Stand Up Now: Songs from the Landworkers’ Alliance

The canon of British folk song is rich with stories and beautiful evocations of landscape, nature, country life and work. That they are mostly sung by people whose own lives are distant from these is an inevitable anomaly: the rural population of the UK is about 11 million, the urban population about 56 million. Stand Up Now bucks the trend: the Landworkers’ Alliance, a union of small-scale growers, brought ‘farmers with a song in their back pocket,’ such as Essex trio King Driscolls, together with simpatico jobbing musicians, including Nick Hart and Ewan McLennan. The record was produced by musician Sid Goldsmith, recording in cow sheds and barns across the land, capturing their songs of agricultural life.

Amy Cox and Maddy Yarwood sing ‘Oak and Ash and Thorn’, Rudyard Kipling's paean to great trees, in lovely harmony, with arboreal double bass. These people live on the land and sing too of its harsh realities. ‘Sing Ivy’, performed by Kerry Ann Jangle and Theo Passingham, is all about hard labour for small return – a harvest that will fit in a walnut shell. Eggclab 7 give ‘Lark in the Morning’ a feminist reworking, ending with ‘nothing lives in freedom in a world that's ruled by blokes.’ ‘Trecadwgan’ tells the story of that farm in Wales, which the local community fought to buy, only to be outbid at auction by outsiders. It's not all gloom; ‘The Ballad of Hawkwood’ is the happy story of an urban farm, ‘I'll be good to the land and the land will be good to me.’ These musicians tend and nurture these songs with such simple care, and the songs repay this love.