Martin Simpson and Thomm Jutz have announced their new collaborative album, ‘Nothing But Green Willow : The Songs of Mary Sands and Jane Gentry,’ out September 29th on Topic Records.
“These are mysterious songs – that’s what sets them apart from popular music,” says Grammy-nominated and IBMA Award-winning songwriter and guitarist Thomm Jutz. He’s speaking about his long-running obsession with Cecil Sharp’s 1916 and 1918 collection, ‘English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians,’ particularly those tunes from singers, Mary Sands and Jane Gentry. “A lot goes unexplained. Why certain characters find themselves in certain situations is not as important as how they deal with them,” says Jutz.
“The stories and messages in these songs are as important today as they were hundreds of years ago. The reason for this is that they deal with archetypes. And archetypes and the problems related to them transcend time and place.” Jutz’s journey through the English folk song collector’s work led him to these two particular women who might’ve unknowingly changed the course of folk music history – and to his trans-Atlantic collaborator, award-winning English songwriter/ guitarist, Martin Simpson.
“Martin Simpson is one of the greatest guitar players on the planet and it was a dream to work with him on this album,” says Jutz. “Together we selected the songs and paired singers and songs. It was easy. We had talked on the phone but never met in person. I picked him up at the Nashville airport and five days later we had the first six songs. Then we flew to England together and after a week had the rest.”
Simpson and Jutz both clearly see the crucial need for each new generation to reinvent these folk songs. “I strongly believe that innovation requires preservation,” says Jutz. “How can we claim to play traditional music or write ‘Folk music’ without knowing the roots of it?” Fortunately for all involved, the pair found a host of others in agreeance and brought together a mix of roots artists from both sides of the pond – Sierra Hull, Angeline Morrison, Odessa Settles, Tim O’Brien, Tammy Rogers, Seth Lakeman, and more, to create an homage to the bridge from Appalachia to England and back, just as the songs of Sands and Gentry originally did.
The first single from ‘Nothing But Green Willow,’ ‘Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies,’ featuring Northern Irish folk singer, Cara Dillon, is a song that inspired a book by Lee Smith and is still being sung on the Grand Ol’ Opry by vocal group The Whites. Dillon’s stunning vocal performance is superbly matched by Simpson and Jutz’s instinctual guitar counterpoint. “This is one of my favorite examples of how Martin and I played off each other,” says Jutz. “None of it was planned or premeditated. We ran through this song once in Cara’s kitchen before we recorded it on a gorgeous summer day in Frome.”
