The Future Is Heritage
For the last couple of years I’ve been working with my son Duncan on a traditional folk song project. It came from messing around with AADGAD tuning on my Eko Ranger guitar back in 2021, when I heard the melody to “She Moved Through The Fair” in my head as I experimented with a few chords. I recorded the song in an online live show on 6th September 2021, and you can see the video of that song here: SHE MOVED THROUGH THE FAIR
If 2020 was disrupted for pandemic reasons, 2021 was an unsettled year during which we decided to move north from our home of 35 years in Sale, Greater Manchester. Duncan and our daughter Jenny were planning separate moves north, so we decided to bite the bullet ourselves and moved to Berwick upon Tweed in January 2022. A couple of months later, Duncan and I were trying a few things in my new home studio, and hit upon the idea of a tribute to the traditional folk songs we knew as a growing family.
We didn’t want to record traditional songs for the sake of it. There had to be good reason. Moira and I used to sing songs to our children just as Duncan and Jen sing songs to theirs so we started there, and recorded the bed track for “She Moved Through The Fair” that summer. Duncan first heard the tune to this traditional Irish song in Simple Minds’ 1989 single “Belfast Child”, and as a four year old was a brilliant Jim Kerr mimic! We drew up a list of other songs that had accompanied our long holiday drives, or drives to visit family on the Fylde coast, and committed ourselves to putting together an album, with each of the songs brought into 2024 with our own style.
When you play a cover song or interpret a traditional song, it’s important to retain enough of the original to make it recognisable while at the same time putting your own stamp on it. Later in 2022 I invited my Nightsong co-creator Jo Beth Young to join us on “She Moved Through The Fair”, but then life overtook us all. Duncan married Antonia in October 2022, moved to Dunfermline from Manchester in December that year, and from self-employment into a job in the environmental sector. Jen, Phiz and their family had already moved both home and business to Hawick in May of that year. We did a lot of visiting each others’ new homes! The project stalled still further to make way for the arrival of his son Ruaridh, and we finally sent a finished copy of this first song to Jo in late August this year.
Developing ideas for this project has been great fun. Only last week we named the project “Heritage” as we distributed “She Moved Through The Fair” to the radio shows. Duncan and I have made progress so far on three other songs and will be working through the rest of our list whenever we get time together. We have a number of interesting ideas that will cement this project as a true family effort, and expect to release an album in both digital and CD format in the second half of 2025.
“She Moved Through The Fair” is to be released on a Bandcamp page dedicated to the “Heritage” project on Friday 4th October: https://johnduncanreed.bandcamp.com/dashboard
We invite you to follow that page to stay in touch with our progress.
Peace.
John