Sam Lee - Ground Of Its Own

Beer and Cheese and Finger In Ear

At worst, the folk-singer performance stereotype is a finger-in-the-ear with nasal delivery about bonnie lads and lasses victimised and/or hunted down and chopped to bits for illicit love affairs from times long gone when such ruthless retribution was the apparent norm; at best, it is a virtuoso played and sung encapsulation of socio-political and/or fantastical narratives about human emotion at its most melodramatic but apparently real.

And much inbetween.

Many people of my generation will have been introduced to ‘folk’ music through the rockier appropriation of bands like Fairport Convention, Pentangle and Steeleye Span, and then Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, and Martyn Carthy.

And many before and beyond.

Sometime around 1971, aged around 17 and studying for my ‘A’ levels, one of which was Economic and Social History, a couple of friends and I were invited by our Socialist [probably Communist] lecturer to attend a weekend History conference at Ruskin College, Oxford. I don’t recall a single lecture or other ostensibly educational aspect of being there, but I do vividly remember the few nights of listening to those also there and much older than me singing folk songs with powerful political content as we ate bread and cheese and drank loads of beer. It was inspiring in the way being politically active at a relative young age will keenly absorb. There was a sense of genuine camaraderie promoted by the context for being there, the ale, and those folk narratives sung with such passion and feeling linking us to a past of hardship and battle with various triumphs and disasters.

Sam Lee’s storytelling is not as portentous as those I have mainly characterised above. They are oral narratives collected largely from travelling communities in this country and tend to deal in love and loss, but are no less emotive for this. What is most significant for me as I reminisce about my aural embrace of folk music – something I have never let go though haven’t held as tightly as in my teenage years – is how Lee’s marriage of a totally traditional sound with a contemporary one makes this such a strong album. His clear baritone provides that sonorous depth associated with classic male folk singing, and the instrumentation on this collection of eight songs brings a current sound, more in the arrangements than the instruments themselves, where Lee’s use of a shruti box and the accompanying regular fiddle are hardly a modernisation [the shruti box, like a harmonium, giving a haunting sound, especially on the beautiful The Tan Yard Side].