The torch songs of Billie Holiday seem indivisible from the tragedy of her own life; it's impossible to imagine the barbed ballads of post-punk legends The Fall unfiltered by the strident individuality of their singer Mark E Smith; and The Wombles’ celebratory anthems about litter collection would not have rung so true had we not known that their daily lives were indeed devoted to selfless off-the-grid guerrilla recycling. But rarely has an artist been as apparently absent from their own work as the writer, song collector and folk singer Shirley Collins.
If I may, in contrast to Shirley, blast my own monstrous trumpet for a moment, I believe it was I who, when penning sleeve notes to Shirley's 2016 return to recording Lodestar, wrote; ‘To me, her egoless recordings resist stylistic flourishes, remove the obstacle of the performer's personality, and directly channel the listener to the words and music, reconnecting traditional tunes with the strange worlds they emerged from.’
In the run up to the record's release, I put it to Shirley, that in her ’50s, ’60s and ’70s performances she didn't so much inhabit a song as surrender to it. To which she replied, ‘All I did was perform the songs in a straightforward way. It's the only way I can sing them, because when people start dramatising or enacting a song, I just become embarrassed. I think the best way is to draw people in, not to stand there and declaim it.’
Partly because of this approach, Shirley's recordings have stood the test of time in a way some post-war folk revival favourites haven't, tied to the identifying sonic and social fashions of the scenes that spawned them. But when she came to write what was to be but her first volume of autobiography, 2004's America Over The Water, Shirley's long-term confidante and cheerleader, the underground musician and archivist David Tibet, of Current 93, confessed, in his introduction to the book, to concerns about the apparent invisibility of the author.
Shirley had based her book around the 1959 song collecting trip she made to the deep south of America as the ‘assistant’ of her then lover the folklorist Alan Lomax, and upon reading a first draft Tibet noted, ‘I felt it was only half-accurate, missing out so much of what I wanted to read about her own life and experience in North America. She had left out practically all information on herself and the book read as an account of Alan Lomax's quest, with a retiring young girl from Sussex assisting, who occasionally mentioned herself. Over many re-writings, Shirley thankfully overcame her modesty to write this luminous account.’
When Shirley published America Over The Water in 2004 she had not recorded or performed for nearly a quarter of a century, having suddenly and definitively forsworn singing for mysterious reasons, which she kept private, as she had every right to do. But questions remained unanswered, and one imagined there was a hidden personal drama behind Shirley's apparent accommodation of her former career, the ending of which remained unresolved and more than a little sad.
Then, with no real fanfare, in February 2014, at one of David Tibet's concerts at the Union Chapel in Highbury, Shirley sang again at last, making some kind of public and personal peace with her past. A documentary crew were already trailing her to make what had appeared to be a capstone to her career. But Rob Curry and Tim Plester suddenly found that their proposed film, The Ballad of Shirley Collins, had blossomed, in a symbiotic flowering, beyond their wildest dreams into a drama of rebirth and recovery. Given confidence by the realisation that, in her absence, her legend had only grown, Shirley Collins, now eighty years old, set to work slowly on the album that would become Lodestar, and on the book that would become All In The Downs.
Much as her fans and supporters might want to honour Shirley by allowing whatever work she was prepared to gift to us to stand alone, without the modern mania for full disclosure, the narrative that leads up to Lodestar, as documented by Curry's and Plester's magical film, suggested that some major issue had been resolved, that whatever prevented her from singing had been unblocked.
Shirley is a survivor from an age now undreamed of, where social media did not require artists to over-share every last aspect of their lives in a Faustian promotional pact with the audience that feeds them. But nonetheless it would be difficult for the admirably private singer's second volume of autobiography to avoid discussing whatever had prevented her from singing in the first place, and whatever had given her the confidence to begin again.
The 2005 autobiography of the comedian and writer Eric Sykes was playfully called If You Don't Write It, Nobody Else Will, but the book's title nonetheless suggests that Sykes was confident he had a story that needed to be told, mainly about playing golf with celebrities admittedly, whether anyone else wanted to tell it for him or not.
In contrast, if Shirley Collins hadn't written this second, and far more open and illuminating and downright literary, volume of autobiography, someone else would have had to at least try. But they would not have made as good a job of it. Like Shirley's, and her sister Dolly's, music, All In The Downs dissolves time, darting between distant memory and history and the events of her recent renaissance, dissolving the years between incidents, bringing ghosts, both metaphorical and literal, striding over the downs into life before us.
The history of the post-war working class, and of the pre-war country folk of Sussex, dovetail into and reflect each other. The birth of the ’50s folk revival is intertangled with Shirley's own discovery of who she was as a woman, an artist and an archivist, as she scrimps by on scraps in a bohemian London as alien as a distant star. And in the fertile microcosm of Sussex, where the story begins and ends, Shirley, like William Blake, sees a world in a grain of sand, and Heaven in a Wild Flower.
‘I feel grateful,’ Shirley writes, ‘that I lived my youth through an earlier and simpler time, even though in many ways it was hard. Our childhood and teenage years were free from television and computers and the video games that no child seems to be able to be without nowadays. I feel that Dolly and I were always looking out and around us. We could step outside our front door on a clear night and look up at the skies over old Hastings and gaze at The Milky Way. And if that's not important, I don't know what is…’
And one also feels, that as well as writing All In The Downs for us, Shirley had, finally, to write it for herself, to understand the sadness that had stifled her voice, and the circumstances that saw it rediscovered. All In The Downs is not a News of The World kiss and tell, but, for example, the appearances of her estranged second husband's jumpers in unexpected places serve modestly to speak of Shirley's sense of betrayal, and do so as profoundly as the more emotionally explicit images other writers might have chosen.
When I first met Shirley fifteen years ago, it was beyond any fan or friend's wildest hopes that she would begin to create again, but the last two years have seen her release, unexpectedly, her finest album, Lodestar, feature in her own biopic, The Ballad of Shirley Collins, and finally deliver the book that makes sense of her story, All In The Downs. She is now, though her modesty would forbid her from ever making the comparison herself, the very revered folk matriarch she once went out into the world to document and learn from. And this is Shirley's own story, of Shirley, at last, victorious. But in it, she also gives life to the forgotten and often anonymous forebears of the folk song tradition that sustained her. Their voices, like hers, were once silenced, but now live on through Shirley Collins.