Frost and Fire

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Blue Murder on The Watersons: Mighty River of Song Morning Looks Charming, The The Watersons: A Yorkshire Garland; Now, for the novice: This album was a big bang 1965 Melody Maker Album of the Year that spawned Shirley and Dolly Collins’ Anthems Of Eden, No Roses by the Albion Band, Pentangle’s everything, Fairport’s Liege & Leif, Mike and Lol Waterson’s’ Bright Phoebus, Mr. Fox, Robin and Barry Dransfield, Steeleye Span, anything on the Fellside label, the Incredible String Band, Hedgehog Pie, Trees, solo singers like Vin Garbutt, Roy Harper, Pete Morton, and everything else, including my current Midwest Americana occasional craving for Marmite, a Theakston Old Peculiar, and a McVitie’s Digestive. Yeah, the village green grass is always greener.

Feeling part of a dynasty in musical terms is a great feeling' ". The Guardian. 12 May 2007 . Retrieved 6 January 2022. We thought – my generation of musicians – that we'd all get old and grey and there'd be nobody left. And then all this new generation of young musicians came up, and we all said, 'Thank God.' So if people say traditional music has got to be like that, or like that, then you're going to freeze it. You may as well put something in a museum or bury it in the ground in a time capsule and dig it up so many years later to see what it was like then. You can't do that with tradition. You have to hope each generation brings their own thing to it, so it keeps going forever." What to say about the performances? Suffice to say it’s no surprise that this album was so influential and popular in its time. These four people can sing, and they do so with enthusiasm and zero pretension. Mike has a unique, slightly adenoidal voice that, like Dylan’s, grows on you the more you listen. Norma’s burnished alto is one of my favorite voices of all time. Lal doesn’t take lead very often, but when she does as on “Christmas Is Now Drawing Near At Hand” it’s an immediately classic voice and delivery. But of course what really stands out is the group singing, whether in unison or in harmony. Most often, one of the singers will drop down a third or a fifth on the final word of a line or verse (see “Earsdon Sword Dance Song” for especially good examples of this) it’s simply magical. The Watersons were an English folk group from Hull, Yorkshire. They performed mainly traditional songs with little or no accompaniment. Their distinctive sound came from their closely woven harmonies. They have been called the "most famous family in English folk music". [1] Style [ edit ]Lal Waterson: Teach Me to Be a Summer’s Morning Shallow Brown The Watersons on Peter Bellamy: Wake the Vaulted Echoes;

I was a 17/18 year old hardcore country blues fan in the West country when Frost and Fire came out,” remembers the musician and former fRoots editor, Ian A. Anderson. “It was one of the first English folk records I heard that really impressed me, partly because to my blues-attuned ears it sounded really weird, it was gutsy, had an unfathomable wildness and clearly some sort of “authenticity” – whatever I thought that was. I don’t think the provenance of the songs entered my consciousness at the time – it was just a good noise. I only heard this stuff because folk clubs were where country blues players got booked, and so your ears got opened to other possibilities. The weirder the better. I thought Shirley Collins was weird, and it was only after a while I realised it was because these people sang in English – local English – rather than fake American, Scottish or Irish, as was the norm.” The Watersons recording Frost and Fire in Bill Leader’s bedroom. Photo credit: Brian Shuel Mike Waterson on The Watersons: Mighty River of Song Three Maids A-Milking Norma Waterson: Bright Shiny Morning Three Pretty Maidens The Watersons: Green Fields; Oliver Knight on The Folk Collection T Stands for Thomas Lal & Norma Waterson on The Watersons: For Pence and Spicy Ale; Blue Murder on The English Collection Banks of the Dee Norma Waterson: Bright Shiny Morning Barbary Allen Norma Waterson: Bright Shiny Morning Barley and the Rye, The Lal & Norma Waterson on The Watersons: Mighty River of Song Barney Lal & Norma Waterson on The Watersons: For Pence and Spicy Ale; Jo Freya’s Lal Waterson Project: Lal Flower of Sweet Strabane Norma Waterson: Bright Shiny Morning;And speaking of resurrection, rebirthed record collectors take note: This Frost And Fire gets a timely revisit with Topic Records issuing the vinyl pressing at 45rpm “ for optimum sound quality”. Lal Waterson & Oliver Knight on The English Collection Come All Ye Faithful Christians The Watersons: Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy; The importance of Epiphany or Twelfth Night is represented by Jolly Old Hawk, before Mike takes the lead once more on Pace-Egging Song, as we move to Easter with Pace-eggers begging for eggs, (and strong beer), long a symbol in pagan belief as a symbol of life and renewal of life, especially at springtime. This is followed by the spring-time ballad Seven Virgins (The Leaves of Life). Sung with mournful beauty by Norma, the song relates to a visit made by Mary to visit her son ay Calvary, in the company of seven virgins, although as Lloyd notes, the parallels between the resurrection of Christ and the slaying and renewal of kings in pagan belief as portrayed in mumming plays is transparently obvious. We’ve divided our cycle of customs according to the calendar seasons–winter, spring, summer, autumn and winter again. Less formally, we might better have divided them according to the economic seasons–the ploughing, sowing, augmentation and harvesting of crops. For it’s due to their relation with economic life, not to any mystical connection, that the song-customs have persisted right up to our own time. Just as one doesn’t need to be an ancient Greek to be moved by the plays of Aeschylus, so it’s not necessary to be anything other than an ordinary freethinking twentieth century urban western man with a proper regard for humankind, to appreciate the spirit and power of these songs. To our toiling ancestors they meant everything, and in a queer irrational way they can still mean much to us.