All in the Downs: Reflections on Life, Landscape, and Song

"Shirley Collins is a legendary English folksinger who was one of the leading voices in the UK from the 1950s through to the 80s. She really pushed English folk song in interesting directions but was similarly keen on preserving its integrity. She was right in there with people like Ewan MacColl, who she is brilliantly scathing about in this memoir. She writes really astutely about English folksong but also the interpersonal details of that folk scene. There’s a lot of love triangles—I think her second husband was cheating on her with somebody in this scene. Shirley goes to perform and this woman is wearing his jumper and she knows that he’s cheating on her. She suffers from a psychological condition called ‘dysphonia’ and loses the ability to sing, both physically and psychologically. So, she goes and works in an Oxfam in Brighton and in a job centre for, I suppose, something like thirty years. But somebody tempted her into trying to sing again and she did a couple of concerts five years or so ago, which led to her releasing a new album called Lodestar on Domino last year. This led to a revival of her music and renewed appreciation of her. I’ve interviewed her; she’s eighty-three, and she’s absolutely fantastic. She takes no prisoners, she’s really funny, and she is not interested in upholding the legendary figures of folk music. It reminds me in a way of Viv Albertine’s memoir where she doesn’t want to stoke the legacy of people like Johnny Rotten. She just tells it how she saw it. I don’t think she gets therapy. Part of it is having a lot of people believe in her, basically, and challenge her to do concerts. She talks about going to the rehearsal to sing one or two songs at the Union Chapel as part of someone else’s concert and really thinking that she wouldn’t be able to do it, and being surprised that she could. It’s to our great benefit that she could. I hope she makes many more albums. I can’t pretend that I’ve listened to all of them, but I thought it was absolutely wonderful. It’s really hypnotic and her voice has got such a fantastic grain to it as well. We often talk about how great older men’s voices sound but, just because there are fewer older women of that generation who are still participating in music, we have less of a fully rounded conception of the many many different ways that an older woman’s voice can sound. I thought hearing her all low and strident on those songs was really exciting. But I also love the music she made with her sister Dolly: their 1969 album Anthems in Eden is really fantastic. Yes! She writes about men who were really threatened by her. She was always protective about what folk music was and what it wasn’t. She went to this night where it was billed as a folk night, but actually they were playing skiffle. She was really annoyed and so she crossed it out on the poster with her lipstick and then the promoter of the night pointed a knife at her. “She takes no prisoners, she’s really funny, and she is not interested in upholding the legendary figures of folk music.” She also writes brilliantly about masculinity and what she finds attractive. It shouldn’t, but it feels delightfully subversive for a lady in her eighties to be writing about how sexy she found Alan Lomax and how sexy she finds Morris dancers. It really opened me up to the beauty of things that I never really contemplated or that I had just thought of as a bit parochial—I’m from Cornwall and so I’ve grown up seeing a lot of those traditions, but they always seemed a bit archaic. But to read someone valuing it as a really vibrant art form does make you see it differently."