29 f
itive road trip. Meeting the relatives of bal- lad singers and playing the recordings back in the rooms in which they were made is part of their process. It might even be key to understanding why the songs and sto- ries they perform have an indefinable rich- ness to them.
“Because we didn’t write any of this music; we’re not the authors and we’re not playing anyone’s compositions either, the question of ownership is really tangled,” says Anna. “And it’s also important to us that we’re held accountable by the people who could hold us accountable for being respectful keepers of their stories. What’s the agreement when you talk to someone about where their story’s gonna go? I think it’s hazy because unlike journalism there’s not a set code of ethics to abide by. I think we’ve always felt that the best way to do our due diligence is to meet the families. That’s not the only reason.”
“It’s also this very rewarding human connection usually,” says Elizabeth. “At the very least it’s a human connection that feels really important.”
“And it’s also a way of making the songs and the stories more present for us. Because the old singers probably had many layers of multi-coloured memories associat- ed with the learning of the song and the times they sang it. And you can certainly gain those memories after learning a song in a library, and that’s very beautiful also. But now when I sing The Ripest Of Apples I have all my Anna feelings and thoughts about it. But then I have this layer of the visit with Linda Chappell – the great-grand- daughter of the ballad singer – and what she was like and how she sings in a church choir, and how on the day I visited them the house was yellow and the snow was a foot thick. And then her taking me to her great- grandmother’s house and how in one room the wood was so lovely… So there are these very tangible details that are not about me, they’re about that world that the song comes from. And I think that’s also maybe an exer- cise in trying to stay humble to the fact that the song is very old and someone else had a very personal experience with it and even if you don’t get to meet that person it’s a way of taking a pilgrimage to the knowledge that is personal to someone else.”
Are they aware that’s a lot more thought than most people give to what they do?
“We think a lot about a lot of things!” admits Anna, causing Elizabeth to laugh for an extremely long time.
“Anna and Elizabeth – overthinking it!” “It reminds me of Jean Ritchie in her
book Singing Family Of The Cumberlands,” Elizabeth continues. “She puts down all of her memories and associations of the family member that taught her the song or wher- ever she learned it. And Almeda Riddle does the same thing in her book; it’s very attached to the person that she learned it from, and she’ll keep a version the same even if she hears a new one that she likes better.”
Anna makes an attempt to distil all this thinking into a philosophy:
“If you just start calling it folk music
and you don’t name the people that it comes from it can kind of erase the names of the people, and without those specific people we would not have this song. It’s not just, ‘Thanks to the poor people of the past’.”
n a West Country pub, at the end of their British spring tour, the dra- maturgy of the Anna and Elizabeth show is struggling to do what we know it can do. What we’ve seen it do. There are too many other distractions: a dog show, loud orders for pasties, the continual clank of glasses being washed and the interruptions of walkers just look- ing for a place to sit down. And so the show changes, lets them in, says hello, explains. It can do that too.
I
“Our show is designed to work in a quiet room,” agrees Anna. “But we’re also playing music that has forever lived in unquiet rooms, surrounded by people doing the dishes and drinking and talking and enjoying themselves. On a stage we hate explaining what we’re doing because we think that the work speaks for itself. But when you’re just in a little room that same behaviour comes off as something else. It would be like if you were next to someone and they were talking to you as if you were far away. So you just have to adjust.”
There has been, as you would hope, way more talking and thinking about this scenario.
“I think it’s so much about the One,
Two, Three game. We made this game… We did a residency last year, for a whole month, in a barn in New Hampshire at this fancy very storied art colony.”
“Anna had brought these exercises
about different spheres of awareness from [experimental composer] Pauline Oliveros. It started out as a system of improvisation together and then it’s become a language of developing our show. So the first place of awareness is yourself, so that’s like if we’re improvising simultaneously but we’re not paying attention to each other. That’s the state of one. A really great example is if you’re watching a ballad singer and their eyes are closed, you’re observing someone in their own world. It’s very beautiful but you don’t expect them to reach out to you. And then two is the communication between partners. So when we’re playing and it’s a direct exchange of energy between the two of us, very much to the exclusion of the outside world. And then the state of three is…”
“Awareness of the environment. Which in performance includes the audience and the stage.”
“So you’re talking to the audience or singing a song and you’re looking out at the audience and making eye contact and con- necting with people. It’s so fun to think about. A lot of folk musicians I think oper- ate… like, when you’re worried about what your audience thinks it’s because you’re so three. You’re checked into the audience’s pulse more than your own pulse. And when I see experimental musicians, and maybe their
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