In 1964, still bruised after turning down The Beatles, Decca Records released an album by the woman who helped make the discovery of blues musician Mississippi Fred McDowell, whose music she had been discovered in Tennessee in the late 1950s and recorded McDowell for the masses: 29-year-old Sussex folk singer Shirley Collins.
Collins may not have looked like much of a rebel on the cover of that 1964 album, but she was. Five years earlier, she had crossed the Atlantic alone to visit prisons and remote Appalachian communities, meeting there with folklorist Alan Lomax to collect folk songs.
Collins’ 1964 album, Folk Roots, New Routes, is an uncompromising work that spearheaded innovation in the middle of the folk music revival. It set a template for all the folk-rock that followed it, and inspired 21st century psych-folk decades later. Bands like Pentangle and Fairport Convention would have been very different without her, while Will Oldham, Blur’s Graham Coxon and Angel Olsen are among the contemporary fans who have recorded her songs.
It was one of the best 1960’s folk music revival albums of the 20th Century. “Folk Roots New Routes” it is a beautiful, highly respected and often the go-to British folk album which has earnt a great deal of admiration from many musicians, critics and fans around the world. At the center of this extraordinary record is Collins’ startling voice. It is clear and stark, pure but free of prettiness, a vehicle for a song and its sentiments, entirely without ego.
Davy Graham and Shirley Collins’ pioneering arrangements and playing is unyielding and timeless, yet their uncompromising approach was also very innovative.
Pressed on 180grm vinyl, analogue remastered with many tracks in stereo for the first time, directly from tapes for RSD 2020.Comes with new additional liner notes and rare photos printed on the inner sleeve. Some tracks are released in stereo for the first time ever.
The Fat Angel Sings 