Salt and Light #19

What Can a Song do to You? is a poem written by Molly Drake, the mother of late folk musician Nick Drake, set to music by The Unthanks who sang at Shrewsbury Folk Festival this bank holiday weekend. Under a starlit sky, the audience was spellbound. “Can it make with each note such an ache in your throat?” asks Molly. Certainly this was my experience listening to Judy Collins on the main stage on the last day of the festival. As she opened her set with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ a woman rushed over to me and asked me if I was ok! She must have seen the tears welling up in my eyes. I later heard that a woman wept for the whole hour of Judy’s performance. A butterfly landed on me, and then flew onto the stage almost kissing Judy’s guitar, as she sang, “Before another summer ends, we can catch the outbound zephyr, we can travel like the wind.” Molly’s poem says; “Every smile, every tear, every pleasure, and a song is the key to the door.” The songs I have heard this weekend have opened new doors; new doors of conversations, worlds, and cultures, dreams and visions. I have been in my element broadcasting for Shrewsbury Folk Festival Radio onsite from a porta cabin every afternoon between 3 and 6pm, playing my favourite records, and with each song recounting a story, a memory, a feeling. I met a young singer from Zimbabwe, who lived close to the Victoria Falls. It was her first time in the UK. She sings and dances in the acapella group, Black Umfolosi, a traditional South African band, specializing in imbube music, and the gumboot dance of the Zulu tradition. The guitarist, Giuliano Moderelli, who performed in Ludlow just last week, with West African kora player Kadialy Kayoute, happened to be playing at the festival with a singer from Zambia, called Namvula! The weekend was full of connections, reconnections, crossing cultures and borders, and weaving golden threads of magical moments, all in a sunburnt field in rural Shropshire!