Audiopile Review: Who are the true English originals? Syd Barrett, Kate Bush, Mark Hollis, and of course the godlike Peter Hammill… But the great folk singer Shirley Collins MBE predates them all. Significantly, her newly reissued debut album, ‘Sweet England’ was released in 1959. There’s an invisible but highly audible line that makes anything released before 1960 sound unspeakably ancient. This line gives ‘Sweet England’ even more impact than it must have had upon release. It lacks the otherworldly arrangements that lit up those late-60s albums Collins made with her sister Dolly. Instead, she mostly accompanies herself on banjo for a set of traditional tunes. This vaguely anachronistic combination of an African/American instrument and Collins’ quintessentially English trilling is breathtakingly haunting. Shirley Collins bridged two periods of the folk revival: the Communist-youth-camp era of Woody Guthrie and Ewan MacColl and the elves-in-the-wood era of Fairport Convention and The Pentangle. In her hands, and in her voice, those two periods are reconciled, and their power is multiplied. These are the strange, magical hopes and dreams of the downtrodden English working people. And those dreams have never been described more eloquently.

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‘Sweet England’ along with its sister album ‘False True Lovers’, was recorded in the spring of 1958 when I was twenty-two years old. I had been living for the previous two years in London with Alan Lomax, the American folklorist, working for him as editorial assistant on his book The Folk Songs of North America and on his field recordings from America, Great Britain, Italy and Spain. The tracks that make up these two albums were recorded by Peter Kennedy and Alan in two days at Peter’s home ‘studio’ in Belsize Park. English traditional music, at its best, expresses and provides everything in song that I need and feel, both musically and emotionally. Sweet England represents the first shaky steps of a journey that I have been on all my life, and that, happily, I still am.” (shirley collins)