Eliza Carthy returns to the Oxford Folk Festival with her first solo set in 15 years
Eliza Carthy, Oxford Folk Festival at the North Wall, Oxford, on Saturday, April 20
Review by JON LEWIS
ELIZA Carthy returned to the Oxford Folk Festival at the North Wall with her first solo set in 15 years, performing songs released on her new downloaded EP, No Wasted Joy.
She asked if we wanted a happy or a sad song. If sad, Carthy listed a range of tropes found in historical folk songs about maidens and damsels; death by chicken, death in the vicinity of fish, death by suicide, or women murdered. She has a wicked sense of humour.
Over the evening, the raven-haired singer and violinist, with bright red make-up applied by her 13-year-old daughter, talked about her folk-singing parents, and especially her mother Norma Waterson, who died a couple of years ago. She tells us her father Martin Carthy was in Oxford the day before ‘but not for the Folk Festival, so that’s not a story’.
An early number, May Morning, is a song on Waterson Carthy’s fourth album A Dark Light, and rethought for Carthy’s EP. It concerns a young maid who goes a-courting only to reflect ‘never trust a young man of any higher degree/For when they’ve enjoyed all the flowers of your garden/Then they will go and leave you, as my love left me’.
Carthy begins with some wonderfully wild fiddle-playing, almost avant garde in its whirling, before singing this story about unreliable lovers.
The Trees They Do Grow High tells the story of another unhappy young woman whose father made her marry a boy a decade younger. He is a lord’s son and can provide for her. Married at 16, he has a child at 17 and is dead by 18. The tale ends with the woman watching her child grow, anxious for the future.
Quite a few songs feature the sea, a place of adventure and danger. New York Trader is a powerful ballad where the captain of a ship is told in advance that his journey is doomed.
Carthy grips the audience with the narratives, her distinctive voice soaring with the deepening drama.
It’s a bold collection of songs from one of the folk greats.
