The Joy of Living

Ewan MacColl wrote the song Jackie Oates has chosen as the title-track of her seventh album when he realised his days of walking in the mountains he loved were over. It is a paean, yet also a lament. Oates takes ‘Mother’, a stark song of child abandonment by a very different songwriter, John Lennon, and pairs it with ‘Spring is Coming Soon’, a ditty made up for her baby daughter, that looks forward not just to the return of spring but also her child's father.

The Joy of Living was recorded in the Oates kitchen, by her simpatico Imagined Village colleague Simon Richardson, in the months following the birth of her daughter – a great joy – which came just five days before the unexpected death of her father – a terrible loss. The polar extremes of human experience can, and do, occur simultaneously, and through this album Oates bravely explores this dilemma. Traditional children's songs such as ‘Rosy Apple’ find a place among classic folk songs, ‘Catch Me if You Can’ for instance, in which a girl is seduced and left with a beautiful son but no father. Rosie, Oates' daughter, calling ‘daddy, daddy’ at the end of this, adds to its poignancy.

Jackie Oates has a beautiful voice, but there's another that echoes through this intimate album – her father's. It's in the songs she chooses – songs that he loved – and in the intonation she has inherited. It is fitting that the album ends with a snippet of her father at a singaround, giving John Tams' ‘Rolling Home’ an airing.