Blackletter Garland is a visceral, synesthetic archival dreamscape, guiding us through the mysterious annals of a timeless library: fingers landing upon aging paper, the textures, the smell and colour, a sudden whiff of sawdust, a musty brightness in the air, flashes of coloured light, gathering figures, ethereal voices trading time with raucous theatre. Hack-Poets Guild—Nathaniel Mann, Marry Waterson, and Lisa Knapp—take us on an adventure through holdings rich with ballads and broadsides, but not just. They emerge from the Douce, Harding, and Wood Collections of Oxford’s Bodleian Library and from the Pepys Collection at Magdalene College, Cambridge. From these found and re-found treasures, with their “inky inscriptions telling ancient tales” (Marry Waterson, press release, 2023), words are subtly transformed; some reshaped into lyrics, others purposefully left out.
Knapp, Waterson, and Mann, all individually well-known figures in the UK folk scene, come together across Blackletter’s 12 tracks in a series of experimental encounters. The project was recorded for the most part in isolation, between 2020 and 2021, during the height of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic restrictions. The musicianship itself then became a means towards collectivity amid enforced solitude. Mann, whose previous work has included the creation of a flying orchestra of flute-adorned pigeons, lends his compositional ear and instrument-making to the project, alongside Knapp, a songwriter, fiddler, and heart-rending ballad singer, and Waterson, an essential voice in UK folk history, whose collaborative work spans decades.
They came together as artists, shepherds, and craftspeople, blowing more life into words and worlds of the past.
Theirs is a work of research and of translation: across language, across time, across genre. The album offers an impressive contribution to a flourishing landscape dedicated to the rediscovery and reworking of musical traditions: from the radical feminist record label Spinster to musicians like Rhiannon Giddens, who embark on ambitious projects of reclamation, reinterpretation, and popular education. Blackletter Garland shows up sometimes with a shot of whisky, sometimes with a wink. The first track on the album, Ten Tongues, sets the tone for the project’s ambition and artistry, a macabre tale transformed into a rollicking drama. Mann’s instrumentation suggests the heavy machinery of punishment, while vocal filtering suggests different lyrical points of view. The result is a mischievous rendering of a wickedly gruesome scene—a nest of birds housed in the rotting skull of an executed man—as a kind of interspecies rebirth. Something to Love Me, then, is almost pop, evoking strings in a smoky bar, the sultry yearning of cabaret. Later, a sombre version of the murder ballad Cruel Mother, originally recorded in the early twentieth century United States by folk collector Cecil Sharp. Knapp first came across the piece during research for an earlier project and noticed that it excluded the most gruesome punishments inflicted on the unmarried main character in other versions. On this album, her voice renders the story with heartbreaking simplicity, with a sparse fiddle and the devastating poetic circuitry of an Appalachian ballad.
Hack-Poets Guild knows there’s a heavy dose of fiction to these texts, which could otherwise play like oral histories. The artists take the cue to approach the stories slant, creating encounters and imagining people into feeling. Blackletter Garland creates space for the kinds of experiences silenced over the centuries, people stained with all manner of ill repute. “As unjustified as her actions are,” Knapp reflects about the process of developing Cruel Mother, “there is always the reminder of how historically for the unmarried mother, unwanted pregnancies have been shameful to the point of death” (Lisa Knapp, press release, 2023). The music helps conjure these figures, imagine their energy, their conflicts, and their preoccupations.
The points of departure for this project were not always songs-as-such; more often, tracks emerged gradually from an attentive curiosity around charms, omens, legends, and such. The result: a spectral plunge with the most contemporary of concerns in mind and heart. Laying the Ghost—inspired by “Stray Notes on Oxfordshire Folklore” (1903) by the early twentieth century folklorist Percy Manning—begins with strings and a celestial voice that lay a sound bed from which the story wakens. Soon, three singers articulate together and harmonise, evoking the spirit of the village: “They read her spirit down/Gave solace to the town/For solace to the town they read her spirit down.” In the Hack-Poets rendering, Stray Notes conjures a community burial, the swell of collective expectations, and constancy. Ethereal, ghostly, these myths are created. Their meaning lives through the telling to each other, at once a kind of witnessing, with themes of loneliness and solitude—“They walled her spirit up/Give solace to the just/For solace to the just they walled her spirit up”—and a notion of how togetherness emerges.
The wonder of reanimating the archive here includes not just humans but all the life around. In Birds of Harmony—based on Woody Choristers from the Bodleian Ballads Douce Collection—we encounter the romantic souls of birds, soft and gentle as the forest. Alongside them, sounds like a wind-up puppet show, the sensations of a diorama, dreamy light-washed figures in a world of their own. Ambiences are layered, thick, and spare: shudder of leaves, Mann’s pigeon whistles, echoes of water in a cavernous space. All this brings attention to the words, the longing of the human heart set in feathered flight.
Hemp and Flax burst forth raw, brute as the implements that create its sound: wood, hemp, and fiddle. The tune comes from The Whipping Cheere, a broadside sung from the perspective of female inmates at Bridewell Prison in London. Hack-Poets gleefully weave the subject matter into a broader collaboration with artisans, honouring the materiality of work by accentuating the tactility of music-making. Mann has played different renditions over time, sometimes singing with Knapp—and others—or with the experimental folk ensemble Dead Rat Orchestra. In a video recorded performance by the latter, rhythm emerges literally from the beating of hemp on a wooden block. In the Blackletter version, the hemp break (designed by Benjamin Franklin and constructed by David Holcombe) reappears, alongside a five-string kantele (built by Geoff Graham), bronze meat cleavers (cast by Merlin), and, of course, hemp (provided by Harrison Spinks). The tune could easily evoke the rhythm of a chain gang, but women are the actors here, bursting forth in this oft-masculine musical, political, and material genealogy. Mann’s voice opens the piece, offering a percussive spine. Soon, female harmonising voices surface, giving the impression of labourers telling a shared story of stamina, sweat, and skill. Physicality infuses the recording, from deep rhythmic drumming to subtle pushes of metallic shuffling that nod towards the repetitions of manual labour. Collective experience, again rendered with entrancing intimacy.
The commitment and playfulness evident in the listening experience of this album also extend to its physical qualities. A blue double vinyl is tucked into a folk art-inspired cover (designed by Faster than a Galloping Horse) that draws out themes and symbols from the music—hearts in hands, skulls on a string, a reptilian devil, birds without song, a nobleman firing from his horse, and fleeing like the wind—in elegant primary colours. Inside the cover, these figures return, now fully elaborated as fables. Block prints made by Desdemona McCannon accompany each song, illustrating fear, flight, and fantasy, their inky artisanship echoing back to times when the first iterations of these recordings were put down on paper.
The ensemble calls forth the timelessness of certain stories—to our chagrin and delight—while provoking us to hear unconventional meanings. These are compositions you want to listen to with your eyes closed, loud, on the most excellent speakers you can find. Here, hard-suffering labourers, ruined women recover personality and soul, complexity through and beyond the fable.
The 12 tracks of Blackletter Garland reflect a class, gender, and race-conscious politics, not a given among sometimes centuries-old material. In the face of pieces that are, as Knapp puts it, “no longer tolerable to modern society for their racism, colonialist attitudes, misogyny, and violence” (Lisa Knapp, press release, 2023), the group makes bold choices to erase and elide. They define their work as an active rejection of the racist stuff, but do not pretend either that it is not there. Their project is to create something derivative, but also fused and different.
The Devil’s Cruelty, based on a true story, illustrates what can emerge from this approach. In the beginning, a whispering woman’s voice appears against a steady drone, then multiplies, the syllables twisting as if into mania. A dull beat, like wind whipping a curtain, and then a solitary man’s voice emerges amidst the whispers: seething vulnerability, terror, the cusp of tears. “I’ve been tempted by the devil/I’ve been tempted by the devil/I’ve been tempted by the devil to extinguish my own flame.” Mann’s reading of the devil as an incarnation of depression in this piece suffuses and structures the track. Suddenly, the perspective shifts, from the first person to the third. A storyteller recounts the devil: in a percussive tone, it is a premonition. Attentive to the persistence of such stories over time, Mann reflects, “It’s the quiet ones you have to watch” (Nathaniel Mann, email, July 4, 2024). The telling this time around is shot through with human courage. It pulls us close.
