Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Singer who led the 1960s British folk revival with her sister Dolly, known for albums and field recordings with Alan Lomax.
On the island
Eight records
I love dances. I love English and Scottish dances from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they were sort of proper slightly hooligan dances, you know. And this is the most glorious melody, fabulously played by David McGuinness's Concerto Caledonia, especially the fiddle player David Greenberg. So it's Chiling Auguira, played by the Concerto Caledonia.
Well, this is the Birds in the Spring from the Copper family. They are a very well known family in Sussex, and they've lived there for well over four hundred years, and they always sang in harmony. And it was just wonderful to hear them, the sort of robust voices of the brothers and the cousins and the fathers. I would want to remember the birds in the spring. I'd want to remember the skylarks as I walked over the downs when I was older. You know, so high in the sky you can't see them, but you can hear them.
Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band
This is one of my or no, it's my favourite hymn, the John Bunyan hymn to be a Pilgrim. Ruffon Williams collected a lot of folk songs in the early part of the um twentieth century, nineteen hundred and four, around that time. And this is um tune already existed for the hymn To Be a Pilgrim, one of my favourite hymns, the wonderful John Bunyan hymn. And in nineteen hundred and four or so Vaughan Williams was asked to Edit a new English hymnal. What he did was to attach some of the hymns to the tunes of some of the folk songs that he collected. So the hymn to be a pilgrim came from Mrs. Harriet Verrill of Monksgate near Horsham. And if you look in the New English hymnal, there's the words tune Monksgate. I love the lustily way Maddie sings it and that's how it should be sung.
What we're going to hear is just the sweetest recording of all time, I think a field recording that is from a little six-year-old girl in the traveller community, Sheila Smith, in Sussex in nineteen fifty-five. And it's just the natural way she sings this song that so delights me, either called Sweet William or Come Father Build Me a Boat.
I'll never forget the first sight I had of Mississippi Fred MacDowell. He'd been picking cotton all day. He came into the clearing where the shacks were, and there were children playing and chickens scratching about and dogs barking. And this very slight figure appeared through the trees in his work dungarees and carrying a guitar. And he sat down and played Sixty one Highway Blues was the first thing he played, and it was the most wonderful sound, the shimmering metallic sound of the guitar, and his wonderful voice, and the wonderful blues itself. I get goosebumps thinking about it now. It was so extraordinary. And Alan and I were just looking at each other, you know, shaking our heads in wonder, and Alan wrote the one word in his notebook, which he'd never written before, perfect, and that was Mississippi Fred McDowell.
Poor Sally Sits a WeepingFavourite
What I loved about Donnelly's I mean, Donnelly's arrangements are his Beautiful, and so true to the songs and so true to the Englishness or occasionally the Irishness of of a song. This particular tune, Poor Sally Sits a Weeping, is I think one of the loveliest of the English folk songs. And she plays it just on the piano so simply. But what I'd love to See, Noah, when I hear it, is that I see Dolly sitting at her piano or the flute organ, she was always so upright. and so graceful. Her hands are so beautiful. But it was just her demeanour was lovely. But this track I think is one it's one of the loveliest of English folk tunes anyway. And the way she plays it is so gentle and so It's so full of feeling and it just it sort of breaks me up when I listen to it still.
I've chosen Linda and Richard Thompson singing Richard's song A Heart Needs a Home. It was the one song I played over and over and over again all the time that Ashley and I were breaking up. It still moves me very much, and I just think Linda Thompson is one of the great singers, underrated, never quite properly acknowledged what a Brilliant singer, she was. So this helped me through some very Sad days.
One of my favorite movies is Local Hero. And anything with Bert Lancaster in. I love Local Hero, and the music is so great. I love Mark Knopfler. And it's called Going Home And so what could be, you know, better than that? And it's such triumphant music as well and um no, lovely. It makes me feel good every time I hear it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:29So what was it about folk music that you loved?
It was because our grandparents sang to us during the war. It was a comfort. So And I was in love to what they sang about. But a lot of the ballads do really go back hundreds of years when you know, love is a bit crueller as well, and people weren't afraid to sing about the s the strange, the deathly things, the evil and wicked things, as well as the beautiful things and the love songs.
Presenter asks
10:19Shirley Collins, when the war was over, you must have been looking forward to your father coming back. Do you remember his return?
I have a strange vision of him coming down the street carrying his de mob case, which was a wooden case. and wearing a b his de mob suit, which was a navy blue suit, and it just looked slightly too tight for him. But I didn't know that that was my Dad but I did know because my sister told me she said that's Dad coming down the road. Um and it was wonderful to have him home. But not for long enough, because he and Mum just couldn't get on. Mum had been used to, you know, running the place, just looking after everything and they just couldn't readjust to life together. Not at all.
Presenter asks
15:17So after leaving school you went to London and I think you started training as a teacher but left after a year. Why was that?
The keepsakes
The book
Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson is my favourite author. Jackson Brod is my favourite hero.
The luxury
solar-powered fridge full of Italian ice cream with lipsticks
I want a solo-powered. Surf replenishing fridge Full of Italian ice cream with a couple of lipsticks thrown in.
I didn't like it. My dad was supposed to send me I think fifteen shillings a week or a month but he never did so I never had any money and I used to steal stuff from other girls like I mean only things like squeezes of toothpaste and shakes of washing powder if I needed to do some washing. Never anything worse than that. But it was humiliating all of it. My heart wasn't in it. I didn't want to do that.
Presenter asks
18:56So Shirley, in the summer of 1959, you travelled to America to work collecting songs with the musicologist Alan Lomax. An incredible trip to go on, I imagine. How exactly did it come about?
I had heard so many programmes of Allen's collections in the British Isles and in Spain and Italy that he'd made in the in the fifties. And I longed to meet him, but thought I never would, until one day an invitation came from Ewan McCall to a party that he was throwing for Alan, who was just coming back to England after recording in Spain. First of all I went to work for him, but um it it sorta soon moved into a a relationship, although I was twenty years younger than him. But it was the most incredible experience because um I mean he he'd got albums coming out ab about the blues, about his field recordings in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. In the nineteen twenties or forties And I remember stepping on this wonderful ship, the SS United States. 'Cause that's how poorer people travelled, you know, it was only the rich that flew then. And it was a five day voyage out of the most Oh, just sumptuous food, you know, just being on deck looking at the ocean all the time, knowing that I was going to meet Alan at the other end.
Presenter asks
20:431959, very much the era of the civil rights movement. Did you get a sense of that social change that was taking place around you while you were traveling?
No. We were just there a year or so. too soon for that. I mean We ate in segregated restaurants. We swam in segregated pools. Everything's shaming. But it was that was all there was, you know. … but we were there to record the music of the people, both white and the black populations.
Presenter asks
26:58Shirley, the nineteen seventies had been another creative decade for you. You married your second husband, the musician Ashley Hutchings, but towards the end of that decade the marriage fell apart and it was at that point that you lost your voice. You developed a condition known as dysphonia. What actually happened?
We were working at the National Theatre in Production of Lark Rice to Candleford. And during that time Ashleigh fell in love with First one, then another, actress. And left her left just left me. He came home one one evening. When I had come home I had come home earlier and he came home late and said um I I knew something was wrong when he came through the drawer. And he said um I'm consumed with love. I'm leaving in the morning. And I remember just standing there crying All night long I think we stood there, and I just cried and cried and cried. But I still had to earn a living'cause he wasn't supporting me either, you know. And so I tried to continue to work at the National Theatre. But One of the actresses I mean, these were promenade performances, so the audience was right up, you know, as close as they could walk right in front of us. Okay. And the first actress you fell in love with would turn up night after night standing right in front of me. As I was trying to sing, but wearing his sweaters. I couldn't cope. I th I couldn't I didn't know what to do. Um some nights I was fine and could sing well. Some nights My voice was as shaky as anything. Some nights opened my mouth nothing came out at all. And it was eventually, I mean, finally so humiliating I had to stop. And you couldn't even sing in private. It wasn't just performance. I couldn't sing at all.
“I love dances. I love English and Scottish dances from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they were sort of proper slightly hooligan dances, you know.”
“I'll never forget the first sight I had of Mississippi Fred MacDowell. He'd been picking cotton all day. He came into the clearing where the shacks were, and there were children playing and chickens scratching about and dogs barking. And this very slight figure appeared through the trees in his work dungarees and carrying a guitar. And he sat down and played Sixty one Highway Blues was the first thing he played, and it was the most wonderful sound, the shimmering metallic sound of the guitar, and his wonderful voice, and the wonderful blues itself.”
“I'm consumed with love. I'm leaving in the morning.”
“I couldn't cope. I th I couldn't I didn't know what to do. Um some nights I was fine and could sing well. Some nights My voice was as shaky as anything. Some nights opened my mouth nothing came out at all. And it was eventually, I mean, finally so humiliating I had to stop.”
“I think I would take the Dolly track. Poor Sally sits a weeping just because I have such a clear picture of her when I hear that played.”