This week’s featured album is the third by Spell Songs, the seven-piece musical collective, some of whom you’ll know very well, which has now made three albums in creative response to books written by Robert Macfarlane and illustrated by Jackie Morris. The books combine art and environmental activism, and so does the music of Spell Songs. The members are Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, Rachel Newton, Beth Porter and Jim Molyneux, and we’ll have Rachel on the show to tell us more about the project and her role in it.
The featured archive album is Bringing It All Back Home, not by Bob Dylan, but a compilation dating back to the 1990s, originally to accompany a TV series about Irish folk music and its transatlantic travels. The album stands as a significant survey of the best Irish folk music, its offshoots, and its great artists at the end of the 20th Century.
And the featured songwriter has to be Dolly Parton.
This is our 20th episode, and it launches at 7pm on Sunday.
Thank you for finding the Dylan Thomas recording. Not only the man himself but reading my favourite “In my craft..” which in a fit of romanticism, I committed to memory at age 18. Stange that although his poems are infused with rhythms and lilt of Welsh accents, his own speaking voice was more Oxford, I suppose as befits a Bank Manager’s son.
Unwittingly, I think I met one of his acquaintances years ago, who ran a radio repair shop and taxi service in Aberaeron, just down the road from New Quay, where the Thomas’s (Dylan and Caitin) lived during the war (and the prototype “Buggerall” of Under Milk Wood??). As a small boy into anything radio/electronic I think I went into the shop probably after a diode for a crystal set. I still go into the shop, its now a nice whole food shop beside the Town Hall, and anyone visiting might be passing over the same threshold as DT.
A friends father, a farmer near Laugharne boat House, his writing den, was not very charitable, he described him as a “drunk waster”.
The Thomas connection encouraged me to explore peoms of possibly his best friend Vernon Watkins. In character and lifestyle they were chalk and cheese but close poetic collaborators. Example taken at random : “Dusk Tide” is a nice read.
Anyway, I do enjoy the music too. Shame on BBC that they were unable to support such a high quality output as you generate. Thanks and well done.
John Mills, Shropshire