Rosie Upton
Threads and Yarns
(Wild Goose Records)
★★★★★

ROSIE MacGREGOR is a long-standing Unison activist in the South West region and also a folk singer who has performed at the Tolpuddle Festival and many other labour movement events. Known professionally as Rosie Upton, she started singing in folk clubs as a teenager in her native Derbyshire.

Her latest album takes its title from yarns as songs telling a story, and threads as themes woven into song. A collection of traditional ballads and new songs, some written by her late husband Pete MacGregor and others, the album explores the narrative folk tradition, often with a strong political message.

Opening with The Shearman, a song about apprentice shearman Thomas Helliker, hanged on his 19th birthday on false accusation of setting fire to a mill in Wiltshire. We then have the traditional ballad, Barbara Ellen. Yet while most versions of the song treat Barbara Ellen as cruel and hard-hearted for her rejection of William, his behaviour towards her may now be considered manipulative and coercive.

The idea that women are to blame when anything bad happens to the central male character is a theme in many folk songs including the American song rooted in English tradition, St James Infirmary. Here however we are given an interpretation of the song from the woman’s perspective where she is not made to take the blame for the man’s death.

Another traditional song The Bloody Gardener is sung as a tribute to the feminist novelist Angela Carter, also a lover of folk music, and Men Bugger Off is a contemporary song but dealing with the age-old theme of women being deserted by men.

The political themes in folk music are given treatment in the anti-war song Needle and Thread and the last track is a rousing version of James Oppenheim’s tribute to the striking women textile workers in 1910 Massachusetts, Bread and Roses. An inspirational end to a fine album.