Sweet Liberties

This admirable project, commissioned by the Folk by the Oak festival and EFDSS to celebrate 800 years of the pursuit of democracy, brings together an impressive cast of contemporary folk notables including Nancy Kerr, Martyn Joseph, Sam Carter, and Maz O’Connor, each contributing three or four new songs, as well as Patsy Reid and Nick Cooke. Kerr's potent opener ‘Kingdom’ moves its focus from the original intent of the Magna Carta to today's plight of vulnerable species in the face of profit-driven land management. Elsewhere, the Human Rights Act, women's suffrage and the abolition of slavery are transformed from dusty declarations and brought vividly to life for a contemporary audience. For ‘Am I Not a Man’ and ‘One More River’, for instance, Carter was inspired by his own family history to examine the struggle against slavery.

It's not always a story of inevitable progress, though, as heard on Joseph's ‘Twelve Years Old’, an imagined conversation between two children a century apart, while Maz O’Connor focuses on more recent injustices, such as the wrongful convictions for the death of police constable Keith Blakelock in ‘Broad Waters’ and the death of David Jones on the miners’ strike picket lines with ‘Broken Things’.