Three Freaky Folk Favorites for the Fall

When the crisp Autumn air starts circling in the Ohio valley, and the leaves start changing, I have a tendency to dig out my folk records, specifically the ones in the notional genres of psychedelic folk, freak folk, and apocalyptic folk. It’s the place where my inner romantic and my inner goth are on good terms with my inner hillbilly who likes to retrace his roots to songs sung in the hills of Appalachia.
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Like so many others, I first got into this style of music by tracing the influences and tastes of Current 93’s David Tibet. Sometimes you find the very best things in a discount bin at a big chain record store. In this case it was Media Play and I found for three dollars a Current 93 import comp called Emblems: The Menstrual Years. It was a two-disc set and the first disc had some of their dark sound collage music from the early records like Dawn, Dogs Blood Rising and Imperium. The second half portrayed their foray into a nebulous realm where acoustic guitars met with Tibet’s enchanting and esoteric lyrics. I knew I wanted to listen to Current 93 even though I hadn't heard them before because I knew what the name referenced, and it was something important to me as a teenager and young man.

The year was 1999 (notice that three nines in the year are actually three sixes upside down -and like David Tibet I am sick sick sick of six six six). I got hooked and started collecting.  It was easy to get taken into his gnostic world of heretical Christianity. I became transfixed by his visions of the Antichrist, Noddy, and his evocations of a primeval world where Christo-Pagan themes permeated and interfused with a post-industrial and experimental sensibility.

From my obsession with the music of Current 93 itself, I soon traced back the influences and citations Tibet himself was enamored with, because I was as enamored of him and his work as he was of these influences. Chief among these was Shirley Collins, the Incredible String Band, and the singular Comus, whose song “Diana” was covered by Current 93 on their record Horsey.

I wasn’t the only one turned on by this material, and my discovery was just in time to coalesce with the freak folk boom of the oughts. Weirdos like Davendra Banhart had rediscovered the work of Vashti Bunyan, and guitar maestros like Ben Chasny and his Six Organs of Admittance project were mining the finger picked lore of American Primitive guitar cross phased with influences from the psychedelic end of the folk revival. The time was ripe to get into this music. Reissues were coming out, and new bands like Espers and Faun Fables were writing songs that bridged the tradition into another era. Every Autumn I get the urge to revisit these strains of music.

Of course, the various flavors of folk feel right to me anytime I’m in the mood, and there are a lot of great artists continuing to mine these streams, as well as adjacent territory. Folk music, in any form, is folk music because it is a living tradition. I am grateful for artists like Sally Ann Glassman and Mary Lattimore who continue to bring their traditional and metamodern sound visions to life. Here I want to take a look at three favorite albums from the British folk revival that are perfect for autumn as the wheel of the year turns. There are plenty of other albums I’d like to write about too, and I hope to bring you some more of them in the future, if not this season, than maybe next Autumn.

THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND: WEE TAM and THE BIG HUGE

We will start our journey in the year of 1968, when the Incredible String Band released their album(s) Wee Tam and the Big Huge. In Europe this was released as double LP, but in the United States they were split into two separate albums. While I love The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, this one (or two as I heard them) remain absolute favorites. Some people seem to get kind of weirded out by listening to the Incredible String Band. They think they will become some kind of crazy hippie or something. But is that a bad thing?
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The Incredible String Band was formed by Robin Williamson, Mike Heron, and Clive Palmer in Edinburgh in 1966. All of them are multi-instrumentalists, and their albums are filled with a hallucinatory variety of traditional instruments put to lysergic use. Incredible String Band used a plethora of stringed intstruments: guitar, banjo, sitar, zither, dulcimer and more. To this they added an expanded palette liable to include whistles, flutes, washboard, kazoo, harmonica, organ, and all manner of hand drums, among other oddments. Some of these were played by additional members that had come into the fold from their hippie communal lifestyle. This can be seen on the cover of Hangmans Beautiful Daughter. Current 93 made a homage to this moment on their own cover to the Earth Covers Earth album.

Mick Heron tells how it was living together. “...we were touring maybe six months of the year and by that time we all lived together, in eight cottages joined together in this place called Glen Row. When we were not on the road we were either in the studio or playing each other songs we'd written. So it came out of the experience of just being in each other's company all the time.” Songs like “You Get Brighter” recall what it must have been like in those days of free love.

In general, I prefer the songs written by Robin Williamson and sung in his high voice the best, but I do love those that Mick Heron brought to the table too. The interplay between them, and the other musicians are where this incredible fusion happens. The Incredible String Band is the sum of its parts and if they had been separated it wouldn’t have been the same. 

Songs like “Job’s Tears” and “Maya” are transcendent and transportive. Other tracks like “Ducks on a Pond” are full of poetic power and tap into the place where bards call down songs of transformation and magic. It’s got the best damn kazoo, harmonica and washboard playing on any record I ever heard. 

Robin Williamson would go on to write a book with fellow Scottish esotericist R.J. Stewart on Celtic Bards, Celtic Druids (1996). He also combined forces with another seeker in the Western Mystery Tradition, John Matthews to pen two more volumes, From the Isles of Dream: Visionary Stories and Poems of the Celtic Renaissance (1993) and The Bardic Source Book: Inspirational Legacy and Teachings of the Ancient Celts (1998). Williamson is an accomplished harpist and traditional storyteller, making the connection to the bards of old even more resonant.

Williamson also released a number of solo records. Continuing in the bardic mode, the harp became his main instrument and he became quite accomplished. Among the gems is a soundtrack he creted for a theatrical production of the Mabinogion called Music for the Mabinogi.

It should probably come as no surprise to fans of the genre that the following two entries also feature Robin Williamson and Mike Heron as guest musicians. They really are that incredible.

SHIRLEY COLLINS: THE POWER OF THE TRUE LOVE KNOT

Shirley Collins had already been recording for close to ten years when Wee Tam and the Big Huge came out. At this point she was reaching her first apogee, with further climaxes to come, followed by a long period of silence that began in the 1970s, and triumphant return starting in the 2010s egged on by the encouragement of David Tibet to return to singing.

Whereas the Incredible String Band would have you flying high on hallucinogenic wings into newly composed songs, Collins takes you down a saturnine notch into a world of false lovers, death, and murder. In other words, a large swathe of the subject matter of traditional song. This was certainly part of the appeal to me when I got my first mail-ordered Shirley Collins CD in the mail, The Power of the True Love Knot. The sadness of things which I had felt in my life, and found solace inside the music of Current 93 was present in droves. I could quite identify with mordant tones in these old but timeless songs.

The Power of the True Love Knot isn’t all weeping and tears, though much of it is. At the heart of the album was an idea Shirley had found across folk music, “the idea of true love as a power outside society's control.” These song-stories and ballads tell these stories of lovers united, torn apart, found again, the power of the knot is unbroken, just as the circle does not break. Mike Heron and Robin Williamson both make appearances on this album, as does her stalwart sister Dolly Collins who plays her custom-built pipe organ on a number of the pieces. 

Songs like "The Unquiet Grave" are perfect as we move into October and there are many ghost stories to tell and hear.

Rarely, as a music collector, am I an absolute completist. But I am with Shirley Collins. All of her albums are educations, as are her two books. The first of these books, America Over the Water was about her romance with Alan Lomax and collecting songs with him in the fields of the South. It is an absolute must read for the student of folksong.
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Speaking of R.J. Stewart who I mentioned above, he also plays plucked psaltery on the Shirley Collins song, “One Night As I Lay on My Bed,” a most incredible story of the Otherworld. 

VASHTI BUNYAN: JUST ANOTHER DIAMOND DAY

While the Incredible String Band and Shirley Collins were busy in the studios and at concert halls, another folk singer was getting started on a path that would lead to her traveling in horse drawn Romany style wagon all the way from London to the Isle of Skye 650 miles away. Her name was Vashti Bunyan and the great appeal of her music is it’s nursery rhyme and lullaby quality. While Shirley Collins may have mined the ballads at Cecil House, Bunyan was writing her own songs, but they were clearly inspired by a familiarity with fairy tales and a way of singing to keep oneself entertained while on a long journey. That is nowhere more apparent than the song “Come Wind, Come Rain” on her classic album Just Another Diamond Day.

Bunyan’s love of folk music came from a source that inspired and continues to inspire countless others: Bob Dylan. When she first heard his Freewheelin’ album at age 18 while on a trip to New York City she determined she would become a singer. She certainly has the voice and the gift. Back home in England the following year she was introduced by a friend of her mum’s to the manager of the Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham. Marianne Faithfull had just left the label he worked for and their was a space to be filled, and this became her window of opportunity. She was tasked with covering a Mick Jagger and Keith Richards song, “Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind.” Jimmy Page, ever the studio musician and helping guitar hand, even recording with eccentric freaks like Screaming Lord Sutch, was brought into add his licks. The B-Side was one of her own songs, “I Want to Be Alone.” That was 1965 and another 45 followed the next year, though both received scant attention at the time. A few other gigs and songs followed such as her masterpiece in melancholy, “Winter Is Blue,” a song I still can’t listen to all that often for fear of it setting me down into saturnine moods. It’s a fantastic number though.

In the meantime, Bunyan was working at a veterinary practice while she was trying to get a music career off the ground, when she heard about an artists community in Skye being set up by the Glaswegian bard of psychedelic folk pop, Donovan. She had just got back in touch with Robert Lewis, who became her partner and later, father of her three children. Lewis had been in art school, and it being the height of the sixties, she quit her job and they made the decision to travel to Skye the way some of her Romany relatives from her maternal grandfather’s line might have: in a wagon and pulled by a horse.  

“It was a way to escape, but with a purpose. We didn't know where we were going to be tomorrow, but it'd be somewhere down the road. What saved me was that I didn't have to think too hard about anything except wood for the fire, water for the horse. Immediate things.” Part of their inspiration was the burgeoning back to the land and appropriate technology movements. “I had wanted to go back and find out how things used to be before the internal combustion engine, without thinking how hard life could be.”

Along the way, through the experiences they had and the kind people who helped them out, they got in touch with the magical side of existence. There were trials and tribulations, but also meaningful connections and people who encouraged her to record her music.

 “I wanted to get back that feeling of childlike wonder, to remember what it was like to find the world extraordinary.”

The songs on Just Another Diamond Day transmit this kind of magic and wonder, and with their sing-song mother goose style lyrics, certainly connect the listener back to their own inner child when they knew magic was real.

​My favorite song is probably “Rainbow River” but they are all enchanting, and contribute their inherent magic to reenchant the world.

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