Salut! Live

MARTIN SIMPSON

Martin Simpson is by general acclaim the finest folk guitar player of his generation. But his excellence on guitar tends to overshadow his other strengths as a musician. 

The range of his repertoire is broad; his own songs are supremely well-crafted; and he moves between folk and blues and roots and bluegrass effortlessly, perhaps a result of his long period living and working in the United States.

All of these virtues were on display at his recent gig at King’s Place in London, where he’d also been running workshops as part of the International Guitar Festival. 

He opened with the traditional blues song In The Pines, and a cover of Woody Guthrie’s Deportees, with quite a lot of slide guitar work on show, and then headed into a sequence of his own songs about real people.

If there’s a theme here, he’s interested in the grit of real lives, of people who go against the grain. Simpson has an ear for a story, and the songs were embellished with extended introductions that brought them to life.

The first of these was Ken Small, a song about a man who spent his savings and broke his marriage to salvage an American tank from the sea off Slapton Sands in Devon. The tank was a legacy of a World War II disaster that had been covered up.

He followed this up with Henry Gray, his charming song about a day that two of the musicians he had played with when he first arrived in the States spent at his house in upstate New York, watching the film Mississippi Burning on repeat. Henry Gray had been Howling Wolf’s piano player, and the blues singer Big Joe Williams got a namecheck in the introduction.

There was a new song in this sequence, about the black American Billy Waters, who enlisted in the British navy in the early 19th century before being crippled in a fall and becoming a celebrated street entertainer in London. The song grew out of a Guardian article his wife, Kit Bailey, had sent him while he was touring earlier this year.

Images of Billy Walters (see also below): T L Busby (1782–1838), found at  Wellcome Images 

Slipped in among these, without an introduction, was his memoir of his father, Never Any Good, which I think has a claim to being the finest British folk song of the 21st century. I’ve seen Simpson sing this a few times now, and the turn in the lyric near the end of the song always finds me welling up. (Salut! Live wrote about ‘Never Any Good’ a few years ago***.)

If the first set was expansive, partly because of the stories he told around each of the songs, the second set was a lot tighter. He did need to make up some time. I’ll just pull out a few highlights.

He opened the second set with Leon Rosselson’s song Palaces of Gold, which he has promised to sing at every gig he does until the victims of the Grenfell Fire get justice. 

Simpson has been working on a project with the American musician and producer Thomm Jutz, making a record of the Appalachian songs of Mary Sands and Jane Gentry.

These were collected in the early part of the 20th century by Cecil Sharp. It’s one of those projects that involves a whole range of musicians from both sides of the Atlantic, including Sean Lakeman, Odessa Settles, Sierra Hull, Tim O’Brien, Angeline Morrison, Emily Portman, and Fay Hield. Simpson shared his song from the record, All You Fair and Tender Ladies, featuring Cara Dillon with sublime vocals, which has been released as a single before the record comes out in September.

Sky Dancers, about hen harriers, is another new song, written in response to a request from the naturalist Chris Packham. Hen harriers are both endangered and heavily protected, but gamekeepers still destroy their nests. 

And it’s worth mentioning his encore. Although he’d left his banjo at home—maybe out of respect for the Guitar Festival—he gave us a bluegrass finger-picking version of Buckets Of Rain. I’m not sure that he’s recorded this yet, but it was also a reminder that when Simpson plays Dylan his versions are always interesting.

His next solo record is out next March. Nothing But Green Willow: The Songs of Mary Sands and Jane Gentry is out on Topic Records in September. To my surprise, while checking something for this piece, I realised that Simpson had turned 70 this year (I’d thought he was still in his early 60s). Like a fine wine, he is aging well. We’re lucky to be able to see him, and hear him, at the peak of his powers.

 * If you’re new to his work, the 2018 Introduction to Martin Simpson is a good overview. His 2007 record, Prodigal Son, which deservedly won awards, is a small masterpiece. 

Martin Simpson by Roger Liptrot and reproduced by permission from Roger's site folkimages.com

 

** Salut! Live's 2007 interview with Martin Simpson: Folk music is dangerous

 

*** Martin Simpson's Never Any Good

which I described as a  'terrific tribute to Martin's dad, honest but affectionate and deeply moving'