Nick Harts Sings Ten English Folk Songs

The third studio album from folk singer Nick Hart will ring a bell. With dry humour, he is totting up the songs since his 2017 debut, Nick Hart Sings Eight English Folk Songs. And he’s also totting up the admirers, winning Cambridge Folk Festival’s Christian Raphael Prize last year.

This ten-song set once more highlights Hart’s most striking feature – a feeling for unaccompanied folk song that brings the storytelling to the fore with singular power. That said, this isn’t unaccompanied singing. Recorded during lockdown, Hart employs a variety of instruments that shared his home with him, including plucked guitar, lyre, drone and whistle, the viol and occasionally Hart’s own layered backing vocals. The instrumentation is never overbearing, always a complement to the voice. His backing vocals bring the air of west gallery singing to the opener – ‘May Song’ – appropriate given the religious imagery of several of the songs. All songs are traditional, and span the redemptive to the gallows tale. While many will view the studied simplicity and unadorned clarity of these songs as everything that is wrong with folk music, it is this very treatment that makes Hart’s creations resonate. This is English folk at its unadulterated best.