Song to a Refugee

After five fine albums of Appalachian-tinged folk songs, Diana Jones felt too devastated by the horror of Trump’s election to respond creatively until a chance encounter with Emma Thompson banished her writer’s block. The actress is president of the Helen Bamber Foundation, a charity that supports refugees and asylum seekers, and their meeting resulted in this brilliant cycle of narrative songs that gives voice to the world’s dispossessed and exiled and seeks to ‘re-humanise the people who are being de-humanised by governments and the press.’

‘El Chaparral’ is about a desperate family that sells its worldly possessions to pay people smugglers. ‘I Wait For You’ is the tale of an asylum seeker in a detention centre separated from her children, who sings ‘when I send for you nr more a refugee and you come to me, we will be free.’ In ‘The Sea is My Mother’ a leaky boat carrying the dispossessed to what they hope is a new life sinks with its human cargo, while ‘Love Song to a Bird’ envies winged creatures for whom there are no borders. Jones inhabits her characters with a heart-breaking conviction and Steve Earle, Richard Thompson and Peggy Seeger are among those adding their voices.