The existence of Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer’s Child Ballads, a deceptively wispy little collection of old English and Scottish folk songs, seems somehow inevitable. For the last decade or so, the dove-throated Mitchell has been whittling out a catalog of introspective acoustic albums; 2010’s Hadestown was a “folk opera” based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a post-apocalyptic mining town and with a side-eye cast upon the underbelly of the Great Recession. Hamer, meanwhile, has split his career between man-for-hire gigs (he lent guitars and delicate vocals to Mitchell’s two most recent LPs) and more personal projects including, last year, a collection of traditional songs from the U.S. and the British Isles recorded with Irish musician Eamon O’Leary.
This brightly ruminative collaboration was sprouted a few years ago when Mitchell and Hamer discovered their shared fascination with the British folk cannon established by Harvard professor Francis James Child in the late 1800s, and the revivalists of the 1960s and 70s who brought the peaty old ballads back into pop consciousness. Mitchell and Hamer are hardly alone in their fondness for this stuff, of course; Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, the Decemberists, Elvis Perkins, and Drag City troubadour Alasdair Roberts, among others, have made their debts evident in recent years. But while many modern appreciations of traditional folk come in the form of live covers, B-sides or general thematic interpolations, on Child Ballads Mitchell and Hamer take a more immersive approach, nestling deep into these tales of fair maidens and knights and shape-shifters and milk-white steeds instead of forcing them into some kind of conspicuously modern milieu.
The album’s runtime is slight, just seven songs, and its production is sparse but cozy: fingers audibly tumbling against guitar strings, vocals close and warm. The general scene suggested is of the pair holed up alone together in some winter-whipped cabin with only a roaring fire, the bulk of the British folk-music canon and a real nice recording setup for company. (Reality: It was recorded in a regular old Nashville studio.) Hamer’s lake-clear voice, at first, seems almost too conventional to pair well with Mitchell’s yowl, but in time they begin to balance out; if either had tackled the project alone, neither would have wound up with something so satisfying, so unexpectedly intimate, as this.
Mitchell and Hamer cop to some lyrical and structural contemporization, but most changes are in the phrasing, ironing out the crumpled corners of lines like “shape it bairn and bairnly like/ And in twa glassen een ye pit.” They’re right not to feel too precious about the source material; long before and long after Child swooped in with his wire-framed glasses and philological theories, these songs were all always in state of natural flux, fudged and flubbed and rearranged along the way according to audience and performer. Mitchell and Hamer especially take liberty with “Tam Lin”, the Scottish legend of rose-stealing maidens and lusty shape-shifters; a protean thing itself, appearing in Child’s collection in 14 different forms, here the trimmed down arrangement throws aside the traditional involvement of a vengeful fairy-queen aside to focus on the core story of headstrong adolescent lust and its eternal repercussions.
The real challenge seems to have been the reclamation of the songs from themselves, prying something immediate and compelling from characters and names and dramas besot by neutralizing familiarity-- the curse of the archetype. Child Ballads mostly accomplishes this by the sheer force of Mitchell and Hamer’s radical empathy. From the panicked grief of the wife of the falsely accused “Geordie,” to “Clyde Waters” and the unsinkable mania of young love, to the sacrifices of the crew of “Sir Patrick Spens”, every performance is imbued with an uncanny compassion, as if the words and the wounds weren’t all a half a millennia old and half fantastical to begin with. Through Mitchell and Hamer, these characters, made flat by design and even more by time, spring into full dimension, ache and grieve and flirt, live and die and get born again.
