Hummingbird

John Smith's rich and distinctive honeyed, gravelly vocals and deft fingerpicking guitar have featured prominently in folk projects such as The Elizabethan Session and across his five previous albums of contemporary folk and singer-songwriter material. Hummingbird, with its memorable interpretations of major songs from the tradition, promises to bring that voice and guitar to a broader audience and to wider acclaim. There are some magnificent songs here, with Smith's voice and guitar accompanied by the likes of Cara Dillon, John McCusker and Ben Nicholls, recorded at Seth Lakeman's Somerset studio. Opening with the title-track, ‘a love song in the key of D for someone I used to know,’ as he puts it, there follows the first of six superlative traditional songs, each fully inhabited and dramatically enacted by Smith. ‘Lowlands of Holland’ is soaked in liquors of love and loss; there's a beautiful take on ‘Hares on the Mountain’, with its sexual imagery of animal transformation; and a majestic ‘Lord Franklin’ is the third of the three best of them. There's a cover of Anne Briggs’ ‘The Time Has Come’ from her 1971 LP, and a tribute from Smith to Boudica, the exacting and terrible Iceni queen. On Hummingbird, she finds herself in excellent company.