We’ve seen several once-forgotten folk luminaries return to recording after multi-decade silences (Vashti Bunyan at 60, Linda Perhacs at 70), but Shirley Collins, now 81, is a special case. A primary architect of the British Folk Revival—not a songwriter but a peerless, iconic interpreter as well as an intrepid scholar/archivist of traditional music—she’s as venerated in certain small circles as she is broadly unknown outside of them. Her first album in nearly four decades consists, as usual, of songs even older than she is; if that sounds at all stuffy, think again. Lodestar is a deeply strange, idiosyncratic affair—perhaps her wildest and most wide-ranging ever—drawing from the expected English sources, but also French and American (including songs she collected in the U.S. South in 1959, alongside then-partner Alan Lomax), with bold instrumental choices from bottleneck slide guitar (transforming ancient British ballad “Death And The Lady”) to a bracing hurdy-gurdy drone and raucous on-record Morris dancing (both on the astounding 11-minute opening suite). The songs are mostly about death—but then, the songs are always mostly about death. What’s striking is how her voice, which once epitomized the prototypical fair young maiden, remains just as compellingly austere (albeit a good deal lower) but has now come to embody the much richer archetype of the wise old woman, with all the knowing tenderness, subtle humor and wry stoicism that entails.
—K. Ross Hoffman
