Black English Folk Music & The Sorrow Songs

 I didn’t think there was such a thing as Black English folk music, but now, thanks to Angeline Morrison and The Sorrow Songs, I think differently. Black English folk music is very much a thing, a very relevant thing.

Back in the 1980s, I stopped considering Black folk as part of the English folk tradition, given their black-faced Morris dancers, which its practitioners claimed had nothing to do with racism, Jim Crow, or minstrelsy. For me, English folk music was the trope of grown bearded white men in Aran sweaters with their fingers in their ears singing folk songs and sea shanties.

My ideas changed following an invitation by the author J T Williams to attend the book launch of Mary L. Shannon’s Billy Waters Is Dancing: Or How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain. Billy Waters was formerly a slave who gained his freedom by joining the Royal Navy, where he lost a leg, eventually earning his living and some notoriety as a fiddle-playing beggar and singer on the streets of London. He died in 1823. I knew of Billy Waters from producing an eponymous podcast for the Black Presence in British Portraiture.  I plan to write a review of the book but for now I've been diverted thru discovering Black English folk. The event was packed with over 200 people, and there was music.

The Sorrow Songs Band

It was that music – the band and songs they played – that made me appreciate that there could be such a thing as Black English folk music.

Angeline Morrison’s Jump Billy, specially written for the Billy Waters Is Dancing launch, was played by The Sorrow Songs Band: Vocals - Angeline Morrison, Violin - Hamilton Gross, Banjo - Clarke Camilleri, Concertina - Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, and conversations with those musicians afterward completely changed my thinking on Black English folk music in particular and contemporary English folk music in general.

The Black presence could be seen in the band’s name, taken from the title of Angeline Morrison’s award-winning 2022 album The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of the Black British Experience. An article in The Guardian on its release whichcompletely passed me by, despite being a subscriber and daily reader.

It describes Angeline as bringing to light the overlooked history of Black British people through original folk songs, blending traditional instruments and a cappella singing. She captivates her audience with her quiet intensity, offering a stark contrast to the conventional, jovial folk performances I was more familiar with. In it Angeline talks about aiming to fill the gaps in the British folk canon by sharing stories of Black ancestors, influenced by her own heritage and experiences, which Angeline makes viscerally real through her soft, melodic voice in the most hauntingly beautiful way in The Sorrow Songs.

Angeline Morrison The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of the Black British Experience,
Topic Records (2022)

I have been listening to it repeatedly since I downloaded it last week. It opens with the deeply sad and moving Unknown African Boy (d1830), written from the perspective of the mother of an unknown Black boy, about eight years old, whose body was found and listed among cargo like palm oil, elephant tusks, silver dollars, and gold dust, and is buried in St Martin's churchyard, Isles of Scilly. The album goes on to tell the tales of many Black Britons, some known to me, such as Ignatius Sancho, John Ystumllyn (I have the rose named after him in my garden), Charles Wooton, and Mary Seacole. Others were new to me: Moll O’Bedlam (with her ‘mad hair’ who died in prison); Fanny Johnson (a servant whose hand was kept by the family she worked for); Evaristo Muchovela (buried in the same grave as his master). All making manifest the complexity and diversity of the Black presence in British history

From its name and cover the album connects with the Black and the Black British Experience. Its name  is taken from the closing chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois' 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter XIV: Of the Sorrow Songs, where Du Bois reflects on the significance of Negro spirituals, or Sorrow Songs as he calls them, as expressions of the Black slave's soul and experience. Exactly what Angeline does for Black Britons through her compositions, reflecting on and empathizing with the lived experiences of Black folk over the centuries. While its cover features the image of an angelic little Black May Queen taken from a World War Two Colonial Office propaganda film now in the BFI collection Springtime in an English Village (1944). There is a beautifully illustrated downloadable annotated lyric book with pictures and stories behind all the songs on The Sorrow Songs.

The album’s songs and lyric book make an informative, emotional, and very accessible introduction to the history of Black people in England. Together, they make  The Sorrow Songs an excellent companion to any of the texts written on Black British history: David Olusoga’s Black and British: A Forgotten History, Hakim Adi’s African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History, The Oxford Companion to Black British History, and Peter Fryer’s seminal Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain.

Angeline Morrison and The Sorrow Songs made Black English folk music real for me, which I will now continue to follow. I unreservedly recommend the album to those who want to experience Black English folk music and some very real Black British history through music.

FOOTNOTE (24th June 2024)

By coincidence on the same day I published this post the Daily Telegraph had the following article :

It's behind a paywall however you can read it here as well as the comments which are sadly so predictable.