Author: Julian May
View album and artist detailsArtist/band: |
Nancy Kerr |
Label: |
Little Dish Records |
Magazine Review Date: |
May/2022 |
In 2020 when the UK locked down because of COVID-19 and live performance was impossible, Nancy Kerr had a bright idea: to post a video of herself singing a song every day in May. Each was by Leon Rosselson. In the 1960s Rosselson found a home in the folk clubs. But he was never really at home there, being more influenced by European chanson – Jacques Brel – and WS Gilbert, packing his songs tight with words and rhymes, and William Blake, too, than folk song. There was the satire as well as the folk boom, and Rosselson wrote (still writes) political and topical songs, with keen wit and seething anger.
The Poor Shall Wear the Crown, is Kerr’s selection of a dozen songs from her project. There are several feminist favourites, ‘Don’t Get Married Girls’ and ‘Invisible Married Breakfast Blues’, and expansive story songs, ‘Harry’s Gone Fishing’, in which the narrator is led through a London made derelict by ‘progress.’ ‘Song of the Old Communist’ takes us into the mind of a person who pinned hopes and identity on that creed. Rosselson writes wonderfully for children, too, and during ‘Why Does It Have to Be Me?’ Kerr’s young son, her own Harry, makes his welcome presence felt. Kerr plays classically tinged viola on ‘Whatever Happened to Nannerl?’, a track about Mozart’s sister, a musical genius crushed because of her gender. Kerr’s pizzicato violin on ‘Invisible Married Breakfast Blues’ brilliantly encapsulates the fraught tension underlying the lyrics. Just two examples of how Kerr’s arrangements match Rosselson’s words and melodies. Kerr is a folk singer, you feel her voice wanting to soar, yet she ties it down to the words, the clear articulation of them. There is an enthralling tension here. The Poor Shall Wear the Crown is an homage to a master, by a musician who is herself exceptional.
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