Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: In the second part of our end-of-year review conversation, with its ‘Something Old, New, Borrowed, and Blues’ format, we’ve moved on to the Borrowed and the Blues. You can read our Old and New selection on the site here. They don’t need to be records released in 2024, just things we’ve been listening to. 

(Photo: pxhere.com/ CC0)

Andrew: Something Borrowed is a bit of a strange category, I know, but I’m going for the traditional folk repertoire and for good cover versions. We got a bit expansive yesterday, so I’ll be briefer here. I’m going to nominate Frankie Archer’s recent EP, Pressure & Persuasion, which features four traditional songs, of which Barbara Allen is a complete reworking. We wrote about Frankie’s outing with Folk on Foot around Consett earlier this year on the site. 

I’ve also been listening to Cat Power Sings Dylan, which is a slightly bonkers complete reconstruction of Dylan’s 1966 concert at the Royal Albert Hall. She’s a great interpreter of other people’s songs, and with the new Dylan film coming out in the UK in January we’ll have a lot of Dylan on Salut! Live during the month. 

Colin: Carla Fuchs qualifies for both Something Borrowed and Something New. With the blessing and support of Sandy Denny’s daughter Georgia, she produced an impressive album, Songbird. Plenty of artists have paid homage to Denny by covering her work. Fuchs is a German singer-songwriter-teacher, and she took another route, borrowing unpublished lyrics from Denny’s notebooks and constructing new songs.

It is as powerful as any conventional tribute and I’ve come to appreciate it in the last few months. Georgia added examples of her celebrated artwork to the project, too. This is how Carla herself described the project for us here on the blog.

The Pitmen Poets borrowed one of the many fine songs written by the late and sorely missed Vin Garbutt for their second album, Re-union. That song, The Land of Three Rivers indulges all my nostalgic feelings for the North East—the Wear, Tees and Tyne (in that order for me)—and evokes John North, the name of a great fixture of the Northern Echo, a daily column of the newspaper where I cut my journalistic teeth, written in its prime by my pal Mike Amos. It’s a cracking song, expertly performed by the Poets; as for them, I lose track of the farewells and comebacks  but they’re building a grand body of work.

On Something Blues, the blues has been important to me since I discovered the grizzled old Delta singers, often with lively backgrounds, and the pale-faced English bands that did Chicago blues so well.

John Mayall was the key to so much of it, his musicians invariably going on to shine elsewhere in the likes of Cream (Clapton), Fleetwood Mac (Peter Green) and others. 

But what a revelation Muireann Bradley has been. A young Irishwoman playing and singing the blues pretty much as well as anyone else. And she’s only  just turned 18. I urge anyone who hasn’t already to check out her album I Kept These Old Blues.

As so often with unexpected treasures of music, it was yet another Sunderland link, John Clark, who introduced me to her. Thanks Jake (as he was when providing illustrations for Salut! Sunderland),Tom Dooley (as he signs himself  now on social media). 

Andrew: In a similar vein I have been listening to Jerron Paxton since I saw him perform on Later… with Jools Holland on the BBC. He plays country blues, and apart from the recording quality these songs could have been recorded by Alan Lomax in a hotel room in the Deep South in the 1930s. 

And on John Mayall, obviously because he was such a huge influence on the white blues boom, we had an obituary on the site. When I was a lot younger almost everyone I knew who bought records had a copy of either Turning Point, Empty Rooms, or the Blues Breakers album. Here’s the opening track from Blues Breakers—with the young Eric Clapton on lead guitar.

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Read more: What we’ve been listening to, part 1, is here.

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