|
When this article
was commissioned I had a good idea of the shape it would take. I've
admired Sara Grey's music for twenty years, been in a band with
her, become a good friend along the way, and feel that I know pretty
well what she's about. When we were rehearsing at her place some
ten years ago, I remember her son Kieron Means (the name comes from
Sara's first husband) talking to me about his teenage dream of 'making
it' with a band. And here he was now, Sara told me, doing gigs on
the folk scene and playing back-up on her new album. I was pleased;
it's fun to play music with your kid. Then I saw Kieron Means perform,
and realised that my feature about a great American singer whose
son plays a bit too, was going to become a write-up of not one but
two unique and compelling performers.
Sara Grey, well-known
for the emotional power of her singing, her mesmeric frailed banjo
style, and her deep knowledge of traditional song, has been around
the British folk scene so long that she's been more or less adopted
as 'one of ours'. She moved to Edinburgh in 1970, sick of the long-distance
travelling involved in touring the US: "With the distances and the
lack of traditional venues over there it's always been very difficult
to make a living from my kind of music. I came back from a tour
one day and saw that the odometer on my virtually new car was already
reading 150,000 miles!" Sara's dwelt for most of the years since
then in Britain, living these days on the Isle of Skye with husband
Dave. After the demise of her successful duo with Ellie Ellis, and
a period working with combinations of Roger Wilson, Dave Burland
and your correspondent in a variously potent or chaotic outfit known
as the Lost Nation Band, Sara has reverted to what she does best:
playing solo.
Seated with
her, overlooking the River Clyde and interrupted occasionally by
Glaswegian youths convinced that the presence of a microphone signals
celebrity presence, I begin by asking Sara how a gal from New Hampshire
got mixed up with traditional music and banjos in the first place.
Surely she didn't hear a lot up there? "Well, my Dad was stationed
before the war in North Carolina, so I got to hear some banjo music
when I was young. As I grew older, I started listening to more of
it and begged my Dad for a banjo, and he got me one when I was about
fifteen. By then my Dad was playing the fiddle: a bit of Cape Breton,
a bit of classical stuff, some Quebecois tunes. And there were songs
around me all the time, too, so it just seeped in, like osmosis.
I was in a band with a guy I knew from school called Sterling Klink,
and an old boy, R. J. Plunkett, a champion fiddler from Vermont.
Then I got involved with the Golden Ring, which was a strong nucleus
of traditional singers - people like Ed Trickett and Gordon Bok
- and it snowballed from there. I started singing, and travelling,
and collecting, and never really stopped. When I came over here
in 1970, the scene was really rolling in England and Scotland, and
I never looked back."
Sara's song
collecting is something not too many folk revival singers ever found
time for. It started in the late sixties with a venture into Northern
Ontario accompanying Shelley Posen, now a member of leading Canadian
trio Finest Kind. "There was a lot of singing in the logging camps,
and I began to realise how little of that stuff had been collected.
We got a lot of wonderful songs, and it helped that we were singers
ourselves, who could exchange a song for a song, not just folklorists
who stuck a microphone in somebody's face and said 'give us everything
you've got'. It's bothered me over the years to see people like
Jeannie Robertson get badly exploited. Lizzie Higgins used to tell
me how difficult it was for her Mom, and Sheila Stewart said the
same. Some of those American collectors were good at their job,
but they were like bulls in china shops, they just wanted to get
as much as they could. That's the last thing I've ever wanted to
do. I don't like the idea of music being treated as a dead anthropological
artefact; it's a living thing. When Jeannie had her stroke and couldn't
give any more, the collectors just went away and forgot about her;
she was expendable, an object rather than a living, breathing human
being whose songs were an integral part of her life. To me it's
important not to cut the songs off from the singer - they're inextricably
bound together."
Sara also collected
on South Uist, in the Hebrides, in 1970, living in an old 'black
house' with an earth floor. "It was an amazing experience, with
this gal called Kate Nicholson…. a gal?" Sara laughs, "she was ninety-four!
She spoke only Gaelic, and for four months we communicated mostly
in sign language, but we formed a great relationship. She was the
strongest singer outside the Balkans that I've ever heard; I think
the School Of Scottish Studies has the tapes."
When I first
heard Sara's music, around twenty years ago, she was appearing with
Ellie Ellis in a high-profile duo which held down prime slots at
folk festivals and got rave audience reactions. Ellie's guitar acted
as foil to Sara's banjo, and their repertoire contained a lot of
contemporary material alongside old-time music, but perhaps the
key to their appeal was a certain bubbliness and girlish humour.
I remember a soundman at Bromyard festival adjusting a drooping
mike stand with the words "It won't stay up," and Ellie bringing
the house down with the eye-rolling reply, "Oh, poor baby!" Sara,
though wasn't happy with the direction things were going. "We worked
together constantly for eight years, which is a long time for a
duo, and that sort of thing began to creep in more and more. I felt
it was too frothy and there wasn't enough depth to what we were
doing. There was so much inside me that wanted to come out in terms
of strong traditional songs, whereas Ellie was perhaps leaning the
other way. But she was having a lot of immigration problems anyway,
so really it ended naturally. After we parted company I heard a
few people muttering: 'Ah, but can Sara hold a night on her own?'
They didn't realise I'd worked on my own for years before that!
And, though I sometimes feel a bit swamped at festivals where I'm
a solo acoustic singer in the middle of all those bands, I've never
felt as confident as I do now working on my own, and - of late -
working with my son." Sara's repertoire has certainly headed back
towards the tradition since the duo parted. "Bob Coltman is the
only songwriter whose songs I still sing. He has a way of drawing
on the old themes and sliding them forward right into the 21st century,
so people can relate to them. But mostly I just hang on to my belief
in the old songs. They've always been near and dear to my heart,
and when Ellie left I started to really think about the movement
of songs across to America, which is my main interest these days.
Not many people had looked at it back then; there were pieces of
the puzzle on both sides of the Atlantic, but nobody had tried to
connect them all together. I suppose I was on a mission - one that
I loved."
It's a mission
that forms a large part of Sara's musical life now. Her workshops
on the subject, sometimes including the Scots singers Anne Nielsen
and Jack Beck to provide comparative versions of ballads, have become
very popular, particularly back home in the States where traditional
folk enthusiasts are fascinated by the ancestry of their own songs.
Sara has a huge store of American ballad variants such as her Little
Musgrave, in which the cuckolded Lord Donald exacts his revenge
not with sword, but with gun. Her interest was initially a reaction
to British misconceptions. "When I first came over here, Tom Gilfellon,
Mike Harding and Christy Moore were trying to get me work, but they
were getting feedback from some of the so-called Traditional Folk
Clubs saying: 'we like her singing, but she's American and we're
a traditional club'. That used to really gall me, when people refused
to gather in the whole picture of songs making their way across
the Atlantic, and all the permutations that resulted. It kicked
me off thinking that maybe I could quietly show that these songs
did migrate. It's taken years for some people to admit it; folk
singers can get very 'precious', and sometimes they try to claim
possession of the songs, and pretend they're unique to a particular
place. But of course they travelled, that's the beauty of them."
The way in which
old British ballads got honed down, mislearned, or improved by singers
in the Appalachians or the Canadian Maritimes is a source of wonderment
to those of us who've studied the results, be they magnificent or
amusingly garbled. Last year I was delighted to hear Suzanne Mrozak
of Boston, Mass., perform a version of Bonnie George Campbell in
which Mr. Campbell lived in Texas and "met a rounder who shot him
till he died" instead of merely disappearing in the Highlands, as
the Scots version has it. But Sara points out that even when ballads
didn't change, the reasons are fascinating. "I sing a version of
the broken token song Her Mantle So Green, which comes from County
Fermanagh, but is also sung in just the same way in New Brunswick,
just North East of my old home in New Hampshire. Why? Maybe it was
printed on a broadside, and people learned it without losing the
story or the tune, or maybe it was because of the isolation up there,
with no outside influences to bring about change. Then there's Her
Bright Smile Haunts Me Still, which I learned from the version by
Mrs. Martha Tillett on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but which
is also sung in Selkirk, in the Scottish Borders, where it's part
of the old tradition of Common Riding. It's the last song they sing
when the riders return to the square, and folks there reckon it's
about the beauty of Selkirk! People sometimes say to me, don't you
get tired of old songs, but I get really excited about the things
that happened to them."
Sara's new CD,
Boy, She's A Daisy, named after a line from a classic Fiddling John
Carson song, includes an Ozark version of that vigorous Transatlantic
migrant The House Carpenter, but otherwise leans toward indigenous
American material. That she's singing better than ever these days
is amply demonstrated by her rendition of Parting Hand, which sounds
so much fuller and more relaxed here than on a previous recording
of the same piece. Several unaccompanied songs are delivered beautifully,
but elsewhere the presence of fiddler Kate Lissauer and son Kieron's
guitar lends the album an old-timey feel, and Sara's certainly playing
more banjo than she did on her previous CD. Back then I felt that
her love of unaccompanied singing was beginning to relegate the
banjo to a minor role. "Yes, I began to realise I was putting the
banjo down more and more often. But it's such a lovely instrument
to accompany a lot of the songs I do. To me the song is the main
thing, and I never try to push in an instrument just for the sake
of it, but if it needs something to move it forward then I pick
up the banjo."
The way Sara
plays the banjo is the antithesis of the wall-of sound bluegrass
merchants to whom more is always better. A firm believer in the
principle that the spaces are as important as the notes, Sara plays
with a very open style and a slow, hypnotic pulse, and it can work
even on British material. "I've been using it lately on Tiftie's
Annie in a G modal tuning; it sounds so plaintive. I do tend to
pulse a song with a banjo, like Rosianne (Bob Coltman's rewrite
of Lucy Wan). The banjo is soft but there's something menacing about
it in the modal tunings that works really well."
The banjo players
that helped to shape Sara's style aren't household names: "Reed
Martin and Pete Hoover influenced me a lot. They're fairly unknown
in the UK, though banjo afficionados know them well. Pete's a great
big fellow about six foot eight, huge guy with hands like melons,
but he plays with the softest touch. Same with Reed Martin - huge
hands, gorgeous player. Kyle Creed was an influence as well, because
I tend to play up the neck. I recently got an old Weymann banjo
which I used on some of the tracks on the CD. It's a very simple
old banjo with a vellum head and a lovely sweet resonance. It's
got a plunkier sound, not as bright as the Whyte Ladie." Sara's
referring here to her regular instrument, once famously left in
the back of a taxi in Oslo - her frantic attempts to explain to
a non-English-speaking operator that she'd left a banjo in an unidentified
cab somewhere in the city are fondly remembered.
There are more
people - especially younger ones - performing the old songs these
days, but few get as deep into them as Sara Grey does. She seems
to connect with them at an unusually deep level emotionally. "I
do, yeah. I identify with them and they have great relevance for
me. And I think if I've achieved anything at all in all these years
it's that I've been able to pass that on to Kieron, that's what
pleases me the most. He has such a tremendous passion when he sings,
it goes right to the very core of himself, he's totally immersed
in them."
At the time
Sara said this, I hadn't seen Kieron Means perform. A few weeks
later, though, I witnessed the truth of her words at Whitby Folk
Festival; Kieron is a terrific performer on account of just that
passion. His voice is especially striking, achieving the rare combination
of a high lonesome edge with a warm richness of timbre, and it has
a power to move the listener that few of his generation can match.
His guitar playing is unconventional, its spareness a mile away
from any notion of fancy picking, but it's highly effective, while
his stage presence is charismatic, yet laid-back. His songs range
from old-time, through the blues - which he sings with startling
conviction - to the work of tradition-influenced songwriters, and
his own composition The Shark has people who know a good song when
they hear one nodding in approval. If Whitby audiences' enthusiasm
is anything to go by - and I hear similar stories from other festivals
- Kieron Means has a great future in folk music.
Meeting him
in the back room of Whitby Rifle Club, a festival venue he's just
wowed, I ask Kieron about his exposure to folk music: was he taken
around festivals by his mother, and did he relate to what he heard?
"I can't remember all the festivals she took me to as I was growing
up. I always enjoyed it, never resented going, I was always keen
to listen to my Mum and whoever else was on." Yet despite spending
many of his formative years over here, and hearing so much English
folk music, his repertoire is almost entirely North American. "I
often wonder why I don't have more British songs in my repertoire,
because I've grown up with them as much as I've grown up with American
songs, and I've heard many that I'd really like to do. I think a
lot of it is down to my guitar playing rather than my singing; I'd
be comfortable singing English songs, but I've spent a lot of time
playing blues or American style guitar, which might not fit them
so well."
That teenage
rock band I remembered (named Heartleap Well after a Wordsworth
poem - something you couldn't imagine Noel Gallagher doing), mutated
over the 1990s, selling their electric instruments and moving away
from straightforward blues-based material into more acoustic realms.
On the break-up of the band Kieron found himself absorbing material
from his mother. Some of it's still there in his current repertoire,
from traditional songs to things like Derroll Adams' The Sky and
Bob Coltman's heartbreaking Lonesome Robin, both resurrections from
Sara's back catalogue. His style, too, bears some of Sara's hallmarks,
notably the use of vocal vibrato. "Definitely," Kieron replies to
my suggestion, "it's not something I did consciously, but it's the
mocking bird effect - I listened to my Mum a lot and it comes through
in what I do. And I don't object to people telling me they've noticed
it, in fact it fills me with pride when they do. Everything about
the way I sing is really down to my Mum."
The emotion
he puts in to his singing, without getting histrionic, is another
point in common. "Mum's often said to sing things as you say them,
and I just do that. But I try to think about what the song is saying
as I'm singing it." His delivery of the blues is particularly passionate.
He doesn't try to imitate black singers, but neither does he sound
like the usual run of white bluesmen, and there's an almost other-worldly
feeling about the way he slides up to high notes on songs like Hard
Killing Floor. "The blues just struck me, I always loved it. I think
the important thing is to approach it as naturally and as simply
as possible, not to try to imitate. It's not necessary to play things
in the style of the people you heard it from - if you sing a blues
song it doesn't have to sound like Robert Johnson, although a lot
of people try to do just that."
Even Kieron's
guitar style, using the thumb to pick out melodies, betrays the
influence of the banjo. "Obviously I had the frailing style in my
head, though I never played banjo myself. I've always loved acoustic
guitar but, from the first, when I was learning a song, I would
pick out the melody - which is the most important part of the song
apart from the story - on the guitar. That would leave it sounding
a bit bare, so I'd add a drone to it, and that in turn would often
get me involved with playing in open tunings. I try to play the
melody with my thumbnail but in fact it often ends up on the flesh
of my thumb (here he shows me an impressive callus). It's all about
trying to keep things simple, and never putting anything in that
isn't necessary. It's not the only style I play in; sometimes I
approach things as a conventional guitar player might, and pick
in the standard style, and I like to do the odd instrumental. Sometimes
I like to sing unaccompanied as well; it all helps to vary the set,
and you do need to remember you're putting on a show, not just getting
up and playing the songs the way you do in your bedroom. It took
me a while to realise that," he adds, with a rueful smile.
Having been
based for the last four years in Arizona, Kieron has done a lot
of his performing there and along the West Coast. "A lot of the
gigs are coffee houses, bookshops, house concerts, libraries - wherever
I can get them. I did play some bars as well but I do a more bluesy
set there, since that's what they want. Most of the actual folk
clubs and festivals I've played have been over here in England."
Kieron's debut
CD is called Run Mountain, after an old-time song, and he describes
it as a sister album to Sara's new one: mother and son act as accompanists
on each other's albums, and the presence of Kate Lissauer on fiddle
is common to both. "I really wanted to record an album with my Mum,
and we had a lot of fun doing it," he says, "I'm really pleased
with the result." When I ask him whether he's ambitious for a career
or just playing music for fun while the opportunity presents itself,
Kieron is disarmingly frank: "I'll tell you the truth. I love to
play music, but I love it mostly because it connects me to things
that are important to me, rather than having great ambitions as
a performer to do this or that. A lot of the motivation to do gigs
comes from other people who encourage me. Years ago I did dream
of reaching a high level, but now I just enjoy going along to festivals,
playing my stuff and seeing other people play theirs. And that's
it. I'm happy - it's all I could ask for."
|
