Salut! Live

Back from France for just a weekend, I would normally have missed this or any radio programme and am still smiling having heard Lauren and Shirley's engrossing exchanges.

Shirley is now 88. She has led an eventful life. Folk music gripped her from childhood in Sussex, home of the seminal Collins family, and she has played an important part in its survival and occasional limited success. Solo, in duo with her late elder sister Dolly, in bands, she has contributed enormously to this often overlooked source of national pride. Her singing style was always unadorned though Wikipedia's description - "plain, austere" - feels a little harsh.

She lived and worked with the distinguished American folk music collector Alan Lomax, making valuable discoveries among US blues singers and others, married the British folk-rock guru Ashley Hutchings and overcame decades of voice-robbing dysphonia to record again at 82.

Her chat with Lauren was pretty much as Linda Thompson said.

We heard sad but matter-of-fact reflections on a childhood marred by the uncaring distance of a father who did not even honour his obligation to send small, regular pocket money after leaving her mother for another woman.

The death of Dolly at just 62 and the break-up with Hutchings were excruciatingly painful. After Hutchings told her he was "consumed with love" for an actress and would be packed and gone next morning, she cried all night.

The listener hears Shirley becoming emotional when describing such distressing events in her life. But there were also wickedly funny anecdotes. When waiting for an early-hours train after a gig in Leeds, travelling bag and banjo case at her side, she was c0nfronted  by "two heavy cops who almost accused me of being a prostitute - I mean, how many banjo-playing prostitutes are there?".

Shirley's allowable luxuries on the desert island would be the absence of jars and packets she's always struggled to open and the provision of large fridge stocked with her favourite Italian ice cream.

I loved her choices of music. Of the tracks she chose, she would want if limited to one Dolly's enchanting piano solo, Poor Sally Sits a-weeping.

Ian Anderson, who ran the much-missed  fRoots magazine, thought it was a wonderful programme - "still dabbing my eyes" - and so did I. Your damehood is fully merited, Shirley, and Lauren, a mere scrap at 45, can have an MBE to be going on with.

Shirley Collins Desert Island Discs tracklist

1: Chiling O Guiry by Concerto Caledonia

2: The Birds in the Spring by The Copper Family