Shirley Collins: Archangel Hill review – brio and unforced gravitas

The third album since Shirley Collins’s renaissance at 81 turns out to be the finest. After a 38-year silence, the recovery of the English folk singer’s vocal powers was at first tentative, but here she sails through an array of traditional song with all the brio an 87-year-old might muster. Her voice is not the joyous thing it was – to remind us of her sprightly younger years, a live 1980 performance is included – but its weathered tones come with unforced gravitas. Collins has always maintained that a song is more important than its singer, and the narratives here unfold easily.

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Among them are numbers originally learned and played with her late sister Dolly, such as Hares on the Mountain and Fare Thee Well My Dearest Dear, the latter a tale of cross-dressing that ends in drowning (a common cause of death in folk music). There’s a nod, too, to Collins’s 1959 expedition to the US with the songwriter Alan Lomax on High and Away, and on an Appalachian instrumental. The title cut is a poem by her father about a beloved Sussex peak, given an atmospheric treatment by arranger Ian Kearey, who along with fellow members of Collins’s Lodestar Band provide discreet, exquisite accompaniments. A tonic.