Sam Lee

St Georges

I have to admit it: I find Sam Lee difficult. He has one of the most genuinely beautiful folk voices in the business and a powerful band behind him; and he is quite unlike any other performer on the circuit.

There is no irony or self-mockery to what he does. None of those jokes about how miserable his set is, or how silly folk songs sometimes are. No skepticism about where the songs come from. More than anyone else, he truly believes in the material. 

He sings with Spencer the Rover. Everyone sings Spencer the Rover. It is a rousing singalong Copper Family song only one inkling removed from The Wild Rover. John Martyn borrowed it from the Coppers and built a career on it. 

Sam thinks the song is about depression. That's what "being much reduced which caused much confusion" means. He thinks that Spencer goes into the woods to reconnect with nature, and that helped cure him of his mental illness. He thinks that is what folk music is all about. These ancient songs are an interface between ourselves and the natural world. 

The old tune is almost discernible; but he takes it slowly. Each verse is different. The song can often feel inconsequential, even quaint. Man leaves home; man goes back home. Sam makes us feel that Spencer has been on a long journey and we have been on it with him. 

He sings Soul Cake which could almost be a nursery rhyme. "A soul cake, a soul cake, please good missus a soul cake; one for Peter, one for Paul, one for he who made us all." (The Watersons did a version. So did Peter, Paul and Mary.) He incorporates lines from another counting song. Never have two lilly white boys clothed all in green-oh seemed so plaintive and urgent. He likes spirituals and songs with religious elements. It's all about finding our own link with the sacred. When he talks about the Nightingale being his spirit animal, you feel he means it. He organizes late night walks through woods to sing round a camp fire and listen to the nightingales sing. 

A lot of his songs were learned from gypsies; he knows many of the source-singers personally. He is a song collector as well as a song interpreter. However hard the arrangements work, there is no getting away from that curious, off-putting tempo that traditional singers sometimes have; from that modal drone [*] that characterize traveler singers like Thomas Mcarthy. It's sometimes more like listening to a chant than a melody. It can be unearthly, alien, uplifting, beautiful. It can also feel like hard work.

Go listen to some Sam Lee. He is unique; unusual; committed; intense. It no longer surprises us to hear someone singing a traditional song with an electric guitar or a synthesizer. But Sam is in his own way doing something more radical; going into the heart of these ancient songs and finding new ways for them to be meaningful. But be prepared to give him your full attention; and don't expect much light relief.

[*] Bluff