Review | Songlines

An Introduction to Norma Waterson

Rating: ★★★★

View album and artist details

Album and Artist Details

Artist/band:

Norma Waterson

Label:

Topic Records

December/2018

The last song on this album is ‘Bunch of Tyme’ from the 2010's Gift that Waterson made with her daughter Eliza. The song is key to her art: she gifts each one to the listener, not so much performing as bestowing it. Her care and generosity were apparent from the start, when The Watersons – Norma, siblings Mike and Lal and cousin John Harrison – recorded Frost & Fire, a ‘calendar of ritual and magical songs.’ ‘Seven Virgins’, taken from that debut, is one of several a capella performances: her voice is powerful, expressive and warm yet with an edge.

Her career has been a family affair: ‘When First I Came to Caledonia’ is from the Waterson:Carthy group (Norma, husband Martin Carthy and Eliza); while a rare non-traditional song, Sydney Carter's ‘John Ball’ is from A True Hearted Girl, the album she made with Lal. ‘Once in a Blue Moon’ is the title-track of Lal's son Oliver Knight's album. All of this gives An Introduction… a unique quality: not intimacy so much as a connectedness, a security that allows Norma Waterson to roam, brilliantly interpreting her beloved English traditional songs and venturing beyond them in the likes Lal's entrancing ‘Song for Thirza’.

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