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Avice Caro

Celebrating 60 Years of "Folk Roots, New Routes"

Shirley Collins: In Conversation with Mataio Austin Dean (Premiere Screening)

Plus musical performances from Avice Caro, Gwena Harman (Goblin Band), Sam Grassie, Henry Parker & Dariush Kanani.

"Collins' 1964 album, Folk Roots, New Routes, is an uncompromising work that spearheaded innovation in the middle of the folk music revival. It set a template for the folk-rock that followed it, and inspired 21st century psych-folk decades later. Pentangle and Fairport Convention would have been very different without her, while Will Oldham, Blur's Graham Coxon and Angel Olsen are among contemporary fans who have recorded her songs.

Collins may not have looked like much of a rebel on the cover of that 1964 album, but she was. Five years earlier, she had crossed the Atlantic alone to visit prisons and remote Appalachian communities, meeting there with folklorist Alan Lomax to collect folk songs. (Decades later, many of these same songs formed the Grammy-winning soundtrack of the Coen Brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou?) Collins had already skipped home as a teenager to pursue a folk career, too, taking her lipstick to graffiti posters in folk clubs she found wanting, even getting threatened in one with a knife.

Collins' voice meets a stunning partner in Davy Graham, whose influential and groundbreaking guitar-playing mixed influences from Indian raga, jazz and North African blues. (Paul Simon popularized Graham's instrumental piece, "Anji," on 1966's The Sounds of Silence, while The Beatles' excursions East followed Graham's lead)." - Jude Rogers, NPR

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