Reviews
Artist:The Norfolk Broads Album: Yonder Green Grove
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 9
Website: https://www.norfolkbroadsmusic.co.uk
Close vocal harmony quartet The Norfolk Broads navigate their way out of lockdown with this, their second album of traditional songs, each infused with a generous helping of fresh energy, and recorded at The Beeches, near Dereham, in rural Norfolk. It is home to Slow Worm Records, where Tom Moore not only mixed and engineered the album but also played fiddle, viola and harmonium. They were also joined by Nick Hart, who contributed guitar and drum.
Incidentally, the group's debut, In The Valley of The Flowers included a track called The Wellerman, derived from the 19th century sea ballad, 'Soon May The Wellerman Come'. Bristol-based a-capella group The Longest Johns then recorded a version, it was arranged by The Norfolk Broads' Anna Cornish, and also featured her on vocals. The remix released during lockdown became a viral internet hit, and launched a tidal wave of TikTok shantymen videos, thereby creating a huge revival of interest in the genre.
The Norfolk Broads can trace their lineage back to 2014 when their four members were singing in the Alto section of the Trad Academy's Sea Shanty Choir in London. Whilst some did have Norfolk connections, Anna Cornish, Eleanor Dale, Helen Cherry and Daisy Johnson had roots planted right across England. Their adopted name, however, and with a sense of irony, reflects their feisty wit as well as their love of traditional broad sheet ballads, and is one that transcends geography.
The nine songs on Yonder Green Grove were drawn largely from Irish, Scottish and English sources, but are bound together by a common thread of powerful narratives, and highlighting life-changing events in the lives of women - stories of leafous love and loss, of cheating and deception, of mischief, and of social justice, themes which actually remain as relevant to the present as they did in times gone by.
Yonder Green Grove opens with 'Fennario', a tale of unrequited love between a Scottish girl and an Irish soldier. Sometimes known as Peggy-O or The Maid of Fife, the song has also been recorded in America, by artists such as Bob Dylan, Joan Byez, Simon and Garfunkel and even The Grateful Dead. On this version, four voices, fiddle and guitar combine in a melancholia of hypnotic beauty.
An a capella version of Irish song 'Slieve Gallion Braes' has vocal arrangements by Peter Truin, and tells of an Irish farmer forced to leave his land and family because of unaffordable rent rises. 'Geordie' is a well known folk ballad that has spread across the English-speaking world, and sees a man accused of shooting a wild deer for food being hanged in London, in spite of his wife arriving to plead for mercy. 'Bay of Biscay' is a gentle ghost story about a wife who last saw her husband when he left on a ship seven years ago, but who reappears in a dream.
Scottish love song 'Fear a Batha' recounts a young woman's turmoil during her courtship with the local boatman, and is accomanied by a suitably sombre harmonium and viola. It is followed by an equally sad song of rejection, 'Lovely Johnny', in which the not-so-lovely Johnny abandons his Irish sweetheart for a lover across the sea in Scotland.
A lifetime of heavy drinking sees an old woman lruefully looking back upon her days as a 'Young Girl', but now making plans for her own funeral as the alcohol has taken its inevitable toll. This heartbreaking tale of self-destruction is followed by a lighter, more spirited tale, that of the 'Dingle Puck Goat', in which a hapless Irishman sets off to market to buy a cow, but somehow ends up with a goat. And no, his name was not Paddy McGinty.
Final track, 'Rambling Woman', is an antidote to the misery, death and rejection bound into so much of Yonder Green Grove, and instead becomes a pioneering song of hope and adventure as a woman leaves home on a train, bound for the unknown. Written in Kentucky the early 20th century by American singer songwriter Addie Graham, 'Rambling Woman' offers an appropriate closure to Yonder Green Grove - not too joyful so as to mitigate the sorrow and suffering of earlier songs, but offering a flickering flame of empowered optimism with which to end.
Yonder Green Grove is a truly beautiful piece of work from The Norfolk Broads, with pitch-perfect vocal harmonies that are unbelievably well balanced, yet exuding a passion and a sense of justice that swims just below the surface. The name may be ironic, but the material and the music is 100% authentic.
David Auckland
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