Benjamin Zephaniah, Simon Emmerson and the long story of Tam Lin
January 15, 2024
Tam Lin is one of the oldest ballads in the English folk repertoire, and one of the strangest versions came from the dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah’s collaboration with Simon Emmerson and his The Imagined Village project. Both men died last year, so Andrew Curry decided to pay his respects by tracing the threads of the song, and the project.
During The Young ‘Uns concert at Cecil Sharp House in London in December, the band dedicated a song to Benjamin Zephaniah, who had died earlier that month.
Zephaniah was a radical poet, writer, actor and activist, best known for his part in Peaky Blinders, whose contact with the world of folk music rests on one song—Tam Lyn Retold, a reworking and updating of the folk song Tam Lin. It was recorded with The Imagined Village in 2007, with Zephaniah and Eliza Carthy on vocals.
Following this thread takes you to the musician and producer Simon Emmerson, who by coincidence also died last year, and to whom The Young ‘Uns also dedicated a song. Emmerson is a significant figure in the folk music of the last 30 years, and perhaps hasn’t had the visibility on Salut! Live that his career deserved.
(Simon Emmerson, playing cittern with The Imagined Village at a gig in Barking in 2008. Photo: Mark A Bennett
Emmerson, of course, was more than just a musician and producer. He was also an innovator who brought musicians together to stretch boundaries, as he did in folk music with Afro-Celt Sound System in the ‘90s and The Imagined Village in the ‘00s.
His music journey started elsewhere. As a student, playing under the name of Simon Booth, he was one of the moving spirits in Weekend, an uncategorisable band that featured Alison Statton of Young Marble Giants on vocals, and then formed Working Week, a radical jazz-inflected dance group. Its first single was Venceremos, in honour of the murdered Chilean singer Victor Jara, with vocals by Robert Wyatt and Tracey Thorn.
Emmerson was both curious and restless. In the early 1990s, when recording with Baaba Maal in west Africa, he was struck by the similarity between some of the west African melodies and Irish tunes that he knew.
As a result, he formed Afro-Celt Sound System, which brought together Irish and west African musicians, including Davy Spillane, to see what would happen. Quite a lot, it turned out. The band was signed to Peter Gabriel’s Real World label and after Gabriel they were the biggest-selling band on the label.
It was a suggestion from Baaba Maal that he should explore his own musical roots that prompted Emmerson’s turn towards English folk music. He’s quoted as saying,
After travelling the world as a producer and musician I thought it was time explore my own roots to look at the earth under my feet, dig the dirt of the homelands.
At the time, Emmerson had become a near neighbour of Billy Bragg, and they would, apparently, walk their dogs together and talk about what Englishness meant. (It had become a bit of a theme for Bragg around the turn of the century.)
The Imagined Village took a few years to gestate, first as an idea, then as a record, then as a band. The first record, which is bursting with ideas, sprawls a bit as a result. The list of collaborators was long and diverse:
Billy Bragg, Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy, Sheila Chandra and Chris Wood, Benjamin Zephaniah, John Copper, the Copper Family, Transglobal Underground, Simon Emmerson, Johnny Kalsi, Mass, Francis Hylton, Andy Gangadeen, Shema Mukherjee and Barney Morse Brown.
This isn’t even the full list.
(The Imagined Village musicians. Some of them, anyway. Photo: Real World Records.)
Tam Lin is one of the oldest ballads in the British repertoire, first mentioned in the 16th century. It was collected by Francis Child and published in Child’s Ballads. It is a tale of Scottish magic, and a website dedicated to the song says it has
been a beloved tale for centuries, both because of the magic in the tale, and because it is a traditional tale centered on female daring and bravery.
It’s also long and complicated, and has been recorded by anyone who is anyone in folk music. If you want your version of Tam Lin un-retold, or just want to remind yourself of the song before listening to the Zephaniah version, there’s a good version of the traditional song sung by Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer.
The idea of getting Benjamin Zephaniah to rewrite and record Tam Lin came from Martin Carthy. Emmerson visited Cecil Sharp House with Tim Whelan of Transglobal Underground, and met the Vaughan Williams librarian Malcolm Taylor, who helped with the task.
Zephaniah updates this story—hence the new title of Tam Lyn Retold—and in his retelling, Tam Lyn is a refugee who faces deportation. There’s a magical twist here too, in the Immigration Tribunal. Zephaniah said of his version:
I actually think that most stories have been told, we've just got to find new ways of re-telling them. If I was in Jamaica I would have written a slightly different version. If I was living in Bosnia I would have written a different version. But I do think it is a metaphor for what is happening now.
And here it is, from a live appearance of The Imagined Village at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2008, which also gives a flavour of the project, Simon Emmerson is centre stage, just in front of the drums.
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