It was a high point of my academic career.

University of Sussex graduation ceremony, 20 July 2016. L-R: Sanjeev Bhaskar (UoS chancellor), Shirley Collins, me, Michael Farthing (UoS vice-chancellor).

22 July 2016: Shirley & Dolly Collins, ‘A Leavetaking: Pleasant and Delightful’

I concluded my July 2016 posts with a track from Anthems in Eden, the classic 1969 album by Shirley and her sister Dolly, accompanied by the Early Music Consort directed by David Munrow. The early music instrumentation—including rebec, crumhorn, harpsichord, viols, bells, rackett—was an innovation that proved influential on other experimental folk musicians of the period, including Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, albeit that they opted to use rock instruments.

This track, which bears the double title of ‘A Leavetaking’ (‘Leaving-taking’ on some copies of the album) and ‘Pleasant and Delightful’ (Roud 660), is typical of the musical melange of Anthems in Eden. It includes several repeated lines featuring a male chorus, such as ‘And the larks they sang melodious’ (my personal favourite).

It’s a song of leaving and possible return, a departure taken on an otherwise glorious day.

In the summer of 2016, I’d been listening to Shirley Collins’s music while driving around the Sussex countryside and I was reminded of the constant connections between singer, song and place. Happenstantial moments would happen, such as the day I drove past the Eight Bells pub in Jevington while playing Anthems in Eden, then, on arriving at my office and opening a Copper Family CD booklet to check some Collins-Copper connections, I saw a picture of Jim and Bob Copper singing outside the Eight Bells in 1950.

Listening to Sussex music and moving through the Sussex countryside, song would echo place and vice versa. Shirley caught this beautifully in her liner note to The Sweet Primeroses album, when she wrote ‘Through these songs I get the same leap in the heart as when I catch sight of a hill figure like the Long Man of Wilmington, or Stonehenge, or the Malvern Hills. Wherever I go in Britain, history seems to press through train windows, and the songs I love best help to celebrate it.’

I thought about this as I prepared my own leave-taking from Sussex. In September I would take up a new post at Newcastle University. I was excited by the possibilities of reconnecting with former colleagues and friends (I’d studied and worked in Newcastle from 2003 to 2012), but was also sad to leave Sussex, my home for the past four years. I’d found the University of Sussex a superb place to work, with wonderful, supportive colleagues. The county of Sussex is beautiful. When the university celebrated a wonderful daughter of the county, I was delighted to be part of that story. It was pleasant and delightful.

---

Shirley Collins at 90

All that was nine years ago, and much has happened since. Word was already out by the time of the graduation ceremony that Shirley had returned to the recording studio after a gap of over three decades. I alluded to it in my speech at Brighton Dome, though I didn’t mention the reasons for the gap. The event wasn’t about that; we were gathered to celebrate all she had achieved, not the setbacks she’d suffered.

When Lodestar, her first new album in 38 years, appeared late that year, the backstory became part of what made her return triumphant. That story can be found many places online. Rather than repeat it here, I’ll offer a few suggested links for anyone interested in hearing from Shirley herself about her absence from and return to performing:

• An interview with Shirley Collins on Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, 11 November 2016

• ‘Shirley Collins: Heartbreak stole my voice. Singing again is extraordinary’, Letter to My Younger Self, The Big Issue, 3 June 2023

• ‘Shirley Collins recalls she could not sing after breakdown of her marriage’, The Standard, 6 August 2023 [adapted from the episode of Desert Island Discs in which Shirley shared her life story and outs soundtrack]

It was wonderful to witness the critical acclaim for Lodestar in 2016 and to see the joy so many people found in Shirley’s return to recording and performing. And it was delightful to meet Shirley again when she and her band travelled north to play a show at the Sage Gateshead in March 2017.

Lodestar was followed by a second album for Domino, Heart’s Ease, in 2020 and a third, Archangel Hill, in 2023. These albums and the live performances that have accompanied them have cast Shirley inevitably in thee role of elder custodian of folk song. Unlike her early recordings, in which her high clear voice stood mostly in distinction from the people whose songs she had collected on her field trips, now she sounded more like her sources.

Take, for example, her return to ‘Death and the Lady’ (Roud 32443, related also to Roud 1031). Here is the version she recorded with her sister for the 1970 album Love, Death & The Lady:

And here’s the Lodestar version, with a video directed by Nick Abrahams:

As much as we can project such concepts onto singing voices, I hear more experience in the later version, more reckoning with life and death. In Abrahams’ film, the visuals help of course: chicks hatching in skulls, the timeless, implacable landscape, the 81-year-old singer’s face superimposed on a picture of her younger self.

I mentioned in my speech at the graduation ceremony that Shirley has often spoken about singing with the same voice you speak with. I hear more of that in the recent recordings. Where many of her early albums kept the experimentation to the instrumental arrangements and left the singing gimmick-free, there was still a sense of a ‘folk voice’ performance rather than a field recording.

You can hear the closing of the gap between singing and speaking voice on the many live performances that Shirley has graced us with in recent years. The one below is from 2020, at the time she was promoting Heart’s Ease. It was lockdown time and so it’s a ‘Tiny Desk (Home) Concert’. That seems apt for Shirley, whose home in the Sussex town of Lewes is an important part of her identity. The video should start at 4:51, with Shirly introducing ‘Sweet Greens and Blues.

‘Sweet Greens and Blues’ was also a return to earlier material. Shirley’s first husband Austin John Marshall (who also wrote the words) had recorded a version of the song by Shirley and Davy Graham in the mid-1960s. That version went unreleased until 2020, when it was included as a bonus single with vinyl copies of Heart’s Ease.

‘Hares on the Mountain’ (Roud 329) provides what must be one of the longest gaps between an early and late Shirley Collins song recording. The song appeared on her on her debut album Sweet England in 1959 (recently reissued by Moved By Sound).

Shirley returned to the song for her 1964 album with Davy Graham, Folk Roots, New Routes. The most recent version is from the 2023 album Heart’s Ease.

I continue to find it inspiring to hear a voice reattach itself to a song after such a long time. To think what was happening in 1959 and what has happening in 2023. To listen again now, on the occasion of Shirley Collins’ ninetieth birthday. To wonder at the continuum that songs and voices offer.

So now to conclude and to finish my song (Roud 1206)

In closing this celebration of Shirley Collins, I want to mention a few other resources that are well worth exploring: further links in the chain, evidence that many were keeping Shirley in mind during the long silence between her 1970s recordings and her 2010s renaissance.

There was David Tibet of the experimental band Current 93, who released a compilation of Shirley’s music on his Durtro label in 1992 and who encouraged her return to live performance in 2014.

Another David, David Suff, reissued Shirley’s music on his Fledg’ling label, including the acclaimed box set Within Sound in 2002.

There have been excellent articles and book chapters over the years about Shirley’s music. I particularly like those by Rob Young (for Uncut and for his book Electric Eden) and Jude Rogers (‘Our Shirley’ for Hole & Corner, various pieces for The Guardian and The Observer, the ‘Gilderoy’ chapter in The Sound of Being Human) and Stewart Lee (his liner notes for Lodestar and several pieces preceding them, not all easily linkable).

In 2014, the team of Fifth Column Films (directors Tim Plester and Rob Curry) and Burning Bridges (producer Paul Williams) created a Kickstarter to fund The Ballad of Shirley Collins. The film was released in 2017 and is available to watch on Vimeo. The funding project also led to Shirley Inspired, a collection of recordings by contemporary artists of songs Shirley had recorded. At the time I pledged to support the project, the album was only scheduled to be a digital release; later, it became a triple album released by Earth.

As I mentioned in my speech at the graduation ceremony, I used to regularly play my Sussex students the version of ‘Claudy Banks’ that appeared on No Roses, the 1971 album by Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band. It’s an album I’ve also enjoyed discussing with my colleague Matthew Ord, whose recently published Sound Recording in Post-War British Folk contains a brilliant analysis of another track from the album, ‘Murder of Maria Marten’.

---