Inveterate updater of English folk songs. Jim Moray, brings another set of 19th Century classics into the 21st with his characteristic aplomb

Timelessly old and completely contemporary

For over 20 years, Jim Moray has taken on the mantle of early Fairport Convention in blending traditional folk music with modern instrumentation to create something both timelessly old and completely contemporary.

His last offering, Beflean, was a career retrospective of re-recordings, so Gallants is his first set of “new” songs for seven years. Most of these songs are story ballads to be found in the copious archives of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library or collected from the likes of the Copper Family. The track listing could be given a set of Roud catalogue numbers rather than names, but like all his records it still it works as a modern album.

The album kicks off with a prototypical Jim Moray folk ballad; Flora (The Lily Of The West), a song which made the journey from the West Country to the USA in the 19th Century where it was collected by Cecil Sharp. Perhaps best known from Joan Baez’s version from the 60s, Moray himself plays most of the instruments and his voice is recorded with a clarity and forward mix to let the words speak for themselves. The arrangement is a simple one with banjo, electric guitars and drums.

driving syncopated drums

Things start to get interesting with the second track, When I Was A Little Boy, with its driving syncopated drums from Matt Stockham Brown and jazz brass section soloing away. The song was collected from John Stickle of the Shetland island of Unst, but it isn’t Scottish, and with surreal lyrics such as “I bought myself a little bull about three inches high,” it made it into the folkie’s bible, the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs. As George Sansome often jests, not to be confused with the English Book of Penguin Folk Songs, a much shorter volume.

Some backwards guitar introduces Nightingale; a traditional naval folk song perhaps most familiar from the versions of Eliza Carthy or Granny’s Attic among many. It features a lovely bansuri flute solo from Suzi Gage. 

Omie Wise is an epic version of the traditional song at almost eight minutes long, which steadily builds in quiet intensity as it describes the murder of the eponymous young woman in North Carolina in the early 19th Century. Moray has added a poignant new last verse about how little has changed: “Now thousands more like her still suffer the same/With different faces and different names/Whose lives were ended when they’d just begun/Killed by the anger and violence of men.”

Jim Moray at Shrewsbury Folk Festival last year. Pic: Stuart Anderton

ghostly Bristolian figures telling fortunes

Three Gallants, which is a Moray original albeit very much in the folk ballad oeuvre, is a story of ghostly Bristolian figures telling fortunes, and features Northumbian pipes from Andy May and harp from Niamh Flynn.

Moray has been singing Spencer the Rover for many years, but stopped as he felt it was “a middle aged man’s song” – but now feels he has “aged into it.” The drum patterns and brass from When I Was a Little Boy return, but this time with a less jazz, more brass band feel.

American Stranger, with its (literally) breathless lyrics is another song where all the instuments are played by Moray – this album is very much a studio creation. It will be interesting to see how they translate to a live environment when he tours this record early next year. Next, Train On The Island – an Appalachian folk song – shifts to a piano based arrangement, sprinkled with synthesizer adornments and swirling backing vocals.

The album closes with Fortune Turns The Wheel, a shanty with harmony vocals from Maddie Morris and the Trans Voices Choir.

subtle variations and transformations

Overall, Gallants is perhaps a simpler, more direct album than say Upcetera or Low Culture, but none the worse for that. The voice – and importantly lyrics – are front and centre throughout, and Moray’s subtle variations and transformations of often well-known folk standards as always reveal the quality of the music which has made them last so long.

Jim Moray: Website

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