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Thank you for all your interest, and considerable patience, while we’ve been putting the album together over the last 5 years. I hope you enjoy what we’ve created, and that you’ll see fit to share “Heritage” around your family and social circles, on and offline!
I’m increasingly drawn to a life offline: a life where humans talk to other humans in the same room. All of the songs on the album come from a time way before we all started to hide behind our screens. They tell the lives of ordinary people, how they lived their lives, and the privations and injustices they suffered along the way.
The album’s two original songs commemorate the life of my Great Uncle Frank Reed (1897-1964), who I met just the once in his Blackpool basement room. The lyrics to both parts of “Keeping of the Bridge” and their title come from the first half of a trenches’ parody of a 15-verse 19th century poem “The Dream of Gerontius” (John Henry Newman 1865) . The parody was included in Frank’s memoirs, from his experience in what he called his ‘Great Adventure’ as he picked up bodies for four years from September 1915 on the killing fields of northern Europe. It’s a sobering reminder of the chaos into which our world descends if good people don’t stand against dark forces.
Back in about 2017-18, Duncan and I had intended to create an EP based entirely on “The Keeping of the Bridge”, and at that time our idea was to involve Matt in the songwriting. He’s so much better at accents than either of us! We may yet revive that idea, but for now Matt has graced Duncan’s ‘Part 1’ with his violin and viola. In 2021, I posted a YouTube video performance of “She Moved Through The Fair”. Jo Beth gave it a ‘like’ and a comment, and it was that which gave me the idea of involving her in the song, and sparked the wider idea of an album of traditional folk songs. Thank you to both of them, and to Ali Karim our great friend and producer.
Our approach to “Heritage” was a relaxed one. If a song worked from just one of us, then the other stepped back. So “Van Diemen’s Land” is mainly me and “Wild Mountain Thyme” is mainly Duncan, the principle being ‘what works best works’. It was nice to close with a song where each of us took alternative verses, coming together in the final verse, with Jo Beth’s amazing vocal arrangements weaving through the whole song.
“Heritage” does have occasional bright lyrical moments amid the political and social gloom, and includes songs that we’ve known throughout our family life, with just one or two of them coming to us more recently. In that sense, the album is also a tribute to the power of folk song. I look back at some of my own songwriting and singing inspirations: Dick Gaughan, Martin Carthy, Nic Jones, Ann Briggs and their ilk. These inspirational, community-minded artists have kept our social history alive and together with archeology, landscape archeology and the science that supports them, they have enabled us to hold on to real truths at times when political leaders have tried to create their own myths.
These are all things that have underpinned our album over these last five years. We didn’t intend it to take such a long time, but somehow, it feels appropriate that family life got in the way! We hope you love our progressive folk versions of songs you will surely know, one or two that you may not, and that it will encourage you to look further at the stories behind each of the songs on “Heritage”.
Heritage was released at 6pm (UK) on Saturday 12th September 2026 and was entirely self-funded. We hope you’ll pick up a digital copy or buy our CD!
www.johnduncanreed.bandcamp.com
Peace.
John