Tia Blake And Her Folk-Group – Folksongs & Ballads

Tia Blake's one-off private press rarity reissued on vinyl for the first time since its initial release back in 1971, providing an opportunity to take a look a set of standards most wont really have had an opportunity to hear. Tia Blake's story seems a little more romantically impossible/impossibly romantic than most - an American teenage girl moves to Paris, falls in love with a record producer, makes a single record comprised of public domain standards with a a group assembled on the fly, releases the record in a vanishingly small number before returning to the US and abandoning the whole endeavour as a folly of youth. Remarkable, really, that we still have a document of such a thing. Diggers never sleep i guess. It's not just the story that makes this compelling, Blake blessed with a heavy-hearted delivery that belies her young age and the arrangements so minimal as to lend a intimate and sometimes vulnerable air to proceedings, some thing like Anne Briggs, Elizabeth Cotten or Sibylle Baier, though not quite... These versions don't sound especially tortured as such, more the sound of young woman reaching into the possibilities of her own voice. It's unfortunate she gave up given how naturally she appesrs to wear the crown. Arriving in a different moment, you could see Blake landing the same way as Karen Dalton and Vashti Bunyan, transmissions from the past that seem to reach out through time's void and transport us back into former lives and worlds. You can't manufacture this kind of authentic expression, a quality that seems to pour from Blake every time she opens her mouth (though i'd skip that first track if i were you - a bit of a roadblock that obscures far greater treats further down the line). Side note: for those particularly enamoured with what they here, do seek out the CBC recordings not included on this version, particuarly the wonderful version of My Father Was A Lonely Man.