I have set aside the series on the top songs on the 500 Best Songs of All Time for today to mark the passing of one of the seminal figures in English Folk Music. Waterson was born in Hull, and, after being orphaned at an early age, was brought up there, with her brother Mike and sister Lal, by their grandmother, who was half-Gypsy. She was an English musician, best known as one of the original members of The Watersons. n 2016 Waterson received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.
The band originated in the early 60’s with members Norma, brother Mike, and sister Elaine known as Lal, with their cousin John Harrison from Kingston High School. They had a skiffle band in the early 1960s but moved on to playing more traditional material. They were briefly known as “the Folksons”. Their first recordings were for the Topic Records sampler New Voices and their first album, Frost and Fire, both from 1965. Frost and Fire was awarded the Melody Maker Album of the Year, a rarity for a debut album. The albums The Watersons and A Yorkshire Garland followed in 1966. The Watersons split up in 1968, when Norma went to work as a disc jockey on a radio station on Montserrat.
The group reformed in 1972, with John Harrison briefly replaced by Bernie Vickers. In that year they performed and arranged the music for the Alan Plater TV Play for Today, “The Land of Green Ginger”, set and filmed in Hull, and appeared in a scene filmed in the Bluebell Folk Club. Vickers was replaced the same year by Waterson’s husband, Martin Carthy. She was known as the “matriarch of the royal family of British folk music”. This line-up recorded For Pence and Spicy Ale (1975), Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy (1977), and Green Fields (1981).
Her eponymously titled solo debut was produced by John Chelew and released by Hannibal Records in 1996, and was well received in the scene (including a nomination for the Mercury Music Prize), featuring collaborations with her daughter Eliza, husband Martin Carthy and other members of The Watersons, as well as Danny Thompson, Richard Thompson and Roger Swallow. From the late 1960s to early 1970s, she worked as a DJ for Radio Antilles. In 1999, the follow-up The Very Thought of You once again featured Richard Thompson, Danny Thompson, Eliza Carthy and husband Martin Carthy. In 2001, she released her first solo traditional folk album, Bright Shiny Morning, on Topic Records.
In 2010, Waterson released an album of collaborations with her daughter Eliza entitled Gift. A BBC reviewer wrote: “The gift in question here, one gathers, is a handing of talent from generation to generation; Norma Waterson and Eliza Carthy are, after all, the sublimely gifted mother and daughter who make up part of British folk’s great dynasty.” Commenting on the final song, “Shallow Brown”, the reviewer noted: “Backed variously by other family members, including Eliza’s father Martin Carthy on guitar as well as her cousin Oliver Knight on electric guitar, vocals and cello, there is a real sense of congregation and rootedness about this song, and indeed this record as a whole. Long may the dynasty flourish.”
