Category Archives: Folk music

Bella Ciao: a brief history of the resistance anthem sung to Viktor Orbán

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A look at the origins and appeal off the song MEPs used to serenade the Hungarian PM in Strasbourg

“This is not Eurovision,” said the speaker of the European parliament, Roberta Metsola, as she tried to silence leftwing MEPs greeting the visiting Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, with a rowdy rendition of the classic anti-fascist anthem Bella Ciao.

The bang-your-fists-on-the-table motif at the heart of this earworm of a ditty – whose title means “Goodbye, beautiful” – may indeed sound like something cooed through dry fog by a spandex-clad blond at the European song contest. But the story it tells reaches far deeper into the continent’s history than the annual kitsch music extravaganza, telling an age-old tale of the left’s determined struggle against political oppression.

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‘We searched for ladies over 70’: on the trail of Jordan’s forgotten folk music

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An arts organisation has been seeking out and recording the region’s traditional music and is teaching the lyrics to young singers

In the Jordanian town of Tafilah, a six-year-old boy softly hummed a song. His family were astonished, and his 82-year-old great-grandmother, Jawaher Al Ahmad, overheard and began to cry. She asked the child who had taught him the “hajini”, or Bedouin folk song, and said: “The last time I heard that song was at my wedding.”

Her great-grandson, Ahmad, had learned the tune as part of the I’m My Voice project run by Tajalla for Music and Arts, a cultural organisation founded by Russol Al Nasser.

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Mercury prize 2023: London group Ezra Collective secure first ever jazz win

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Band say unexpected win is ‘testimony to good, special people putting time and effort’ into helping young people to play music

The 2023 Mercury prize has been awarded to Ezra Collective, the London band whose propulsive blend of jazz, funk and Afrobeat has electrified audiences and cemented the capital’s jazz scene as one of the world’s most exciting.

“We met in a youth club,” said drummer and bandleader Femi Koleoso on accepting the award for the year’s best British or Irish album for Where I’m Meant to Be, the band’s second release. “This moment we’re celebrating right here is testimony to good, special people putting time and effort into [helping] young people to play music … let’s continue to support that,” he added, citing grassroots collectives in London such as Tomorrow’s Warriors and Kinetika Bloco.

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Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian singer-songwriter, dies aged 84

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Musician best known for folk-pop hits such as If You Could Read My Mind and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald continued to tour in his later years

The Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, best known for folk-pop hits such as If You Could Read My Mind and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, has died at the age of 84, his family has announced.

His longtime publicist Victoria Lord said Lightfoot died at a Toronto hospital on Monday evening.

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Joni Mitchell teams up with Cameron Crowe to script her biopic

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Legendary folk star is reportedly offering input into screenplay for drama film about her life

Cameron Crowe, the director of Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire, is developing a new drama film with Joni Mitchell about her life.

According to a story on the entertainment site Above the Line – which was subsequently reposted on Mitchell’s own website – the project is not a documentary and Mitchell has been collaborating with Crowe on the script for the past two years.

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‘He sounded great’: David Crosby was working on new album when he died, musicians reveal

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Folk-rock pioneer ‘writing, playing, singing his ass off and preparing a fantastic show’ in his final days, says guitarist Steve Postell

David Crosby was working on a new album and planning to tour again until the day he died, according to musicians who worked with the folk-rock pioneer in his final days.

The founding member of the Byrds, and Crosby, Stills and Nash died last week at the age of 81. But other artists who were working with Crosby on new music told Variety that his death had came as a shock, as he’d been rehearsing for a new tour and “seemed practically giddy” about new songs he was working on.

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Raffi Cavoukian: from children’s troubadour to climate campaigner

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These days the Canadian singer, 75, is as likely to be belting out protest songs as performing whimsical tunes

With 13 albums, more than 12m sales in North America and a devoted following, he’s been called the most popular children’s singer in the English-speaking world, a title that has spanned generations. But pivoting from hits such as Bananaphone and Baby Beluga, the Canadian singer Raffi Cavoukian has since followed in the footsteps of his folk music heroes, dedicating much of his later career to advocating on children, social justice and the climate crisis.

“Nobody can guarantee a future, but who has the right to steal our children’s future?” the 75-year-old, who performs as Raffi, said in an interview. “The stakes are very high right now. People ask me if I’m hopeful. But I heard recently that hope is a verb. So I’m active.”

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Archie Roach, Australian songman and voice of the stolen generations, dies aged 66

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Tributes pour in for musician whose song Took the Children Away became the anthem of the stolen generations

Archie Roach, the Indigenous Australian songwriter whose celebrated song Took the Children Away brought national attention to the story of the stolen generations, has died aged 66.

Roach died at Warrnambool Base hospital after a long illness, surrounded by his family and loved ones.

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Martha Wainwright: ‘Forget rock excess, life on the road was a juggling act for me’

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The Canadian-American singer-songwriter on why she needed to tell a different story in her candid autobiography

The rock autobiography is typically a male genre, telling tales of excess so competitive that readers could be forgiven for wishing Keith Richards, Neil Young, Roger Daltrey, et al, would break the monotony by taking up wood whittling.

But now comes Martha Wainwright, whose autobiography, published this week, is a female-gaze account of what it takes to juggle relationships, familial and domestic circumstances with life under the stage lights.

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Roughly the size of Wales: four reflections on Welsh identity in the 21st century

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From addressing the grievances of history to making ancient music modern, four writers consider what it means to be Welsh today

History helps people feel they belong. This is why people can feel angry when history is reinterpreted or retold in ways that make them feel uncomfortable. And yet that is not always a bad thing, since so many comforting views of the past are deeply flawed. History should not just exist to serve the present, but to challenge it, too.

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‘I wanted to try cocaine, but Jimi was against it’: Janis Ian on her tough, starlit life in music

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Hendrix and Janis Joplin warned her off drugs, she sang for James Brown and Salvador Dalí offered to paint her. Janis Ian’s confessional folk-pop is still sensational – so why is she retiring from recording?

‘I learned the truth at 17 / That love was meant for beauty queens / And high school girls with clear-skinned smiles / Who married young and then retired.” Janis Ian’s At Seventeen is an indelible portrait of life from the perspective of a socially awkward unattractive teen, inspired by a newspaper article that the singer-songwriter read about a young woman who thought her life would be perfect. “I learned the truth at 18,” the girl told the journalist. Ian changed her age and spent three months working on the intimate and confessional lyrics.

“You couldn’t write a song like that without having gone through it,” Ian says, video-calling from her home in New Jersey. Now 70, her hair is short and white, no longer the dark curls she sported on her album covers during the 60s and 70s. “The first time I sang At Seventeen in public I did it with my eyes closed. I felt like I was naked and I was sure the audience was going to be laughing.”

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Jazz, Old Norse and ‘troll tunes’: the strange, stunning music of Shetland

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It’s 550 years since the islands became part of Scotland, and the archipelago is still not for the faint-hearted. But it has inspired its own diverse music, where fiddles and accordions meet the sub-bass of the sea

Five hundred and fifty years ago next month, the king of Norway lost a deposit he had put down to settle a debt: more than a hundred wild, treeless islands in the sub-arctic North Sea. The Scottish king, James III, had wanted Rhenish florins, but he had to settle for Shetland instead.

The archipelago eventually became part of the UK and has since developed a diverse, distinctive musical culture. This weekend, at the annual Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow, the Shetland 550 concerts will celebrate it, bringing together experimental composers, jazz performers, poets and players of traditional tunes. The series is co-curated by the award-winning fiddler Chris Stout, who was born in the three-mile-long Fair Isle (population: 68) before moving to the Mainland at eight (population: 18,765). “Although, even there, you’re still only ever three miles from the sea,” he says.

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Anaïs Mitchell: ‘Hadestown was larger than life. This album is life-sized’

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The singer-songwriter is back with a new album after a decade spent nurturing her award-winning musical. She reflects on white privilege, finding a musical community – and moving back to rural Vermont

“Anything that you love can become a trap,” says the singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. She’s talking about the career-defining stage musical Hadestown, an energetic Depression-era retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice which dominated her life for more than a decade.

Mitchell first toured it as a lo-fi theatre production in 2006, travelling through Vermont in a converted school bus, turned it into a concept album in 2010, and then spent several years reworking it for the stage with director Rachel Chavkin. Since opening on Broadway in 2019, Hadestown’s timelessly American tapestry of folk, blues, jazz, gospel and cabaret has won her a Tony award (and collected eight in total), a Grammy and a place on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2020. But it left her facing the question: what now? Her new book of exhaustively annotated Hadestown lyrics, Working on a Song, feels like a final clearing of the decks prior to the release of her self-titled seventh album, her first collection of original songs since 2012 and her “escape pod” from the musical.

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‘I need to not be violent to myself’: Big Thief on pain, healing and their intense musical bond

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The folk-rockers have weathered divorce and trauma to become one of the US’s best bands. Loved up with one another on tour, they explain their need for imperfection – and why recording is like sex

It is early afternoon in downtown Nashville, and the party is already going strong. Bachelorettes in pink cowboy hats are flowing, mask-free, in and out of the honky-tonks. The members of Big Thief, though – Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, Max Oleartchik and James Krivchenia – are sitting outside the Ryman Auditorium like dots of oil floating atop the water. No one seems to notice that one of the US’s best bands is scattered around a patio table a few hours before their show tonight, just yards above the 24/7 bacchanal.

“There’s a pigeon-keeper up there,” says the band’s frontperson Lenker, leaning forward in her chair in a horse-print shirt, jeans and a bandanna, her gaze fixed on a small skyscraper. She points, and the rest of the band follows her finger to a group of birds on top of a building, furiously in motion. “They’re flying in circles, so there has to be a cage up there. They only do that when there is someone conducting them.”

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Fire, cider and ‘heavy metal morris dancing’: the resurgence of wassailing

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A centuries-old outdoor folklore ceremony featuring singing, dancing, costumes and crop-blessings, the wassail is having a pandemic-era revival – with witchy reinventions

On a January night in the tiny Herefordshire village of Eardisland, a crowd of hundreds is being led to an orchard down a muddy country lane. Their leaders wear tall hats, garlanded with fruit, feathers and flowers; their faces are a damp, mossy, green; their ankles jingle with bells. It is very dark: the only light comes from a crisp, crescent moon and the flaming torches that men, women and children hold in their hands.

The scene may sound sinister, but there is joy in the air at this crop-blessing wassail, a midwinter folklore ceremony, usually in apple-producing counties, involving singing, dancing and other folk customs. At Eardisland, the Leominster morris – they in the extravagant hats, plus flowery jackets made from old bedsheets and curtains – pour cider made from last year’s apples on to tree roots, hang toasted bread on tree branches to tempt the spirits, and light fires to represent renewal and the coming spring sun. The mood is jolly. “I’ll hopefully not set my leg on fire,” says the announcer, Josh Johnson, to laughter, before stamping flames out.

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Joni Mitchell: ‘I’m hobbling along but I’m doing all right’

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Singer discusses health difficulties in rare public speech as she accepts Kennedy Center award

Joni Mitchell addressed her health difficulties in a rare public speech as she accepted her Kennedy Center Honor, one of the most prestigious awards in American cultural life.

At a ceremony attended by Joe Biden – in a show of support for the arts after the awards were snubbed by Donald Trump – Mitchell discussed the issues she’s faced in the wake of an aneurysm in 2015 that left her temporarily unable to walk or talk.

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The greatest songs about the climate crisis – ranked!

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As Cop26 opens in Glasgow, we provide the soundtrack, ranging from Gojira’s metal fury to gorgeous environmental paeans by Childish Gambino, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell

From its cover shot of a submerged bedroom down, 2019’s Titanic Rising feels like an album informed by the climate crisis, but the lyrics seldom address it explicitly. Something to Believe is the perfect example: a plea not to feel overwhelmed by or nihilistic about the challenges faced, beautifully steeped in the lush sound of early 70s Los Angeles.

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‘She went her own way’: the tragic and unusual life of folk singer Karen Dalton

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In a new documentary, the underrated singer’s life of depression, addiction and poverty is told while her incredible talents are celebrated

The outlines of the life led by singer Karen Dalton tell a heartbreaking tale. It was one scarred by consistent poverty, intermittent homelessness, bouts of depression and escalating alcohol and drug addiction, culminating in her death from Aids at 55. Yet, to Robert Yapkowitz, who co-directed a new documentary with Richard Peete titled Karen Dalton: In My Own Time, “there’s an inspirational element to her story. Karen was an artist who didn’t compromise. She made music that she was proud of with the people she loved. And that was the focus of her life.”

Related: Beatles on the brink: the truth about the Fab Four’s final days

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‘I don’t want to remember these things’: dark pop poet John Murry on surviving rape, heroin and family strife

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The singer-songwriter talks about his relative William Faulkner, his violent childhood and drugs – and saves a surprise until the end

If you’re after cheery crowdpleasers, John Murry is not your man. Murry is 41, barely known, and has never come close to denting the charts. Yet he has been compared to the great existential pop poets Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker. And with good reason – he has a rich baritone, writes gorgeous ballads and is half in love with death. The titles of his first two albums, The Graceless Age and A Short History of Decay, reflect the melancholy at the heart of his work. The title of his third, The Stars Are God’s Bullet Holes, is equally bleak. Yet, it turns out that Murry has a surprise in store.

The singer-songwriter is related to the Nobel-prize winning American novelist William Faulkner. Like Faulkner, he paddles along his stream of consciousness – sometimes ferociously. You get a sense of what his songs are about, but seldom know for sure. Take the new album’s opener, Oscar Wilde (Came Here to Make Fun of You). We get the references to terrorist attacks and the images of foreboding, but the meaning is left to us.

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