When coals from Newcastle met and mingled with sugarcane in Bridgetown, this is what they sang, brought back again to Blighty by B-K, in a tour de squeezy force.
Release Date: 4th October 2025
Label: Grimdon Records
Format: CD / digital
When news first came in about this album, a revisiting of folk song through the prism of a Caribbean lens, I missed, at first, the plot, thinking it to be along similar grounds as EII’s Dancing Tunes, back in 2021. There, the reggae-folk fusioneers tackled old favourites, learnt from the West Indian diaspora, performed in their inimitable style. So Banana Boat Song and lots of waay-o.
But I was so wrongity wrong, as B-K is taking a far more scholarly approach, investigating and expanding the journey taken by songs, originally deriving from “the tradition”, but becoming morphed along the way, as successive generations handed down songs first heard a century or so earlier, gradually losing much trace of their Anglo (and other) genealogy. Not so different, say, as songs “learnt” in the UK travelled also to the U.S. and Canada, becoming staples in Appalachia and Nova Scotia.
exploring genealogy
Of course, he is ideally placed to do this, being of a mixed genealogy himself, so attuned both to his father’s tastes and his mother’s influences, although neither parent specifically prompted him into becoming, now, an impossibly youthful ambassador for the joys of traditional folk song and dance. Both solo and with Granny’s Attic, the trio he helped form at school, a decade and a half ago, he makes both melodeon and concertina look cool. Which is impossibly uplifting for old codgers like me. He also has an enormous and unusual voice, at least by current standards, a boomy baritone that feels a direct, if evolved, link from his only overt comparator, the great John Kirkpatrick.
Subtitled “English Folk Song in the Caribbean and Black America”, and made with the assistance from both the Alan Surtees Trust (Shrewsbury Folk Festival) and the EFDSS, B-K writes extensively about the project, and each of the 11 tracks, in the accompanying sleeve notes. He says: “I was enthralled the prospect that my mother’s Caribbean ancestors and my father’s British ancestors could conceivably have sung versions of the same songs“. For good measure, interspersed are a few songs of an origin entirely separate, B-K reversing the journey, if you will, and bringing them here, for his very Anglo interpretation of his Bajan roots.
the warm glow of melodeon
Opening with Tacoma’s Song, possibly all, and certainly in part née The Keys Of Canterbury, this is presented as a mix of the two. With the warm glow of melodeon, B-K pipes up with a tune, in a different setting, could easily be that of a 60s pop song. His voice is a little more angular than recalled, and it makes for a great introduction to the record. Little subtle twists of rhythm in his squeezing are not a mile away from soca or calypso, or even a proto-reggae, each then swiftly drawn back into a more traditional ceilidh stance.
Clever stuff, which then takes a further step, with the fairground dynamic of Row, Row, Nanny/Crow, Nanny, Crow, which then applies a similar alchemy. These are tunes without any clear transatlantic origin, but rather a pair of children’s ring game songs, from Barbados. The swirls of button play he inserts, towards the end, beggar belief as to their possibility.
Cohen curious?
Sweet William And Lady Margaret stems from Cecil Sharps travails, 1916-18, collecting songs in the U.S., this coming from the singing of one of the few (3, out of 1500!) collected from black voices. Switching now to concertina, this feels little different from any forbear, and is none the worse for that, showing off the B-K experience much as we expect. A good one to play to the Cohen curious, perhaps.
Hangman Slack On The Line stretches him a little harder, as he mixes and melds various versions of the song, attaching it then to a dance melody from another collector, and her book, ‘On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs’, entitled ‘Tain’t Gwine Raine No Mo’. Both titles give away the 1925 timeline. A rousing thigh-slapper, it reeks of medicine shows in shaky b&w, with the insert, by B-K, of ‘prickle holly bush’ adding a not really current but sort of focus, thinking Spiers and Boden.
B-K does good unaccompanied too, and The Highway Robber is good unaccompanied, a lusty tale open to various interpretations. Sticking then with rogues, The Outlandish Knight is possibly known in earlier iterations. Close attention reveals a few lyrical variations that wouldn’t quite tally in Suffolk, Stirling or Shropshire, for this peripatetic song of many names.
mainly norfolk
I really must point you here to the excellent resource, Mainly Norfolk, who discuss this song here, at length, including this new version. Again, the rendition is in fairly “received folkie”, without the need or gift of any tropical sheen, but let that not distract, because O Sailor Boy piles back into the hybrid of the first few tracks here. Already a highlight of his solo live sets, this is a fabulous rear view mirror version of a much told tale. In each verse, as the accommodating damsel “jumped in the car and drove away“, to get the various shoes, trousers, shirt etc, so it becomes a highlight here also, perhaps the first and only time a car has been mentioned in a folk song.
trad. arr and blues
The Rich Old Lady possibly points toward a join between the blues and trad. arr., a variant of Marrowbones which, slowed down and pitched to a guitar, or a banjo, could fit that swap of idiom perfectly. Just the job for a team of sharecroppers or a group in prison fatigues. This leads into one eagerly anticipated interpretation, that of Little Musgrove (or Matty Groves in certain well-known hands). Again, despite the squeezebox backing, B-K seems to have twisted his voice into the persona of an old bluesman, righer and with more gravel than we are used. The heart of the story remains, but his hybrid version, cutting and pasting from several sources, takes a more circuitous route than usual. It is a dour version that appeals to my love of dirge.
Miss Bailey is a much livelier filly, the first tune I can picture in the grasp of Simon Care, awaiting the rest of EII to jump in. This is, to be fair, a further Bajan melody. Removed from the children’s game it often embellishes, it is a jolly piece to cleanse the palate. The set is completed by a final song of his Barbados heritage, Cocoa Tea, although the narrative thrust would fit many a boozy UK folk festival singaround. Indeed, knowing B-K’s love of music hall, this song perhaps inhabits a similar role to From Marble Arch To Leicester Square on his last album, Rakes And Misfits, ending the album on a high, with humour.
enhancing the genre
This recording will do no harm to the artist’s reputation and may well enhance it. He describes himself as, rather than a rake, but as a misfit, within the largely vanilla folk circuit, but, as he, Angeline Morrison and others take further forward ideas of colour into musical reference, so less will that prove to be the case.
Here’s the opening salvo from the album, Tacoma’s Song:
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