root salad Christi Andropolis
American comes to learn British folk and discovers the blues. Arsebackwardness investigated by Ian Anderson.
W
ith her fluid, bluesy voice that effortless floats over her melding of British traditional songs with spooky influences
from her native USA, it’s hard to believe that Christi Andropolis only fell into the arms of most of this music a few years ago. Her addictive debut album Rust + Holler – the second 2010 whammy from Furrow Records that had already brought us her friend Emily Portman’s masterwork The Glamoury – seductively revisits the centuries-back process where Anglo ballads were transported across the Atlantic and mutated into something other. Like Emily’s, it’s a killer.
“I grew up in Niagara Falls, in New
York State,” she tells me down the old- fashioned land-line from Newcastle, “and I had played almost exclusively classical music –my dad is a music teacher. I played piano right from the start and then when I was about 13 I started playing violin. Then he’d started up an Irish band so we started doing traditional Irish stuff and some pop songs and I was in his group.”
Her name hints at a Greek back- ground, though.
“I'm third generation American. It was my great-grandparents on my father's side who were off the boat, so to speak. The other half of my family was predominantly Italian. My father has played some Greek music before and can play bouzouki, but it wasn't really an influence, more just a type of music that I was aware of, growing up.”
“In 2001 we had some friends who were living up in Northumberland and they told me about the [Newcastle] Folk Degree. So I was really interested and decided to go over for an audition, and within half an hour I was sold on it! So I moved over in 2002, had four years on the Folk Degree and I’ve stayed ever since.”
So where did those blues and ‘old weird American’ influences come from?
“Most of that came after I was here. I was so into traditional Irish music and was going to do exclusively fiddle, but when I came here – just being around all the dif- ferent tutors… About three years into it I started singing which I hadn’t really done that much of before. I found that doing English ballads didn’t really suit as the pro- nunciation of some of the words felt odd with my accent, so I started looking at Appalachian music and it really took off. And then I started doing blues.”
“The main source I had when I first got into it were the Alan Lomax record- ings, particularly from the ‘40s when he went into the prisons in the south, the field hollers, the work songs, road building
songs – everything was improvised and I think that’s what got me so fascinated. There were these people just making up music and it’s so beautiful and huge and completely alive. We’re really lucky on the degree because there’s this huge library of CDs and vinyl and I was just digging through one day, found that, then looked up online and found loads of collections of Alan Lomax stuff. But I started off with the field recordings, all the ballads and break- downs, voices from the south, Southern Journey, that kind of stuff.”
“Sara Grey was really influential, she came in at one point and I got to have a couple of hours singing with her – she gave me tons of material to look up, which was brilliant.”
“I’ve done it all backwards, haven’t I?! I went back one summer and I was lucky enough to go to the Library Of Congress, and because I said I was studying they let me look at loads of microfilm that hadn’t necessarily been printed in the books, and all the Cecil Sharp collections. I was able to make copies of all these fragments of dif- ferent versions and started piecing them together. That was another big thing for me as I had a real source there.”
“I absolutely love finding the American version and then going back and finding the British version and where it came from and seeing how it changed. And then what I started doing when I felt like the tunes didn’t suit my voice, was take almost all the text, which is traditional – I’ve put little bits in – but I always, always change the tune to make it my own.”
“Songwriting is pretty new for me, so I only included three originals on the album, but Winter Soldier has gotten a good response to it so far. ‘Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan’ was an event organised by Iraq Veterans Against the War in March 2008, where military veterans and active duty soldiers were invited to provide accounts of their experiences. Those accounts were posted online and once I started reading them, some of the images were so strong they just stuck in my head and became the song. I had really struggled to compose lyrics up to that point, so it was something of a catalyst!”
G
ig-wise, Christi currently works with David Newey who played guitar in Rubus, the band they shared with Emily Portman. “We actually started together playing for Emily’s final assessment – she wanted a guitar and fiddle and we were kicking around. But we kept it all traditional so that Emily could continue to write her own songs. In the duo, David does all his own songs, and I put together my things, just playing on each other’s as accompaniments.”
Blues used to be an accepted part of folk clubs back in the 1960s but you hardly hear any these days.
“I’m really aware of that because it’s what people always comment on. I thought it would be really standard and didn’t know how unusual it is.”
So is she here for the duration? “I love being here and I love the music that’s going on here. It’s a good spot to be just now. And as this blues thing is getting interesting… I can actually use the fact that I’m American, I don’t get shut out because of it. I’m allowed to play blues, I got the accent, don’t I…”
www.furrowrecords.co.uk F 15f
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