root salad Hickory Signals
Laura Ward & Adam Ronchetti have hit bullseye with their debut CD. Jude Rogers goes sleuthing.
folk going on. It comes from a married cou- ple, singer/flautist Laura Ward and gui- tarist/banjo player/drummer Adam Ronchetti, who record together as the duo Hickory Signals. They play traditional bal- lads and their own striking originals, the latter inspired by unexplored messages in old songs they love, as well as their own contemporary situations.
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The couple met in 2010 when Ronchetti became the drummer in Ward’s group, The Risen Road (“we made very Fairport-like folk-rock,” Ward explains; an autumnal Sandy Denny-like warmth still reveals itself in her singing). She grew up around folk, her father taking her to folk sessions as a child, and she vividly remem- bers seeing Christy Moore at age six or seven. Female singers like Anne Briggs and June Tabor also had an effect. “Those female voices got me into the idea of per- forming folk music: that way of singing so far away from X-Factor vocal gymnastics. Singing as you speak, but with passion. I wanted to do that.”
Ronchetti didn’t grow up knowing tra- ditional music at all. He loved rock, laughs his wife, and lived locally to her. “But we didn’t meet until he joined Risen Road. Then the band got a bit complicated!”
After getting together, the couple lived together on a houseboat in Shoreham-On- Sea (they later moved to Hove) and started making music. That dynamic’s not always easy. “There’s always a moment when you want to throw something across a room!” Ward laughs. “But performing with some- one you’re that close to, and having that connection, it’s really, really special. It’s why we keep doing it.”
Their debut album, Turn To Fray, was released in November, mixed by Stick In The Wheel’s Ian Carter, with a fuller band sup- porting their songs. It mixes beautifully direct, unvarnished versions of traditionals like Who Put The Blood and Bushes And Bri- ars with original songs about grappling with identity. This latter camp is inspired by Ward and Ronchetti’s careers outside folk. Ronchetti teaches young people with com- plex learning needs and autism, while Ward works for the Oasis Project in Brighton, a charity that works with women, families and young people affected by substance abuse. “In both our jobs, we’re always blown away by the resilience of people,” Ward says. “Even when they are struggling
own on the coast of East Sussex, among the tourists, the chip shops and the pebbles, there is a gentle but powerful moment in
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to live every day. And so many of them just want to tell their stories.”
twentieth-century British poet Rosemary Tonks, who quit the poetry scene to become a recluse and a religious evangelist. Later on comes Zelda, about the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who keeps on dancing alone after everyone has left her, her men- tal health unravelling. “Would that have happened to her if she was a man?” asks Ward. “These questions are still relevant. I want to write about real people, in all their difficulties and strangeness, and really make them come alive in your mind’s eye.” Richard Thompson’s Wild Eyed Woman was a particular inspiration to her – she loves songs that flesh people out.
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Turn To Fray also include a beautiful cover of Frankie Armstrong’s Doors To My Mind, a song about being a woman which begins directly and pointedly: “I’ve been raised since a babe in the cradle/to be lady- like, sweet and demure”. Ward sang it to Frankie herself in her living room last year. “And she said, ah, that’s lovely. Did I write that?” Ward laughs. “If I’d written that, I’d never forget it. And I’d tell everyone!”
Ward’s time volunteering on the Greek island of Samos from 2015 to 2016, helping refugees, also feeds into to this record.
any songs on Turn To Fray cen- tre on women in powerful ways. The album opener, Rose- mary, is about the life of mid-
Kana is a beautiful, raging track about a Syrian-Kurdish man missing his family, as well as himself, and also pining for accep- tance amid harsh, uncaring circumstances. It forms an interesting companion piece to their version of Bushes And Briars, which ends the LP, about another voice never allowed to ring out. The title track, howev- er, does show a woman escaping: “I’ve known what to do for such a long time”. And we all exhale.
Beyond their band, Hickory Signals also do other wonderful things. As part of the Brighton collective Bird In The Belly, with producer Pryor and solo artist Jinnwoo, they released a 2018 debut album, The Crowing, its aim to reintroduce long-lost folk songs to the canon. An ongoing documentary pro- ject spinning off from it has seen them interview Martin Carthy, June Tabor and Lisa Knapp, among others, and the duo also run a monthly night at the West Street Loft in Shoreham-On-Sea, showcasing local folk and related acts.
“It’s great to encourage newer artists in that kind of environment,” Ward explains, her mission to keep folk reaching out to new people and new pastures becoming even more crystal clear. “But we never want to preach,” she says. The beauty of her music does quite the opposite. “We just want to use the platform we have to do things, and to get people listening.”
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Photo: Pat Blann
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