lundi 31 Mar 2008, 14h16m
Shirley Collins’s book America Over The Water recounts her time travelling through the southern states of the US with Alan Lomax in the late ‘50s making field recordings of local musicians. It’s a fascinating book but the show – basically an illustrated lecture, though way more exciting than that sounds – really brings it to life. The show is a celebration of Lomax and, crucially, of the great singers and musicians he encountered – admittedly not people I knew well previously but I’ll be seeking out Texas Gladden, Mississippi Fred McDowell and the rest in the coming weeks. The fact that I’m able to do so is thanks almost entirely to Lomax’s (and Shirley’s) diligence, capturing their music on a prototype portable tape recorder (one of only two in the world at the time). The old recordings sounded fantastic through the Purcell Room sound system, the photos of the South in the ‘50s were eerie and humbling and some of the more animated characters – the Baptist preachers and scary Klan advocates – were brought to life by actor Pip Barnes punctuating Shirley’s reading by recreating some of the encounters.
Shirley presents all of this with complete modesty on her part, never getting in the way of the fabulous recordings and slides from the trip. Yet when she gets on to mentioning how the experience of hearing this music influenced her own singing, it’s a reminder that I'm here not only because she’s got a great story to tell but also because she made some of the greatest English folk records of all time.