Obituary: Norma Waterson (1939-2022)

“During the war when most of the men were away, my grandmother kept a house full of women and children, and my grans would pass the Saturday nights sat around singing. It was never arranged. Any sort of love for music I got from her, because she loved all sorts of music.” So said Norma Waterson, England’s greatest living singer until her sad passing, at the age of 82, at the end of January. And if you heard her albums – whether her first, eponymous, Mercury Award-nominated solo album from the mid-90s, or her last, with daughter Eliza and the Gift Band, 2018’s Anchor – you heard how broad her sails were when it came to catching a song, and how eclectic her journey into music and into its very heart. Tom Waits, Nick Lowe, Kurt Weill, ‘trad arr’ – all were her wellsprings.

It is with the family band the Watersons, captured in the classic 1966 film Travelling for a Living, that Norma Waterson embarked on her life in music. With sister Lal and brother Mike – like Norma brought up by their Gypsy grandmother in Hull – and their cousin John Harrison, their 1965 debut Frost and Fire remains a classic of English folk. They released two more before splitting up, with Norma relocating to Montserrat to work as a DJ for some years – another example of her eclectic musical nature – then reconvened in the mid-1970s with her husband, Martin Carthy, for three more classics, concluding with 1981’s Green Fields.

Along the way there were solo projects – Lal and Mike’s Bright Phoebus, which has developed a cult of its own, Norma and Lal’s A True Hearted Girl, and Mike’s eponymous 1977 album. The 80s proved a tough road for folk musicians, but by the 90s, with Norma and Martin’s daughter Eliza spearheading a new generation of eclectic players, family band Waterson:Carthy rose to the occasion with their 1994 debut, Norma’s own solo set landing two years later. Five more Waterson:Carthy albums followed between 1996 and 2006, and while Norma was probably the last person to give the oft-repeated phrase “the first family of folk” much credence, to many she and her family were just that.

While health became an issue for Norma from the 2010s and performances became fewer – aside from the annual Normafest in Whitby, which began in 2015 – her final two albums with her daughter Eliza, 2010’s Gift and 2018’s Anchor, were as eclectic and electrifying as anything she’d done.

She has gone, but her voice will never leave us, nor the spirit wrapped up in that voice, or the songs wrapped up in that spirit. Once heard, she is unforgettable. And what she once said about the force of folk music holds true, still, as her voice will always hold true: “You can look at a book, the facts and figures,” she once told me, “but it doesn’t ever give you the emotion that knowing the song gives you. And that’s why traditional music is important to us. There it is, that’s our history, the history of humanity. The human condition.”