Shirley Collins - Lodestar

Pitchfork 80

Shirley Collins is so deeply woven into the folk tradition, her own life story could be the dramatic tale of a forgotten threnody. Lodestar is Collins’ first album in 38 years, her first since she regained her ability to sing. Back in the late ’70s, following her divorce with her husband Ashley Hutchings, leader of the Albion Country Band, Collins lost her voice and retired from music. The doctors diagnosed her with dysphonia, but you might put it more fancifully; heartbreak robbed of her powers, just as some capricious faerie might steal away a child.

A working-class woman from rural Sussex, Collins learned traditional English songs passed down from her grandmother and aunt and soon fell in with the early folk revival. After meeting the song collector Alan Lomax at a party, she traveled with him across America, collecting music from foundational figures such as Bessie Jones and Mississippi Fred McDowell. The journey was serialized in her book America Across The Water, and some of the recordings found their way into the Coen Brothers’ seismic O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack. Today her admirers are legion: from Will Oldham to Billy Bragg to Current 93’s David Tibet, who was instrumental to coaxing Collins back to the stage in 2014. But as the comedian Stewart Lee—another long-time fan—writes in the liner notes, Collins’ music is “egoless,” her voice a conduit for these ancient and timeless songs. Never has this been so obvious as it is on Lodestar.

At 81, Collins’ voice has grit and grain, both old and strangely ageless. There is the sense that she has stood still, and folk has revolved around her. Recorded in Collins’ front room in her cottage in Lewes in rural Sussex, Lodestar is comprised of interpretations of English, American, and Cajun songs dating from the 16th Century to the 1950s. She is surrounded by a small coterie of collaborators, chief among them musical director/producer Ian Kearey of Oysterband and Ossian Brown and Stephen Thrower, members of Cyclobe and both formerly of the English post-industrial group Coil. Speaking of Lodestar, Kearey resists easy comparison to Johnny Cash’s latter-day recordings with Rick Rubin, but there are clear parallels. Essentially the trio’s role here is to curate an atmosphere that gestures back to Collins’ storied past, while authentically capturing her in the here and now.

There are fiddles, mandolins, and picked guitars, with Brown adding a droning hurdy-gurdy here, and a church pipe organ there. On several songs, there is something Collins simply refers to as “The Instrument”—a unique hybrid of a mountain dulcimer and a five-string banjo, which she commissioned back in the ’60s and played on 1968’s The Power of the True Love Knot. An opening 11-minute piece titled “Awake Awake—The Split Ash Tree—May Carol—Southover” weaves a rich web, tying together apocalyptic balladry, wailing hurdy-gurdy, Pagan carols, and the jingling bells of a Morris dancer. As Lodestar opens up, the theme of death takes hold—although life in these songs is cheap, and people perish in matter-of-fact ways.

“Cruel Lincoln” is the tale of a mason conned by a landowner, who returns to seek revenge. In the background, you can hear the birds sing in Collins’ garden, even as the tale of butchery unfolds: “There was blood in the kitchen, there was blood in the hall/There was blood in the parlor where the lady did fall.” On “Death And The Lady,” which Collins first recorded with her sister Dolly in 1970, a wandering woman comes face to face with the Grim Reaper; but the quaver in Collins’ voice lends this version a faltering quality, only intensifying its sense of somber fatalism.

If her voice is smaller now than back in the day, Collins is still capable of surprising range. A take on the old Cajun lament “Sur Le Borde De L’eau,” popularized by the Louisiana guitarist Blind Uncle Gaspard, is truly haunting. But a spry mischief runs through the nonsense song “Old Johnny Buckle,” in which the Johnny is given medical advice to rub his wife’s injured leg with gin, but drinks it instead, and is consequently sent to hell. This seam of black humor persists into “The Rich Irish Lady,” a song about a wealthy woman who spurns a doctor’s romantic advances, then falls ill and throws herself at his mercy. Not only does the doctor deny her, he announces that he will dance on her grave, and as the track segues into a manic Kentucky fiddle piece titled “Jeff Sturgeon,” you can imagine Collins kicking up her heels in her front room, cackling her head off.

Many of the recordings Collins made in her song-collecting days were of aged singers, transmitting the tales and melodies they themselves learned in their youth. Back then, she was their custodian, but after a lifetime carrying them, she sounds at one with them; they have grown around her, and she has grown around them. That Lodestar exists at all feels like a minor miracle. That it is so exquisitely done is a small blessing on top.