Reviews

Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage
Album: Ink Of The Rosy Morning
Label: Topic
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.hannahbenmusic.com/

Have to admit that I am a relatively new convert to the Hannah Sanders and Ben Savage fold. "Ink Of The Rosy Morning" is their third album, but sadly the first that I've heard. A mistake that I will soon rectify.

I had made the assumption that their album titles were deliberately selected to follow a sequence through the day - "Before The Sun" and "Awake" preceding this. Not quite so sure now, though, as 'ink of the rosy morning' is lifted directly from the lyrics of the third track "When I First Came To Caledonia".

They recorded the new album without any preconceptions as to what tracks they would include, or how the songs would be arranged, or even that they were recording an album. Their third album was already well on the way when covid hit, and the world stopped. They hired an old schoolhouse in Hastings for a few days, lit the fire, cracked open a bottle of wine, set up some microphones and played songs that they liked as a way of staying sane. Then suddenly, they realised they had an album.

Like most traditional folk albums there are a couple of murder ballads, plenty of songs of lost love and heartbreak, and several that date back to those seemingly alien times where it was deemed aceptable to go up to a pretty young damsel and ask if you could take her maidenhead, then take it anyway no matter whether she said yes or no, and then write a song about it afterwards. OK - I admit that I don't listen to a lot of rap music, but it feels like alien times to me.

The most stunning thing about "Ink Of The Rosy Morning" is their voices. If you graded all human voices on a scale from one to ten, where one represented someone like me who couldn't sing, and ten was Sandy Denny, Hannah would come in at way over eleven! Her voice is just totally off the scale. Ben doesn't just have one amazing voice - he has two. One is soft, gentle and dreamy and the other feels full of age, wisdom, regret and pain. And when Ben and Hannah sing together, their voices blend together and harmonise in total perfection.

There are ten songs on the album, eight of which are traditional, reworked by Ben and Hannah, one, a cover of a song written by Richard Guard and Anna Crockatt, with only one original - "A-Life A-Lie". I would so encourage them to write more of the own material. "A-Life A-Lie" is gorgeous, made even more perfect by Hannah's voice. It is like listening to crystallised hot chocolate (should crystallised hot chocolate sing).

Curiously, the inspiration behind "A-Life A-Lie" was them imagining the unheard response to the previous track, "False True Love" although they probably didn't realise that they had actually effectively covered that response in the song "Earl Richard". Traditional folk songs evolved over the centuries and morphed into other songs, and collectors, such as Cecil Sharp, have tried to trace the connections between them. Child ballad 68, "Young Hunting", probably an old Scottish song, seems to have passed over into the Appalachian mountains, where it became "False True Love" and "Bird In A Cage" (which I know from Edgelarks album "Henry Martin" - where it is sung by another Hannah who I would also rate at scoring well over eleven on my scale of one to ten). During the transition from "Young Hunting" to "False True Love" the murder ballad aspect of the song was droppped to simply become a song of betrayal. However, the section of the original song relating to a murder witnessed by a talking bird who threatened to tell all, is retold in "Earl Richard".

So strange that they chose two completely different songs to sing that just happen to be so closely related.

"A-Life A-Lie", however, is no murder ballad, and brings the emotions caused by betrayal back up to modern times.

Ben's 'aged' voice is just perfect for "When First I Came to Caledonia", and "River Don't Run". They are both songs of lost love, reminiscing of times gone by, and written with such detail that you feel that you could be overhearing someone's autobiography. "River Don't Run" written by Guard and Crockatt, hits deeply as entire towns and villages are still under threat in this day and age from compulsory purchases for development of HS2 and for Heathrow expansion, and also because it is so local. The song refers to Agar Town and the Fleet River. The town was demolished to build St Pancras Station, and the river diverted underground.

"Polly O Polly", "Lovely Joan" and "Sweet Nightingale" are all songs in which some guy approaches a young girl and tries to con her into a little pre-nuptial, sometimes using a euphemism to fool her - 'Let's just go to your cottage so we can hear the nightingale sing.' - yeah, right! Polly, sadly, ends up losing her life as well as her maidenhead, whereas Joan manages to rob the guy and flee on his horse. In "Sweet Nightingale", despite her protestations, after hearing 'the nightingale sing', the couple do at least get married. Odd songs in these hopefully more enlightend times but all arranged and sung so beautifully, (love Hannah's ironic 'Yee Haw' at the end of "Polly O Polly").

If I had pen from Pennsylvania. If I had paper of the snowiest white. If I had ink of the rosy morning, I might be able to write more eloquently about how beautiful this album was. Instead, I'll just urge all young fair maidens to come with me down to yonder valley and listen to this pair of sweet nightingales singing.

Pete Bradley

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