Traditional transatlantic folk songs spring to life on this splendid collection of bloody tales.
Drag city isn’t a label you’d immediately associate with traditional Scottish folk songs but when Alasdair Roberts pressed a demo of his songs into the hands of Will Oldham (AKA Bonnie “Prince” Billy) some years back he was taken into the fold, releasing a series of albums which sat somewhere in between alternative and traditional folk. ‘Remembered In Exile’, his second collaboration with Isle of Lewis singer Màiri Morrison, finds the pair of them delving more into tradition as they head across the Atlantic to record ten traditional Canadian songs with Scottish roots, aided and abetted by Nova Scotian bass player and musical arranger Pete Johnston. They draw heavily on the work carried out by the late folklorist Helen Creighton (also from Nova Scotia) who collected such songs with an emphasis on of the westward journey undertaken by Scottish fishers, crofters, merchants and their families as they migrated to Canada from the 1600s to the mid-1800s.
As such, many of the subjects of the songs here will be familiar to fans of traditional folk music with tales of lost love, tragedy and death and just the daily rigmarole of surviving in hard times prominent. Some of the songs are rendered in Gaelic, sung beautifully by Morrison, but the majority are in plain old English while all are delivered with grace, delicacy and, at times, a foreboding sense of doom. Chief among them is the seven minute tale which is ‘Katharine Jaffray’. A narrative ballad which unveils much as Fairport Convention’s ‘Matty Groves’ did, it tells the tale of two warring suitors for a maiden’s hand and has been long well known in folk circles under the title of ‘The Green Wedding’. Morrison and Roberts deliver the song quite wonderfully as it slowly builds to a fiddle and drum fuelled climax, their voices both entwined and sparring.
A wheezing harmonium drone adds atmosphere to the ship faring tale which is ‘Uilleam Glen’, a tantalising listen, while their rendition of the familiar air ‘Hi Horò’s Na Hòro H-eile’ is quite magnificent. The most contemporary take on these traditional artefacts is to be heard on ‘The Bonny House of Airlie’, a song which was collected in the Child Ballads. It’s a bloody tale and with its thundering double bass, shards of electric guitar and martial drumming it’s the most dramatic song on the album.
While such folk music might be considered an outlier in terms of Americana, Morrison and Roberts are working very much in the vein of bands from here in the UK and in America who find succour in these traditional sounds and ‘Remembered in Exile’ is, simply put, quite excellent.
