Hannah James: Beginner’s Guide

Looking across Hannah James’ career as an accordionist, singer, dancer and songwriter, you’re presented with a borderless sense of exploration and assimilation, of different channels feeding into a greater whole.

Within those channels, you’ll find the 14-year-old who sat down at the Derby Assembly Rooms with a pre-teen Sam Sweeney in 2001, and went on to form teenage band Kerfuffle.

Further along, there’s the established artist who spent six months studying at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy before teaming up with Estonian accordionist and composer Tuulikki Bartosik to record the singular, improvisatory Chatterbox.

Hannah Jame (photo: Elly Lucas)

Then there is the audacious one-woman show JigDoll, blending dance, accordion and looped voice into a seamless whole; and the pure-voiced harmonising with Rowan Rheingans and Hazel Askew as Lady Maisery, currently touring their first album in six years, tender. On this record, featuring original songs alongside interpretations of Tracy Chapman, Björk and Lal Waterson, ‘tenderness’ is the key word to unlock songs like ‘bird i do not know’, while the trio’s massed harmonies, set to James’ percussive beats, soar and swoop across Björk’s ‘Hyperballad’ as if they had wings.

“When you’ve sung together for such a long time you start to be very in tune with each other and you listen in a different way,” says James of Lady Maisery. “We’ve evolved together to make this sound, and it keeps expanding as we expand, but it’s very much its own thing, and we all came back together with a renewed appreciation for that, and it shows in the new album. Hazel said recently that it’s as if we’ve written a love letter to each other with tender, and I feel that’s true. The new album is quite different to any of our previous stuff.”

Lady Maisery released their debut, Weave & Spin, in 2011. “Me and Hazel knew each other on the folk scene,” says James, “and spoke about starting a trio that was about voice and vocal harmony. We found Rowan and it just worked. We didn’t know each other well at the beginning, and we had the idea of doing mostly traditional material and the mouth music [diddling], but as we’ve all evolved as performers and creators, the container of Lady Maisery has expanded too.”

Much musical evolution has passed, too, since James’ 2001 meeting with Sam Sweeney, which led them to form Kerfuffle and release five albums between 2003 and 2009, signing off with Lighten the Dark: A Midwinter Album. “Kerfuffle was great, but it was our teenage project,” says James. “People say, ‘Oh I still listen to the Kerfuffle albums,’ and I’m like, for God’s sake [laughter], I made that when I was 15 and had no idea what I was doing. Although, by the time we made Lighten the Dark we were in our 20s and knew what we were doing.”

Working as a duo with Sweeney between 2012 and 2014, they released two albums, Catches and Glees and State and Ancientry, the latter including one of James’ most delicately beautiful vocal performances, ‘On Yonder Hill There Sits a Hare’. “Me and Sam had a very strong musical connection, so it was obvious the two of us would do something together,” says James. “At that time we were both moving into other projects and starting to earn a living by playing. So it made sense to do something a bit smaller and that filled a different niche.”

Around the time Lady Maisery was diddling into position, James met with the mighty force that is Maddy Prior, who called James out of the blue in 2012 to join her and Giles Lewin (of early music group The Dufay Collective) for the excellent 3 for Joy album. In 2017, they reconvened for the mythic, magical Shortwinger, its music populated by the wilds of English landscape and folklore, its airs scored with hares, hawks, starlings, wrens, blackbirds, herons, larks, swallows and curlews. “Maddy’s brilliant,” says James. “She’s been such a big influence on me. She took a total risk on me. She’s also the person who made me start writing songs.”

As well as working with Prior and Lady Maisery, James was clog dancing with the ebullient Demon Barber Roadshow before spending time in Finland and putting down the music for 2015’s Chatterbox with Tuulikki Bartosik, the two having been invited to play together at the Gower Folk Festival. “It was really fun, and very different from how I’d worked with anyone before,” says James of the album.

Broadening her palette further, a fashion for large ensembles saw James join the line-ups for the acclaimed projects The Elizabethan Session and Songs of Separation, both live and on their respective albums, released in 2014 and 2016. “It’s always fun with those projects,” she says. “They’ve got a theme, and you’ve got a certain amount of time to get together and make something, and it makes everybody’s creativity quite focused.”

Further sonic experimentation came with 2021’s Sleeping Spirals duo set with French cellist Toby Kuhn, who also featured on her 2019 JigDoll Ensemble album, The Woman and Her Words. Indeed, JigDoll is among the high points of James’ career. “I wanted to make a show that brought all the elements of what I do together, in a seamless way,” she says. “And I decided to make it a show where I didn’t talk to the audience, so the whole thing runs seamlessly, a one-woman music and dance show.” She used Ableton Live for looping and sequencing, and after two years of solo performances, and her first solo album, JigDoll, James expanded the stage line-up into a pan-European ensemble of Hungarian percussionist András Dés, Scottish fiddle player Kate Young and Estonian bassist Marti Tärn, and later Toby Kuhn.

While the JigDoll show is in a resting position (“the pandemic has made things very difficult”), if there’s one thing the long, giant pause from COVID-19 lockdowns has taught James, it’s the value of the folk community over any idea of ‘industry.’ “I feel there has been an emphasis in the past ten years to shift the folk scene to something that is more comparable to other music scenes, in terms of it being an industry,” she says. “The folk scene’s been special to me for its community side, and there’s been a pulling away from that, until the pandemic. And it has shown us how important that community is for supporting the artists and as a big supportive network. It’s where the music should be and the music comes from that.”

This article originally appeared in the January 2023 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today