Shirley Collins: ‘The music was in my blood’

Shirley Collins answers the phone on the first ring. When you’re releasing a new album for the first time in nearly 40 years, you don’t have time to hang around.

The fact that Collins has released a new album at all is a thing of wonder. She was a queen of the English folk revival, and lived a giddy life during the 1950s to the 1970s, working shoulder to shoulder with song collectors and field recordists such as Alan Lomax, musical adventurers such as Davey Graham, the scenesetting The Albion Band and her sister Dolly.

Albums such as Folk Roots, New Routes (with Graham from 1964) or No Roses (with the Albion Band, 1971) were vivid encounters from the edge where English folk tradition was beginning to break new ground.

And then, silence. After the breakdown of her marriage with Ashley Hutchings in the late 1970s, Collins developed dysphonia and her singing voice was damaged. She retreated to the shadows, worked in the British Museum and ran an Oxfam shop. People still searched her out.

There was an album, Shirley Inspired, with Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Angel Olsen, Lee Renaldo, Alasdair Roberts, Graham Coxon and many more singing songs she was associated with. David Tibet from avant-garde collective Current 93 went further.

“About 20 or so years ago, David called me up and said he loved my music and could he come see me. Apparently, I burst into tears and said that I thought I had been forgotten.

“Over the years, we formed a friendship and he tried to persuade me to sing again. I kept saying no, I couldn’t do it. After a few years, I said I would, but I chickened out of it. 18 months ago, he asked me once more and I said yes and this time I did it. He is obviously a very patient man.”

She’d a very simple reason for giving it a go now. “I had been singing songs in my head all the time, but not out loud, and I realised I couldn’t bear to let it go. There were so many songs I wanted to sing.”

Home studio
Collins recorded the album at home – "I didn't want to go into a studio at my age and face some young engineer who'd destroy my confidence" – and is as pleased as punch with the outcome. "It's lovely to just have this album in front of me and think 'it's okay, Shirley, it's okay'."

She cackles about the bodycount which adds up throughout the album. “No one ever pretended that traditional songs were all cute and meek. The bodycount is the same as any violent film you’re going to watch or video game you’re going to play. In traditional songs, they sing about everything.

“Nothing is taboo, nothing is left out. I find the history behind all of them so fascinating and moving. I find the thought of all those people before me who sang these songs to be fantastic.”

Her immersion in folk began with film. Collins and her sister would go to Hastings on a Saturday to visit the library, sell copies of the Daily Worker on the streets for their mother ("my mum was an ardent socialist and feminist. It was so humiliating and really put me off politics") and go the cinema.

"We saw Night Club Girl which was the story of a girl discovered in the Tennessee mountains singing a folk song and she was taken off to New York where she sang in nightclubs. I thought that would do for me."

She wrote to the BBC to let them know (“as you do”) and her letter reached folk song collector Bob Copper who was collecting songs in Suffolk and Hampshire.

“He was visiting Hastings to collect from the fishermen in the old town and dropped up to see us. Of course, Dolly and I, being stupid teenagers, sang this very long Scottish ballad which we’d learned from the radio and which we tried to sing in Scottish accents.

“I feel so ashamed when I think of it now, but Bob had teenage children of his own and he had an inkling of what it was all about.”

Collins went to teacher training college, but the lure of the music was too great.

“I heard about the English Folk Song and Dance library at Cecil Sharp House and I knew I had to go there because I didn’t know what else to do.”

She started taking part in sing-around clubs and hearing field recordings. “They were extraordinary. They reminded me of my grandparents singing. None of the other singers could cope with listening to unaccompanied singers; they wanted to play their banjos and stuff and deliver not proper folk songs and more like what Peter Paul & Mary would sing.”

Moved in
Irish musicians such as Sarah Makem, Seamus Ennis and Margaret Barry entered her orbit.

"I'd met with Alan Lomax and had moved in with him and he'd Margaret over a couple of times and it was my job to look after her while she was in London. She was a bit of a handful. I can clearly remember the first time I heard her sing She Moved Through the Fair. If there was anything absolutely utterly confirmed that this was the music I loved, that was it."

She joined Lomax on his 1959 trip across the American deep south to collect songs and make recordings. “Before I went, I knew I loved English music but I was romantically inclined towards Appalachian music because it comes from here anyway and it’s fascinating how it ended up over there. The longer I was there, though, the more I realised I was English and I wanted to be an English singer. Alan sent me home finally, he wanted to be on his own in the end, and it was a relief because I could come back and find out more for myself.”

She calls herself “an honest singer” when she looks back at her life. “Annie Briggs was another honest singer, but I don’t think other people got it or understood the music properly. I trusted myself that I did understand it because I was steeped in it. The music was in my blood.”

- Lodestar is out Friday, November 4th on Domino Records