85 f


ments covering what happened in Sussex, Bris- tol and Leeds have appeared and now there is Brian’s book, recording more than 50 years of folk music activity on the Isle of Wight.


Brian would seem to be the ideal person to undertake the task with his total immer- sion in all aspects over several decades: he has been singer, morris dancer, dance caller and has undertaken more than his fair share of the organising of clubs, concerts, festivals, dances, morris sides and so on; just the sort of bloke that performs such a vital, often thank- less work that has made the whole thing work. Without committed, unpaid organisers like Brian up and down the country, the whole thing would grind to a halt.


The book is around 90 pages, well pro- duced on substantial cream paper and ring bound. You could not say that his writing is deathless prose, but he makes a thoroughly competent job and his enthusiasm shines through on every page. He certainly has a lot of ground to cover; for a relatively isolated island community, there was definitely a great deal happening there.


The book includes a number of “island variants” of songs and Brian sings them and others on the accompanying CD Folk On Wight (Village Bike Records) in his cheery voice, unac- companied or with straightforward backing.


www.menofwight.org.uk/sales/fow.htm Vic Smith Great Spirits


Randall Grass University Press Of Mississippi ISBN 978-1-60473-240-5


The subtitle of this book is Portraits Of Life- Changing World Music Artists. Whether most fRoots readers would have ever expected to see these eight artists gathered together in a world music gallery is debatable. The com- mon denominator is that the author “per- sonally encountered [them] in one way or another” – which includes working as a jour- nalist and for Shanachie or, in the case of raks sharki (colloquially belly-dance) dancer Nadia Gamal, “witnessing her sole perfor- mance in the United States” in 1981. The first portrait is of Nina Simone (The High Priestess Of Soul). Then come Sun Ra (Composer From Saturn), Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (The Afrobeat Rebel), Bob Marley (The Reggae Shaman), Augustus Pablo (Composer Of Dreams), The Neville Brothers (First Family Of Groove), Yabby You (The Jesus Dread) and Nadia


Gamal (The Oriental Dance Diva). It is a bold choice of characters, carried off well but not completely convincingly.


The better portraits are, to use the old journalistic expression, quote-rich. The Fela Anikulapo-Kuti one, for example, includes what is presumably a verbatim transcript. Fresh out of Ikoyi Prison, Grass asks him if he will be suing for wrongful imprisonment. “How can I sue a government in a court I have already said is corrupt? I’ve sued them many times and they didn’t pay me anything.” A revealing pen-portrait emerges. The reader comes away with some insight into the man, his music and his struggles. In the case of “tone scientist” Sun Ra (“my neighbour for twelve years”), the portrait that emerges is well researched but not as insightful as the neighbour business might have promised, though the insights are good that his saxo- phonist John Gilmore provides into what is niftily called “forbidden temple music”. The quotes, it turns out when you go to the Notes, are largely culled from sources such as Robert Mugge’s Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, John F. Szwed’s Space Is The Place: The Life And Times Of Sun Ra. If the eight subjects hold any appeal, there is much here to engage with. The one thing that irritated is down to a per- sonal preference. I prefer authors to be large- ly invisible and Great Spirits is sown liberally with a voice in the first person singular.


Available through Amazon. Ken Hunt Land Of The Seal People


Duncan Williamson Birlinn ISBN 978-1- 84158-880-3


This posthumous collection of 24 of Duncan’s stories comes from transcriptions of record- ings made by his ethnomusicologist wife, Linda. About a half of them have appeared in two of his previous books published in 1991 and 1992.


The legends, songs and stories of the silkies, the half-seal, half-human shape- changing creatures are a central theme in the folklore of the Highlands and islands and anyone who has been close enough to see the near human antics of seals and the way they interact will understand why.


Anyone who heard Duncan tell his sto- ries when he first came into contact with folk- lorists and continued to hear him as he became a leading internationally recognised storyteller will recognise that these stories


Duncan Williamson


are told in the way that he used later in his life, which has its good and bad points. He became accessible, more sophisticated, used a wider vocabulary whilst moving on from that raw, exciting language enriched with the Doric, Gaelic and traveller cant that charac- terised his storytelling as a younger man.


What never changed was the range of


the storyteller’s techniques that made him compulsive listening. Much of the develop- ment of the stories is achieved by Duncan using reported speech and there are few sto- rytellers that can make the colloquial pas- sages of a tale seem so real, so believable even when the conversation is taking place between a person, often Jack, and a fairy, a wind or a seal.


Another skilful technique that he uses is to avoid naming the mythical creatures that we encounter, but when someone is wearing a long, soft, black coat and they are shuffling awkwardly, we get the message.


It is my firmly held belief that people who have had the privilege to have heard Duncan live will get most out of this book; being in his company when he told stories was an unforgettable experience. Buy this book, but also try to hear recordings of Dun- can as it will enhance the enjoyment of these stories. www.veteran.co.uk/kyloe.htm would be one source of such recordings.


www.birlinn.co.uk Vic Smith


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