Sam Lee - Ground Of Its Own

  by Benjamin Howarth

published: 8 / 3 / 2013

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Review

Good heavens, these are exciting times for British folk music. The Unthanks have drawn critical plaudits, Bellowhead are becoming an institution and have taken traditional music into the charts, while Lau’s improvised live shows have shown that folk can be as imaginative as any jazz group. No one sums up the rude health of modern folk better than Sam Lee – a fine art graduate, former professional burlesque dancer, trained survivalist instructor, then the promoter of an influential folk club and an academic who travelled the country meeting travelling communities and learning folk songs – after an apprenticeship under the late folk singer Stanley Robinson, he has now become a performer in his own right. ‘Ground Of Its Own’ was his debut album, released last year and already the recipient of a Mercury nomination. On the back of a UK tour, the album is being ‘relaunched’, giving listeners who – like me – missed it the first time round a second chance to listen. Lee harks back to the tradition that sparked the fascination with traditional music in the 1950s and 60s – the roving chronicler, finding folk songs and preserving them for prosperity. Unlike Harry Smith, though, Lee has taken those songs and breathed life into them – imbuing the traditional melodies with tinges of jazz and abstract electronica. The arrangements of the songs are the real selling point here – Lee and his band pride himself on using modern instrumentation without distorting the meaning of the traditional songs they are performing. There are no guitars on the album (many of these songs were written as unaccompanied ballads, so the music is an adornment rather than the core of the song). Instead, we hear fiddles and ukuleles, a beautiful jew’s harp, skronking trumpets and an enterprising use of samples. All this is wrapped around Lee’s nimble vocals, delivered with the gentle poise of Nick Drake and the lilt of Bert Jansch. Ambitious for folk music, he has said that he wants more artists to take creative risk (telling 'For Folk’s Sake' magazine that “my beef is always that there are not enough people bringing their own musical visions to the songs, too much replicative and derivative re-enactment. The scene has got to go forward, got to evolve, got to be a proactive musical sound-shaper and not a reactive responder to what is happening in the mainstream”). You suspect that Lee’s later records will be sparser, even less rooted in the typical folk sound than ‘Ground Of Its Own’, but for now, he has struck a fine balance – both recognisably part of the folk scene and strikingly unusual. It is not just the beautiful songs that make ‘Ground Of Its Own’ special. It arrived at a time when public sympathy for travelling communities has evaporated. Travellers are often patronised (‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’, though perhaps not always deliberately rude, has not fostered much real understanding) while politicians use them as cartoon devils (witness the morbid presentation of the violent removal of a travelling community from Dale Farm in 2011). Lee, by contrast, clearly loves and admires the traditions of travelling families (describing them as “our Native Americans” in an interview with 'The Guardian' last year). But the album works because it isn’t explicitly linked to the wider politics affecting travellers. Instead, Lee celebrates travelling culture on its own terms, taking their songs and making an album that is quite unlike any other released last year. I’m rather embarrassed to have missed this majestic music the first time round.

Track Listing:-

1 The Ballad Of George Collins
2 On Yonder Hill
3 Wild Wood Amber
4 Goodbye My Darling
5 The Jew's Garden
6 The Tan Yard Slide
7 Northlands
8 My Ausheen

Band Links:-

http://samleesong.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/samleefolk
https://twitter.com/samleesong
https://www.youtube.com/user/samleeson
http://www.songkick.com/artists/223444
http://www.pledgemusic.com/artists/130

Label Links:-

http://samleesong.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/thenestcollec
https://twitter.com/NestFolk