Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
  beautiful music from time long ago July 2, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is how I like to hear the old, traditional songs sung.
Simple and unadorned as they were sung in homes and
at gatherings long ago. Haunting stories about real life
that bring us close to times past.
Lovely - I'm so glad it was released. If you like this you may
like Kathy & Carol. Two old souls from across the pond,
who sang in the same haunting, and pure way as Anne Briggs.
a voice pure and true February 19, 2007
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
i recently discovered anne briggs via a recommendation on amazon and am so glad i did. her voice is perfection. it is such an honest representation of the music that moved her so and defined her career. though i wish in many ways she had produced more, it seems so fitting that she would shun fortune and fame and live a simple, earthbound existence. this is a gem.
Austere, restrained, dignified ,masterful delivery September 6, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is like immersion in cold water-- once you get used to the bracing difference from normal sensation, you do not want to leave. Briggs' soprano is pure, free of much ornamentation but for this all the more controlled and focused. Briggs allows the song to guide her, and while she directs its interpretation by careful phrasing and pitch, she does not distract the listener from the narrative by any grandstanding. Briggs, in a Northern English/Scots style, understates her own transmittal of the tune. She points back, rather, to the tune.
If this makes sense, then you may like Briggs' self-effacing approach. This is not to make her sound mealy-mouthed or unable to make her presence felt, rather that Briggs steps aside, or gives the illusion of doing so, to let the song take the stage. No mean feat for a modern singer, like us all too aware of the celebrity and the poser who pretend to go back to revive an indigenous tradition in the name of roots or folk but really in the name of self-promotion and aggrandizement off of the public domain. If you have enjoyed Sweeney's Men, Andy Irvine, Planxty, or the numerous side projects of Irish trad in the 1970s onward, go back here to the origins of what became, slightly later in the 60s, the genesis of folk-rock. Even the Pogues, via a Sweeney partner Terry Woods of Moynihan, can attest to the far-ranging impact from two decades earlier of Briggs' arrival on the mid-60s scene. Here, partner Johnny Moynihan (who with another fellow Sweeney, Andy Irvine, brought into Ireland the bouzouki) gives subtle backing to a few tunes; these I would hold gain in resonance. I prefer the songs with a bit of instrumental enhancement, but these are few in the total heard here.
The majority are unaccompanied, and their austerity may prove daunting in extended listenings unless you are prepared for very intense, committed, and sustained delivery of British song as it may have, you wonder, been heard long before tape recorders.
Briggs' own discomfort with her recorded voice apparently led to her own termination of her career at least on vinyl by the early 70s. However, those of us less critical than the creator of these song versions that influenced so many in the past four decades of British folk in its acoustic and electric versions will want to pay close attention to where the origins of contemporary folk lie for so many especially British and also some Irish singers and musicians. Even Jimmy Page, indirectly via Bert Jansch and "Blackwaterslide" reveals the influence of Briggs, as does Sandy Denny and those who have followed in turn in her own considerable talents and pioneering inventiveness. Still, Briggs preceded Sandy D and Fairport and Steeleye and Sweeney's and all the rest of the later 60s crowd. This is where the revival began, for all practical purposes, for those who took up the challenge of restoring folk to its rightful place in the song tradition.
The stunning introduction to modern listeners here of the first and definitive "Willie O'Winsbury" speaks well for the entire collection; the penultimate line shows the singer's slight shift of emphasis, which sums up many verses and role reversals that the song tells of by Briggs' nuanced moment, caught on record so memorably. Of such slight polishing comes dazzling displays for us who can hear these early tracks, gathered with Colin Harper's liner notes and a handsome presentation from Topic. The result gives us the definitive compilation of this singer's best moments-- at least on tape.
Just give me a time machine... March 8, 2005
14 out of 18 found this review helpful
Anne is the girl who tricked the Queen of Faeries and rescued Tambling, and the same who wandered off with Reynardine into the fogs that mask the face of true lands of milkwhite steeds, unpolluted by cellphones. She rides on the West Wind and bemoans the East Wind, while the North Wind courts her, and the Great South aches with white flowers garlanded about her dark tresses. I would give seven pots of gold for a time machine, and I would travel back to the Cambridge Folk Festival in '65, and wander traipsing among the daisies with fair Anne, and chase the swallows as they play among the haywains of an ancient summer.
She has swum with the Salmon of Wisdom.
It doesn't get any better than this.
The first and most essential English folk album March 13, 2004
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
In the early 1960s, traditional English folk and its rich tradition of storytelling was largely the realm of the Communist Party and people like A.L. Lloyd - an English socialist who saw folk songs as a voice for ordinary English people.
Anne Briggs began as a singer in this environment, centred on coffee houses, but with a much more traditional, emotional style than that of, say, Joan Baez.
Her early recordings epitomised the purity of a capella folk singing, and showed her voice in a great variety of moods from crystal clear on "The Recruited Collier" and "The Doffing Mistress" to the seemingly incomprehensible, singing-in-tongues style of "The Whirly Whorl". The sad "She Moved Through The Fair" was a taste of the amazing intimacy created by this a capella style: it makes one feel like Anne herself when one listens. "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme" was equally naked and even sadder, whilst the soft, high vocal on "My Bonny Boy" developed a new level of dark, melodic mood on the memorable line "I built him a bower in my breast".
"Polly Vaughan" showed the tragedy of so many folk songs at its starkest: the tale of a girl mistakenly killed through being "mistaken for a swan". "Rosemary Lane" had a still higher, more melodic and softer vocal, whilst the disjointed lines of "Martinmas Time" serve only to add feeling in a way very different from the usual "whoa" of a pop song.
"Blackwater Side" offered a shock with its guitar accompaniment, but the beauty of Anne's voice remained because of the sheer austerity of this accompaniment. "The Snow It Melts The Soonest" was a classic nature-based folk tale, with Anne's voice less bell-like than before, whilst "Willie O'Winsbury", with dual bozouki accompaniment, was the most sublime piece here: Anne's and John Moynihan's bozoukis move in perfect harmony over a simple, reassuring tale of romance - yet sounding incredibly contemporary even today. "The Cuckoo" crystallised Anne's ability to describe the simple joys of the abndant English environment, whilst "Living By The Water" was a perfect finale: chronicling Anne's love of solitude in harmony with nature (she wrote the song whilst living on Bull Island). The ten-minute epic "Young Tambling" was almost a family story: it is amazing how Anne could focus on the whole so much as to not distort it.
Anne Briggs' beautiful, soft yet all the more emotional voice was the instrument that led the English folk revival that was one of the most important events of the 1960s. This and Sing A Song For You show how well she was able to convey traditional folk tales in an intimate, spontaneous manner that can ring a bell even in a time and place so remote from these realities.
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