(Buying the albums sampled on “Picnic”).
Today, some more from the notes, dated January 1993 and credited to David Suff and John Tobler, from the liner to the expanded CD.
“”Anthems in Eden”, the 1969 album by Shirley & Dolly Collins featuring a suite of songs centred round the changes in rural England brought about by the First World War, had a terrific impact on recorded folk music in Britain. The glorious and unusual ensemble of early music instruments – rebecs, sackbuts, crumhorns and all – proved once and for all that the guitar was not the only appropriate accompaniment for folk song. Several critics have suggested that it is impossible to imagine that electric accompaniment for traditional song, as successfully purveyed by Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span [qv above], could have developed quite as it did without the pioneering “Anthems in Eden”.
“Shirley and Dolly Collins were brought up in Sussex, in a family which had a deep love of traditional music. Their uncle, F.C. Ball, encouraged them to hear a wide variety of music, especially the work of Monteverdi and Purcell. By the mid-1960s, they were keen to attempt to marry “Early music” instruments with the songs Shirley was singing in folk clubs. David Munrow, a noted and enthusiastic explorer with the Musica Reservata ensemble, proved to be excited by the same idea.”
More next time.
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