FOLK
BY JIM WIRTH
Angeline, Cohen And Jon ★★★★
Grace Will Lead Me Home
INVISIBLE FOLK. CD/DL/LP
A three-handed voyage to Amazing Grace-land.
Adopted as an African-American spiritual, Amazing Grace has a troublesome backstory: written in 1772, its author John Newton was a parish priest in Olney, Buckinghamshire, but also an ex-slave ship captain. With echoes of Peter Bellamy’s ballad opera The Transports, this thoughtful project finds Sorrow Songs auteur Angeline Morrison, concertina maestro Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne and Jon Bickley wrestling with Amazing Grace’s roots while honouring its message of redemption. Morrison gets inside Newton’s process on the Rusholme Ruffians-alike Turn Round Newton and whips out a glorious autoharp-accompanied take of Zoe Mulford’s The President Sang Amazing Grace, while Braithwaite-Kilcoyne’s Fantasia On A West Indian Burial Theme is nobly elegiac. Bickley’s gruff Sorry, meanwhile, posits that any reckoning with the legacy of slavery can only begin with a proper apology. That Newton came out as an abolitionist in 1788, his seafaring past “a subject of humiliating reflection”, is a moot point, but the sounds here are sweet indeed.