As Martin Carthy, her brother-in-law, puts it: “It was impossible to separate her singing from her song-writing. She used all the techniques of traditional song-making in her own lyrics and she never sounded like a revival singer. All the rest of us
did.
“She was tremendously inventive, and as different from her brother Mike and her sister Norma as it was possible to be. She and they were and are the very, very best to be heard today.”
Coming from the acknowledged doyen of the English folk music revival, that’s high praise indeed, and while his marriage to Lal’s sister might be thought to colour his judgement, there are few of his peers who would dispute it.
I first met Lal, Mike, Norma and their second-cousin, John Harrison, when I was compering some sort of a benefit concert in St Albans in the early Sixties. They had not yet shaken off their roots in the skiffle movement, and accompanied their songs with a guitar, yet there was an integrity and an authenticity that distinguished them from many of their better-known colleagues in the second wave of the revival (the first wave, of course, being that led by Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd) with record contracts on budget labels.
Folk producer Bill Leader had picked up what he billed as “The Waterson Family” for a “New Voices” sampler he was putting together for Topic Records, and in the liner notes for that album Lloyd himself wrote: “They have a wide repertory but their abiding interest is in the songs and customs of their native East Yorkshire. They make their own harmonies to the songs and in all the world of the folk song revival there's nothing quite like the ' Waterson sound'.”
Actually, Lloyd was only the first of many to make the mistake of describing the interweaving melodies of their a capella singing as “harmonies”: their style was strictly polyphonic, and the lines they sang had the same relationship to the root chords of the tunes as the three-part voicing of a New Orleans jazz front-line.
And like many jazz virtuosi, their ensembles were the combination of four very individual solo voices, but it was not for some time that this was to be adequately recognised.
Elaine "Lal" Waterson, was born into a Hull family partly of Irish gypsy descent, on February 15, 1943. The three children were orphaned early in life and brought up by an aunt, a second-hand dealer. They started singing around Hull as the Mariners, and were known later as the Folksons until they reverted to their family name and started up what became one of Britain’s leading folk clubs, Folk Union One, at the largest venue they could find in the city, at the old Bluebell pub.
The four of them were never keen on the touring that soon became necessary, Lal less so than the rest. As Carthy recalls: “She was a very private person. She didn’t enjoy singing on stage, or in any public event, for that matter.”
When Norma went abroad to work in a tropical radio station in the unlikely role as a late-night DJ, and John Harrison went to live in London in 1966, they stopped performing for a while. Six years later they returned to public platforms, for a short time with Bernie Vickers, and ultimately with Martin Carthy.
The group last toured in 1993, but had been performing without Lal for some years. She had been plagued with ill health for many years, and had to withdraw from a US tour in 1991, after which she was replaced by Jill Pidd, who was joined on their final US tour two years later by her niece, Eliza, Norma and Martin’s daughter, today a Brit Award-nominated star in her own right.
However, in the previous two decades she and her brother had begun writing songs, at first not aware of what the other was doing, but then coming together triumphantly in May 1972 for what is probably the seminal British folk rock album of all time, when these two singers – known till then, predominantly, for their unaccompanied singing of traditional lyrics and ballads – blazed forth to the accompaniment of electric alumni like the great Fairport Convention electric guitar virtuoso, Richard Thompson.
Lal contributed six songs to the album, “Bright Phoebus”, for Bill Leader's Trailer label, ranging from the drunken reminiscence of Red WineAnd Promises to the devastating picture of industrial poverty in Never The Same.
Perhaps her most remarkable song on the album was The Scarecrow, a joint composition with Mike (later recorded by June Tabor on her “Abyssinians” album), with its chorus:
Ah, but you'd lay me down and love me,
Ah, but you'd lay me down and love me, if you could.
For you're only a bag of rags in an overall
That the wind sways so the crows fly away
And the corn can grow tall.
Mike’s song, I’m the Leader of the Rubber Band, was licensed to RCA as a single, and there was even talk of a Top of the Pops appearance, but the group refused to go on the show.
The Phoebus album has been long out of print since Dave Bulmer bought the Leader catalogue, but two tracks (one, The Magical Man, another joint composition of Lal’s with Mike) reappeared recently on Castle Communications' reworking of the “Electric Muse” folk-into-rock compilation).
In addition to her appearances on Waterson albums, she recorded with her sister and her daughter, Maria, on the Topic album, “A True-Hearted Girl”, in 1977, which included her solo performance of The Welcome Sailor.
She joined the Rotherham-based No Master’s Voice song-writing collective (forced by HMV to drop the last word in their name), for whom she joined with her son Oliver Knight, in recording “Once in a Blue Moon”, an album in many ways as significant as “Bright Phoebus”, and very different from it. Ultimately this appeared on Topic.
She was also involved in a TV project, “Hard Cash” for the BBC, who took fright at its downright condemnation of mid-1980s Thatcherism, and refused to show it. Her song from the soundtrack, Hilda’s Cabinet Band, was the most outwardly political of her material, though her very existence, and the disregarded tradition upon which she based her life’s work, was a political statement of great power.
In the last year of her life she was also working with Oliver, who had turned out to be a highly talented electric guitarist and recording engineer, not only for his mother but also for his cousin Eliza.
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Elaine “Lal” Waterson, born Hull, February 15, 1943, died Robin Hood’s Bay, September 5, 1998.
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