Shirley Collins just doesn't sing old songs — she inhabits the experience within and transmutes them. She hears songs holistically, and out rings a voice that never overtakes, but rather lives with the melody. Collins innovated the folk music tradition, heard most strikingly in the 1964 album, Folk Roots, New Routes , and gave shape to bands like Pentangle and Fairport Convention.
Then she stopped singing ... for almost four decades. You can hear that story in a stirring interview , moderated by our own Bob Boilen and conducted jointly with Colin Meloy. That story is also part of a new documentary which has been making the cinema circuit in the U.K., and I eagerly await its U.S. debut.
The Ballad Of Shirley Collins' soundtrack roams her early career, most notably the 1959 recordings she made with Alan Lomax, and features tracks by closely-tied singers like Texas Gladden, Sidney Hemphill-Carter and her sister Dolly Collins. But it also contains two previously unreleased BBC recordings from 1958. The presentation of the anonymously written hymn "Wondrous Love" is simple: a banjo picking an arpeggiated pattern quietly under Shirley Collins' voice. But the performance weighs the salvation of soul with a plainspoken introspection; her voice may sound defeated, yet it also admits a crack of light.
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