Angeline Morrison
The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs Of Black British Experience
★★★★
TOPIC. CD/DL
Black muses: lost voices imagined into British tradition.
Britain’s small pre-Windrush black population left little mark on traditional song, but Angeline Morrison (born in Birmingham to Jamaican and Scottish parents) retrofixed matters for one of the most important ‘folk’ releases of the last 12 months. Debuting on vinyl in 2023, The Sorrow Songs expertly splices stories of real black British lives into the Anglo-Celtic musical idiom. A stately mother’s lament for the drowned child found among the cargo of a Scilly Isles shipwreck, Unknown African Boy (d.1830) exemplifies the June Tabor-voiced Morrison’s soft power, but if she has miserable tales to tell (not least Mad-Haired Moll O’Bedlam), she offers hope too, guest Martin Carthy (father of the LP’s producer Eliza) adding more gravitas to the stirring Slave No More, a tale of inter-racial friendship gleaned from a Cornish headstone. Grave material stylishly handled.