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JIMMY ALDRIDGE & SID GOLDSMITH - Let The Wind Blow High Or Low

JIMMY ALDRIDGE & SID GOLDSMITH - Let The Wind Blow High Or Low
Fellside Recordings FECD266

Keen students of the Fellside label will know its record in launching young duos. Here’s another good ‘un. Jimmy Aldridge and Sid Goldsmith play a mix of traditional and more recent folk songs from the British Isles. They sing in harmony or solo with pleasant tenor voices. The instrumentation of Jimmy’s banjo alongside Sid’s guitar often adds a dash of Appalachia, starting with the fiddle tune Clinch Mountain Backstep which follows Gaol Song and Tralee Gaol in the opening set.

Gaol Song (aka The Treadmill Song) has been widely covered. So have several other songs like The Bonnie Ship The Diamond, Ron Angel’s Chemical Worker’s Song and Si Kahn’s What You Do With What You’ve Got. Sometimes they add a nice twist. For instance, Keep Your Hand On The Plow is their secular adaptation of Gospel Plow; and they add a chorus and restore some original lines to Chris Woods’ acclaimed working of Frank Mansell’s poem The Cottager’s Reply. Their interests in the environment, political struggle and the death or decline of traditional industries have informed their choices.

Three consecutive songs in the middle of this 55-minute album show Jimmy and Sid at their best. In the title track, East Anglia meets Appalachia in a fine re-working of a “love hurts” traditional song from Walter Pardon’s repertoire. White Dove, Ewan MacColl’s adaptation of The Cuckoo, is beautifully arranged with a fiddle tune, Wynchburgh Junction, for afters. The Gardener is Sid’s response to When I Was In My Prime, and includes a good fiddle contribution from Aaron Catlow.

A cleaner banjo sound and more focus on original sources would have been wonderful, but this is still a thoughtful and very promising debut.

www.jimmyandsid.com

Tony Hendry


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This album was reviewed in Issue 105 of The Living Tradition magazine.