I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again History

Christiana Wallman passed away in June in Pinehurst, North Carolina, at the age of 63. Those who know about the album she recorded under the name Tia Blake take long puzzled over her backstory, which in some ways, is just as hazy and enigmatic as the music she made. Hither are some stray details: she was built-in in Georgia to a begetter who may have been a CIA agent and a mother, Joan Blake, who would go on to establish the Canadiana landmark that was Double Hook Bookstore in Montreal.   She herself spent virtually of her life as a writer (article in Granta, play at the New York Fringe Festival), but very briefly, she refashioned herself a folk chanteuse in Paris. Information technology was there, circa 1970, that she barbarous in with a group of musicians and cut an LP of folk standards for a pocket-sized and unglamorous-sounding French characterization,Société Française de ProductPhonographiques. Such was the scale of the production, in fact, that a number of copies were misattributed to 'Tia Blake and His Folk-Group' despite Blake's beautiful visage appearing on the anthology embrace. There followed a lone gig at the famedThéî¢tre du Vieux-Colombier, then a relocation to Montreal, then a few tracks (never used) laid down in a CBC studio–and that was all, the end of Tia Blake every bit a recording artist.

However, Folksongs & Ballads, despite its throwaway title and the transparent objective (pretty American in Paris sings a bunch of tunes in the public domainî  laaméricain) is anything but run of the mill. For all intents and purposes, an album of songs lifted straight from the Peter, Paul and Mary songbook–produced at a time when the Sixties folk revival had long run its form–should be little more than than a coffeehouse curio. And even so, what nosotros hear on this tape  is  remarkable, sometimes hauntingly and so.

What haunts usa is the melancholy richness of Blake'southward vocalism,  simultaneously whisper-soft and world-weary. It helps, too, that she and her band seem to know their Francoise Hardy about every bit well as their Joan Baez. If the repertoire seems to imply a earth of pre-Bob Dylan postcard folk, the songs themselves play out like post-Sound of Silence, post-Songs from a Room messages dwelling–intimate, alone, low-central, shot through with  onetime schoolennui. Throughout, we hear a immature woman far from home, having learned all as well well that blues run the game. Yes, it may sound as innocently makeshift as a Brill Building demo, merely its a naiveté (Blake was only nineteen at the time) that manages somehow to get under the onetime, worn-out peel of these songs.

Case in point: Blake'southward rendering of "Children Go Where I Transport Thee." As in the Peter, Paul and Mary version, the song is here titled "Jane, Jane"–but gone is the groundwork chant that accounted for the name change. All that's left is the small key organization, slowed to the step of a nighttime stroll. In fact, when I first encountered Blake's music through a  Numero Group playlist featuring this song the result was disorienting. I already knew this old spiritual, with its plant nursery-rhyme choruses, its surrealCuckoo-like cribbing of folksong tropes. My gramps used to sing it, my female parent used to sing it. Tennessee Ernie Ford sang information technology. Nina Simone sang it. And still, listening to Tia Blake's downbeat version, fifty-fifty at the point at which she started singing familiar lyrics, I couldn't recall how exactly I knew what I was listening to. It was ghostly.

Tia Blake :: Jane, Jane

The guitars pluck abroad, lullaby soft, while a loping rhythm drives the tune further and further into dreamy territory: skip-rope prophesies, dogs that talk, cows that pray on Christmas morn. Only the matter that really startles is Blake's vocalisation. The identify-holder first line–Hey, hey my lord and lord–is delivered by Blake in the style of a secret, her hands cupped to your ear. It'southward a masterclass in understatement: one breath, one line, and Blake is already leading us into that slightly scary place where folksongs dislocate from time and identify and go unknown quantities again. Blasts from the past, maybe, only information technology'south a past likewise far back to think fully. Hence the ghosts, hence the haunting.

Something similar occurs during 'Plastic Jesus.' Here we have a jokey false-trucker song that had get something of a folk gild staple earlier Paul Newman  wrenched the heart out of it inCool Hand Luke. What'due south surprising is that even though Blake doesn't come up close to replicating Luke's tearful rendition, her laidback vocal still manages to locate something of the same lonesomeness in that melody (turning information technology into something Karen Black might have sung absentmindedly from the passenger seat inFive Like shooting fish in a barrel Pieces). The band is bouncing along abreast her, but they never overtake the essential somberness of the song, a wistfulness that manages to speak volumes more the dopey lyrics e'er could. Although 'Plastic Jesus' undoubtedly provides one ofFolksongs'lighter moments, it is, similar the rest of this album, anything only lighthearted.

Runway for track, the unselfconscious melancholy of Blake'due south vocalisation quietly reclaims these songs. She quiets them down and airs them out in a way that few folkies dared (Jean Ritchie and Shirley Collins spring to mind, certainly–but more often than not it's Vashti Bunyan, Sibylle Baier, and Nico you find yourself reminded of). Maybe thinkLadies of the Canyon  but turned downwardly depression at 4 a.m. "Polly Vaughn" in such hands comes across as an atmospheric slice of psychfolk. "Betty and Dupree" is a play of light and shadow, aBadlands  story by way of Bridget St. John. "Hangman," meanwhile, re-supplies all the rejection and hurt that Led Zeppelin left off of "Gallows Pole"; over again, it'south her vocalism calling us down into the authentic grain of the song. Hearing her singslack your rope, Hangman, you can't help onlywitness the vocal's unproblematic details from correct there on the scaffold.

Tia Blake :: Hangman

Some other stand out is "Wish I Was a Single Girl Again," a vocal which has been prone to plaintive, sometime-timey rocking-chair arrangements. The soft-footed Peter, Paul and Mary version provides a proto-"Blackbird" template here, but Blake's band again softens the vocal upwardly even further, loosening its pace, giving its forlorn narrator a picayune more living breathing life than a simple "bored housewife" cliché. Blake–without the slightest hint of pining–vocally lends the last few lines a g mile stare:

When a fella comes a' courtin' you, and sits you on his knee,

Keep your eye upon the sparrow that flits from tree to tree

And you'll never wish y'all were a single daughter like me.

In H2o Music'due south recently expanded edition of Folksongs & Ballads (culled from materials housed at the Southern Folk Life Collection, UNC Chapel Colina) a rehearsal record of "Single Girl" ends with one of the musicians asking, 'Something like that, correct?…That's the humor, the atmosphere you lot want?'–and then there's sound of Blake's voice (once again the nineteen-year-erstwhile daughter, maybe stifling a laugh at the use of the word 'humor') giving whatever easygoing yeah.   words / dk o'hara

Tia Blake :: Wish I Was a Single Girl Again

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Source: https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2015/08/03/tia-blake-wish-i-was-a-single-girl-again/

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