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Angela Remembered: The Life Of Angela Gradwell Tuckett

Rosie MacGregorWaterMark (ISBN 978-0- 9570726-3-3)

Ola Belle Reed And Southern Mountain Music On The Mason-Dixon Line

Henry Glassie, Clifford R. Murphy, Douglas Dowling Peach Dust To Digital (ISBN 978-0-9817342-7-9)

Born in Lansing, North Carolina, in 1916, Ola Belle Reed is one of the all-time greatest per- formers of authentic old-time music and a pivotal figure in the American folk song revival. Listening to the radio in January 1966, Philadelphia resident Henry Glassie became transfixed by the voice of Ola Belle, who was performing with her brother Alex Campbell and Burl Kilby in a live broadcast from Oxford, Pennsylvania.

Over the next two years, Glassie record- ed Ola Belle performing her deep repertoire of folk ballads, minstrel songs, country stan- dards, and originals, both solo and with vari- ous members of The New River Boys and Girls – a string band originally founded by her father and uncle. 24 of those recordings fea- ture on the first of this book’s two accompa- nying CDs, glorious performances of songs like Uncloudy Day, The Ranger’s Command, My Home’s Across The Blue Ridge Mountains, Black Jack Davy, John Hardy and her own iconic signature song, I’ve Endured.

Glassie’s biography of Ola Belle is rich in her own recollections, and his beautifully tex- tured writing is both authoritative (“Her thumb never left the thumb string and she got her shuffle by picking up after she had picked down with her index finger”) and insightful: “When she told the men behind her to slow down, she did it to preserve melodic complexity, and even more to set a pace comfortable for singing. In bluegrass, where men dominate and athletic musician- ship prevails, the voice is an instrument and the song is a vehicle for sound more than text. But Ola Belle cared, above all, for the message in the lyrics. During her moment of change in the sixties, Ola Belle was not only bringing old songs and sounds into the pre- sent. She was bringing a modest domestic tra- dition, familial and feminine, into the pub- lic.”

The book’s second part, Southern Moun- tain Music On The Mason-Dixon Line, begins in 2008, with Maryland State Folklorist Clif- ford R Murphy meeting Alex Campbell’s nephew Zane Campbell, erstwhile member of New York punk band Hard Times, whose pro- ducer, Thomas Erdelyi (aka Tommy Ramone) was “floored” at the realisation he was work- ing with a musician related to Ola Belle Reed.

The story of how Campbell embraced his musical legacy and how Murphy went on to meet and record Ola Belle’s descendants like Hugh Campbell and Dave Reed, is thrillingly told, both in text and across the second disc.

We ran short of new superlatives for

Dust To Digital’s releases some time ago, but with this beautiful book, published in collab- oration with Indiana University and Maryland State Arts Council, they may even have sur- passed themselves.

www.dust-digital.com Steve Hunt

I think that I may have once met Angela Grad- well Tuckett. To my shame, it was the descrip- tion of her (by a Swindon Singer’s Club mem- ber) as: “an elderly, dignified-looking lady, who played the concertina incredibly slowly to accompany her renderings of interminably long, meandering ballads…” that triggered this vague recollection. Having read Rosie McGregor’s affectionate, yet even-handed account of this remarkable woman’s life (1906–1994) I wish I’d paid more attention.

Born into an affluent, artistic and politi- cally aware Bristol family, Angela Tuckett (she married Ike Gradwell in 1962) joined the Communist Party in 1931 and caused a diplo- matic incident four years later when, as a member of the England women’s hockey team, she refused to give the Nazi salute before a match in Germany.

Bristol’s first woman solicitor, she became the Head of the Legal Department of the National Council for Civil Liberties in 1940 before moving to The Daily Worker (now The Morning Star) as legal advisor and journalist, and to Labour Monthly. She was also a quali- fied air pilot and the author of several books.

The empathy between author and subject (Rosie MacGregor is a folk singer and journal- ist, an active trade unionist, peace campaigner and feminist) makes for an insightful book about “one scary woman” who (pictured on the cover with her beloved concertina at the Greenham Common airbase fence) was both widely respected and well-loved.

www.watermarxmedia.yolasite.com Steve Hunt

Sounds Of The New Deal: The Federal Music Project In The West

Peter Gough University Of Illinois Press (ISBN 978-0-252-03904-1)

“Imagine it,” writes Peggy Seeger in the foreword to this thoroughly-researched book by Peter Gough: “the president of a huge, relatively new country sunk in a catas- trophic, between-wars depression has the intelligence, vision and courage to set in motion and massively fund an arts program

Ola Belle Reed

that would invigorate and unite a popula- tion, significant elements of which were indulging in social fission. Indeed, imagine it now, in our time of economic chaos and regression, when our cash-strapped govern- ments regard the arts as the first thing to go when cuts need to be made.”

Imagine it indeed, and then read this extraordinary account of the west of America discovering its own sense of identity in hard times through grassroots music. Initiated in 1935 as a part of President Franklin Roose - velt’s New Deal plan for fiscal recovery, the Federal Music Project (FMP) and the subse- quent Works Progress Administration Music Program (WPA) offer a vast and fascinating subject for the study of both America’s politi- cal left and its folk revival. Myriad migrant cultural connections are made via the individ- ual efforts of the likes of the redoubtable Sid- ney Robertson Cowell, wife of the composer Henry Cowell and Director of the WP Califor- nia Folk Music Project which recorded 185 musicians in twelve languages, along with extensive sets of photographs.

“Music Unites All Races At School” declares a celebratory 1937 Pasadena Post article. Elsewhere, the contradictions of America’s racial dilemmas are highlighted two years later, when The Negro Spiritual Singers of the Federal Music Project are brought to the White House by Charles Seeger to perform for the King and Queen of England, while a group called The Black-Outs were out performing minstrel shows under the FMP’s auspices.

It’s not all field recordings and folk songs of course, as FMP orchestras also flourished, those in the west most heavily influenced by Dvoˇrák, who advised the American com- posers: “Nothing should be too low or too insignificant for the musician. When he walks he should listen to every whistling boy, every street singer or blind organ grinder… for every now and then I catch a strain or hear a fragment of a recurring melodic scheme that sounds like the voice of the people.”

That “voice of the people” insinuates

through Sounds Of The New Deal, calling the reader to listen again to those early record- ings with fresh ears and new insight.

www.press.uillinois.edu Steve Hunt

Sunlight And Shade: Celtic Song Affairs

Jake Walton Song Bücherei (ISBN 978-3- 923445-11-0)

Inspired by Donovan and Bert Jansch, Jake Walton started performing in Cornwall’s folk clubs in the 1960s, before embarking on a lengthy recording career alongside the likes of Roger Nicholson, Wizz Jones’ Lazy Farmer, Jez Lowe and Eric Liorzou. A much-admired singer-songwriter (Ralph McTell is a particu- larly enthusiastic admirer) Jake is also a huge- ly accomplished musician on guitar, hurdy- gurdy and Appalachian dulcimer.

Sunlight And Shade includes original compositions, traditional songs like The Trees They Do Grow High, Bogie’s Bonnie Belle and The Wheel Of Fortune and musical settings of poetry by Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Robert Burns, WB Yeats, Walter de la Mare and John Masefield.

Lyrics, melody notation, chords and tun- ings are given for each song, with Jake’s background notes for each one in both English and German, with illustrations by Vivien Nicholson. The inclusion of the chord shapes used in the various open and alter- nate guitar tunings will be welcomed by gui- tar players both for the playing of these songs and for providing a gateway to fur- ther exploration.