England - East Anglia & Kent

East Anglia is a flat landscape with sweeping sandy beaches along its coasts on the bulge of land to the north of London.  Above a beach in northern Norfolk.  Hailing from Norwich, the capital of county Norfolk is folk trio Alden Patterson and Dashwood, who weave rich vocal harmonies, fiddle, guitar and dobro around beautifully written original songs and melodies, some of them influenced by bluegrass.  Here's a song from their 2018 album By The Night called The Cobbler's Daughter:

Near Norwich is the village of Raveningham, where performer, composer and improviser Laura Cannell hails from.  She is mostly known for her baroque violin playing and the eerie drones of her recorder producing experimental sounds exploring links between medieval traditional and modern musical idioms.  Last year she got together with fellow East Anglia singer Polly Wright to record a purely vocal album called Sing As the Crow Flies, which is a collection of haunting melodies inspired by the landscapes of Norfolk and almost puts you into a trance like state.  The source of their material apparently was a 19th century book snappily entitled 'The Norfolk Garland: A Collection of the Superstitious Beliefs and Practices, Proverbs, Curious Customs, Ballads and Songs of the People of Norfolk'.  This is the opening track called One for the Rook One for the Crow:

Folk singer, guitarist and concertina player Nancy Wallace was born in East London, but was raised in an unspecified Suffolk seaside town, but now resides in Montreal, Canada.  Her songs have featured on many compilation albums, but only released one full length solo album in 2009 called Old Stories.  This is a song from that album called I live not where I love:

Finger-style guitarist and singer/songwriter Adrian Nation was born in the Essex seaside village of Holland-on-Sea in Essex.  He lists his influences as the theme song of TV series Black Beauty, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot and is said to have something of a young Martin Simpson about him.  Here's a demonstration of his guitar skills called Five Finger Rapids from his 2009 album Fall or Fly:

Legend in his own lifetime Billy Bragg was born in 1957 in Barking, Essex.  It's hard to believe the singer/songwriter and political activist is only 62, as he seems to have been around forever playing his brand of folk punk and protest songs.  Here is one of his classics, The World Turned Upside Down, performed live.  I like this version because of the intro, which says it all really.  It features on his 2016 release Back to Basics amongst other places:

Mother and daughter duo Belinda Kempster and Fran Foote have traditional folk running through their veins.  They've decided to record songs they have learned from Belinda's uncle Ernie, who was a farm labourer near Colchester in Essex, to document their family tradition.  The result is an album called On Clay Hill released in 2019, which just features the voices of these two women, plus a short bonus song, sung by Uncle Ernie himself.  This is a song called Dark-Eyed Sailor off the album:

Another family affair are multi-instrumentalists and folk singers Emily and Hazel Askew known as the Askew sisters from London (as we are passing through London again).  They aim to give ancient traditional songs a contemporary feel accompanying their voices with fiddle, melodeon, concertina and cello.  Their latest 2019 album is called Enclosure and this is the opening track, I Wandered by the Brookside:

Folk singer Chris Wood started out his musical journey as a choir boy at Canterbury Cathedral in Kent.  He has been part of the Oysterband and many other collaborations including with Andy Cutting and others, playing English, French and Québécois folk as well as his own compositions.  Here's a slightly dark song called Non the Wiser, which is the title track from his 2013 album:

And talking about the Oysterband, they are a folk punk band who started life in 1976 in Canterbury as the Oyster Ceilidh Band, then as the Oyster Band and finally adopting its present name with various changes in personnel over the years.  Here's a song from their 2008 album The Oxford Girl and Other Stories called Early Days of a Better Nation:

Also from Canterbury are progressive folk band Arlet, whose music according to their own words falls somewhere between the folk club and the chamber music hall.  Composer and accordionist Aidan Shepherd creates a fresh sound, which is drawing from English folk tunes, reminding one of the Penguin Café Orchestra and hints English composer Vaughan Williams.  Here's a tune from their 2013 album Clearing called V12:

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Tim Edey was born in the Kent village of Broadstairs near Dover, but lives in Donegal these days and is involved there in the Irish folk scene, having been part of the Chieftains and Lúnasa.  He also collaborated with New Zealand harmonica player Brendan Power to produce according to a BBC reviewer "one of the more colourful folk albums of 2011" entitled Wriggle and Writhe.  This is the title track off that album:

Sorry this was a bit of a longer post, but this concludes our trip around the British Isles, around Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland and its islands, England and Wales.  After one year and almost 5 months, covering 5,120 miles or 8,240 km, stopping at 178 places, we're next heading over the channel to France and the rest of Europe.  As usual you can follow my virtual tour on my tripline map.

England - The South Coast

Heading east along the south coast of England we stop in Dorset.  Accordion player Paul Hutchinson is a native of Dorset and he recently recorded an album with a new quartet he named The Maniacs together with Seona Pritchard on violin and viola, Gil Redmond on cello and Karin Wimhurst on clarinet.  Whilst the name The Maniacs suggests a heavy metal band the title of the album released in February is more explanatory: The Maniacs - De-composed 18th Century Dance Music.  The album was recorded in Shroton Church in Dorset.  Here's a song from that album called Roodulum:

Moving on to Southampton in Hampshire we meet folk punk band The Men They Couldn't Hang.  They've been going on since 1984.  Here's a song from their 2005 album Smugglers and Bounty Hunters called The Ghosts of Cable Street about an antifascist protest in London in 1936 in opposition to a march by the British Union of Fascists.  The antifascists clashed with the police and the events became known as the Battle of Cable Street.

Next stop is the popular seaside city of Brighton in East Sussex, where folk duo Hickory Signals hails from.  They consist of Laura Ward and Adam Ronchetti, their sound is based around Ward's powerful leading vocal and Ronchetti's vibrant acoustic guitar and pulsing cajon to which they add flute, percussion and shruti drones.  They released their debut album Turn to Fray in 2018 and this is an atmospheric number from it called Noise of the Waters:

The pair are also part of the Brighton-based folk music collective Bird in the Belly.  They go around collecting little known and forgotten lyrics, poems and stories and set them to their own hypnotically original compositions.  Here's a song from their 2018 debut album The Crowing called Horace in Brighton:

Virtuoso guitarist Richard Durrant was born in Hollingbury just outside  Brighton.  His music kind of defies categorisation incorporating elements of classical guitar, jazz, folk, prog rock and electronica.  In 2014 he released a minimalist album called Cycling Music, combining his guitar playing with mechanical bicycle noises and electronica.  He launched his album by cycling almost 1500 miles across England from venue to venue.  Here's the story of that ride.  It's 44 minutes long, but well worth a watch and of course full of music:

Folk singer Shirley Collins was born in Hastings in 1935 and was a significant contributor to the English Folk Revival of the 1960's and 70's.  She lived with American Folk Collector Alan Lomax for a while and went on a folk collecting trip across the southern United States with him in 1959, where she was credited with the discovery of Mississippi Fred McDowell.  She originally retired from music in 1979 after a painful divorce and the loss of her voice, but miraculously picked up singing again in 2014.  Here's a song from the latter part of her career from the 2016 album Lodestar.  Sorry it's a bit morbid, the song is called Death and the Lady:

Shirley Collins actually is going to have a new album out on the 24th July called Heart's Ease.  Not bad for an 85 year old!  This is a song from that album called Wondrous Love:

That's it today from the south coast of England, next we are heading into the big smoke that is London.  As usual you can follow my virtual ramblings on my tripline map