I fell for Richard Dawson's individual delivery and take on the folk tradition when I first heard him on BBC 6Music's Freak Zone about four years ago, and having collected his more recent CDs, this year, for Christmas, I requested this early album and my brother duly obliged. I was familiar with it from streaming, so it's a bit of an old friend.
The seven songs on this album are all inspired by artifacts in Newcastle's Discovery Museum, as part of its Half Memory project and they're punctuated by 12 short guitar/harp pieces (two between each pair of songs - more on these later)
A Parent's Address To His Firstborn Son On The Day Of His Birth - the title kind of explains it. It's a heartwarming song without accompaniment (as all the songs are), joined by the chorus for "welcome, little stranger". Poor Old Horse is the macabre tale of a group of men in Gateshead attempting to kill a horse (and it brutally surviving most attempts), Dawson's vocals in the refrain often breaking, almost in grief at the horse's fate.
For me, the highlight of the album is William And His Mother Visit The Museum, a first hand account of William, who is blind, visiting a 'handling session' for blind children at Sunderland Museum in 1913. It's a tear jerking tale of a mother and child in difficult circumstances taking such joy on a routine, yet special day out, and Dawson delivers beautifully. The Brisk Lad on the other hand, is a traditional song and much less memorably than the others, followed by the wonderful Joe The Quiltmaker. When I saw Dawson live last year, he opened with "I'm going to start with an eleven minute acapella song about a 19th century quiltmaker. Is that OK?". It was more than OK, it was glorious. In this recording, however, Dawson's voice falters often, and his sub-par delivery leads to it dragging a little. There's a magical live version on YouTube.
The Ghost Of A Tree is a rousing song from the chorus, with a lively beat (there's a drum, so technically it's not unaccompanied), while the final song The Ice Breaker Baikal recalls the life of a North Shields shipbuilder and his family, a mournful song of working class life, which does seem to go on a bit.
The short tunes which punctuate the songs feel improvised, often discordant, and while none of them stand out on their own, they act as an interesting buffer to the procession of unaccompanied folk song.
It's an album with some massive highlights, but a couple which outstay their welcome, and Dawson's vocal performance isn't the strongest.
3* - there's much to reward the Dawson listener in this early album.
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