Jim Moray on A. L. Lloyd
Jim Moray writes:
With the celebration at in London this autumn it occurs to me that I am roughly as far away in time from much of his work as he was from Cecil Sharp overhearing John England singing and setting in motion the chain of events that leads directly to us even having a Cecil Sharp House to house the material that he collected...
What is more, by the time he was my age had already done the collecting work he is most remembered for in Lincolnshire and recorded Joseph Taylor for the first ever commercial folk record, released by the Gramophone Company in 1909. Nearly a hundred years later I had the pleasure of recording a contribution from for my latest album, who is also around the same age Taylor was (and with a voice every bit as powerful). One of the nicest things about the folk music world is that age is unimportant, which is surely the way it should be. Lloyd is in many ways as distant a figure as Grainger or Taylor to me - he died in 1982 when I was one year old, but the work they all did is still around and indelibly inked into the fabric of our folk culture.
often talks of the Cypriot tradition where the ghosts of everyone who has played a tune before you are looking over your shoulder to check that you are taking good care of it. It's that thought that drives me to play the way I do - hopefully respectful to Joseph Taylor and Bert (A. L.) Lloyd and all the others that may have touched a song since its birth, but not too careful. I don't think that's what they would have wanted somehow.
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