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Anthems for the Fallen

Alternative music comes in all shapes and sizes, all modes and guises, all sounds and styles. Sometimes, it takes the form of angry young men playing electric guitars. Other times, it's made by a crew of English folkies, wielding archaic, renaissance instruments —called things like crumhorn, sackbut, sordun, rebec, and rackett— as a form of musical archeology.

In 1969, at the height of social unrest, making such recidivist music —as heard on Anthems in Eden— may seem like a retreat from the times; a blinkered nostalgia trip refusing to acknowledge the turmoil of an unflattering present.


But, this couldn't be further from the truth.

Shirley Collins' career-defining masterwork was, in fact, a fiercely political statement: against the masculinity of rock'n'roll, against the relentless march of capitalism, and, most notably, against the far-reaching damage of involving a nation in conflicts on foreign shores. The LP's title did, in part, evoke the prelapsarian idealism that reigned in 1969, but it also spoke of The Fall: the sounds and songs of the rural idyll each tinged with a fatalism that found things forever turning tragic.

To author this veritable monument to the very tradition of oral storytelling, Collins —a one-time student of legendary ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, and a walking repertoire of folksong— assembled her sister/collaborateur, Dolly, and the ancient-instrument-wielding members of the Early Music Consort of London, and set about crafting a single suite of traditional tunes that could bring to life the transformative carnage of World War I.

The Notes Are Loud and Clear

Young girls watching young men go off to war have long been a favored folksong tale, but Collins wanted to take things further: capturing not just the tragedy of the individual sweetheart, but the grand social changes that came in WWI's wake; when a whole generation of young men were lost, and the village centerpiece became not the maypole, but the memorial stone.

The result was "A Song-Story (Medley)," a nine-part, 28-minute opus that spanned the entire Side A of Anthems in Eden. As crumhorns and sackbuts squeak and squawk in their imperfect tuning, wavering all the while, Collins' singing resounds pure and true. For some, Sandy Denny was the voice of the folk-revival, but her super-sweet, belted out vocals always sounded saccharine to me; she more the pin-up of the folk-music industry than anything else. Collins is, contrastingly, not just the voice of the folk-revival, but the voice of the people.

As Collins gives new life to often-sung dirges ("Lowlands," existing here as "A Song-Story"'s part F), intones words given to her by the Incredible String Band's Robin Williamson ("God Dog"), and turns in the definitive version of a sweethearts-meeting folk-revival staple ("Searching for Lambs), she takes her place amongst the most singular figures to ever sketch out their own unique, idiosyncratic, never-to-be-replicated place on the fringes of familiar sound.

Anthems in Eden is just as 'out there' as any of 1969's celebrated outsider works, but it just happens to be sowed with thematic ambition, redolent beauty, and persistent cultural resonance.

Record Label: Harvest
Release Date: 1969