The Wilsons
Edinburgh Folk Club
Folk song in Britain has been well supported over the years by family groups: the Stewarts of Blair, the Elliotts of Birtley, the Copper Family to give some celebrated examples. While most of these are multi-generational, and with a consequent family singing tradition, the Wilsons comprise five brothers, who, as they told us, discovered folk song almost accidentally, like some unsuspecting ordinary citizen acquiring super-powers through exposure to a transforming energy source.
What they produce is undoubtedly heroic singing. They combine that uncanny blend of voices that comes from blood relationship with a power and volume that easily fills the room. They mostly sing together, but their individual voices, each with its own characteristics, are deployed to good effect, providing a welcome contrast to the full strength ensemble.
As natives of Tees-side they draw a significant part of their repertoire from that region’s industrial past, with several songs composed by writers like Ed Pickford and Graeme Miles, who write from first-hand experience. It is not a past that is sentimentalised by any means, and the grainy power of the Wilsons’ voices is the perfect vehicle for an unvarnished picture of working class and rural life pre- and post-Thatcher. More traditional material such as ‘Sportsmen Arouse’ and ‘Byker Hill’ acknowledges the influence of the late Peter Bellamy, an early hero of theirs and of the English folk revival in general.
This is hearty, nourishing, life-affirming music, which forges imaginative connections in the listener with a vital community and a tradition which flourishes still. Kudos too to the opening duo, The Peerie Faeries, a product of Edinburgh University’s thriving Folk Society, who themselves displayed an acute understanding of the song tradition. Setting out their stall immediately with the ballad ‘Young Waters’, sung in close harmony to the accompaniment of lute and shruti box, the pair suggested that we will hear much more of them in the not too distant future.