 | | Reviews | | |  MARTIN SIMPSON
Righteousness & Humidity
Topic Records TSCD540
An interesting cove, Mr Simpson. A gifted exponent of both English traditional music and Delta blues, he's equally at home with pastoral anthem or swampy holler. Last year, freshly repatriated from a long domicile in the USA, Simpson scooped Musician Of The Year at BBC Radio 2's Folk Awards as well as Best Album for his traditional English CD Bramble Briar. Now he's turned out an homage to the music of the American south, largely recorded in New Orleans and containing traditional blues and old-time ballads in which themes of religion, crime and punishment, love and loss are all grist to the mill for his virtuoso guitar stylings and empathic, quiet drawl of a voice.
Familiar traditional songs from Rollin' And Tumblin' to John Hardy take on new life, with banjo tunings and Mississippi fiddle melodies defining arrangements and settings. Simpson's unique guitar style owes a lot to the 5-string banjo (which he also plays with finesse along with a sweet-toned ukelele) and a read of the sleeve notes is illuminating: song provenances, tunings, snippets of histories and copious namechecks testify to the extent of his interest in the genre lovingly portrayed here. From the simple acoustic guitar of This World Is A Trouble And A Trial to the full-band-driven The Coo Coo Bird, this is sixteen tracks of finger lickin' goodness.
There's a great version of Georgie (Geordie) sourced from a 1936 Virginia field recording, Blind Willie Johnson's Can't Keep From Crying, a bluesy version of Payday (aka Honeybabe) in sharp contrast to Mississippi John Hurt's major modality. It's the self-penned songs which alert the x-factor sensor, though. Easy Money vividly evokes injustice and jazz life in New Orleans while Love Never Dies is as fine a piece of songwriting as you're likely to hear this side of Lyle Lovett.
Mel McClellan - August 2003
See also:
More from Martin Simpson in our reviews archive.
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Folk & Acoustic
