Alison McMorland with Jo Miller and Kirsty Potts

Description

Some Ballads of Anna Gordon: Mrs. Brown of Falkland is a major event for ballad scholarship: classic versions of twelve ballads from one of the earliest and most famous Scottish sources in a double CD, with notes and commentary by leading singers and scholars. The repertoire of Anna Gordon, collected in the closing years of the eighteenth century, has long been a standard reference-point for folklorists but never before has it actually been heard. Commissioned to accompany Ruth Perry’s landmark new biography The Ballad World of Anna Gordon, Mrs. Brown of Falkland, (Oxford University Press) these historically-informed performances by traditional singers Alison McMorland with Jo Miller and Kirsty Potts open a thrilling new soundscape into this ancient art. The sensitive direction of Alison McMorland, using occasional doubling of voices and gentle instrumental interjections, beautifully recreates the informal domestic circumstances in which these ballads were originally learned and sung. The results will surprise and delight even the most experienced ballad enthusiast.