‘A World of Our Own’ Is a Maximalist Folk Compendium » PopMatters

Cherry Red Records compilation album A World of Our Own is a colossal release for one with such a finite scope. Comprising three discs and 86 tracks, it covers, as its subtitle suggests, The UK and Irish Folk Explosion of 1965 with maximalist gusto. This breadth is not the result of curatorial indecision but rather commemorates a singular slice of space and time, marked by an abundance of creativity and celebrating a gamut of interpretations of musical tradition.

Such a kaleidoscopic array exemplifies the core populist values that generally underpinned the folk revival movements of the mid-20th century. So, too, do the individual cuts selected to represent the metaphorical explosion at the album’s center. What emerges from it all is a well-fleshed-out picture of how UK and Irish folk revival artists of the 1960s drew from and inspired their more widely recognized North American counterparts.

Those are the broad ideological and technical strokes. Listening to A World of Our Own is far more enjoyable. The album moves between moody balladry, swinging blues, rock and roll, and hook-heavy pop with relish. Opening the compilation, the ethereal combination of Shirley Collins and Davy Graham on “Reynardine” evokes the ancient with a nod to modern pastoral sensibilities through Graham’s wistful guitar work. As soon as it ends, though, Jon Mark rides in with the rollicking western-leaning “Baby, I Got a Long Way to Go,” a song that unquestionably fits into the broad category of folk music but which feels worlds apart from the previous track. 

So goes the whole collection. Maureen Craik’s haunting a cappella work on “Bonny at Morn” leads into the bouncy, southern gospel-adjacent song “So Small” by Glaswegian group New Faces. Barbara Ann’s soulful rendition of “Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair” is a jazzy break between David Sless performing the murder ballad “Pretty Polly” and Harvey Andrews’ softly sung modern anti-war/anti-racism piece “Harvest of Hate”, the former an old folk song and the latter a new one with largely the same aesthetics.

The final disc begins with the one and only Nico singing Gordon Lightfoot-penned “I’m Not Sayin’” with full pop orchestra, followed immediately by Bristol’s Crofters singing a jaunty “Pill Ferry”. It ends with the blatant Delta blues emulations of Vernon Haddock’s Jubilee Lovelies’ “Stealin’” leading into Benny Hill’s pointed Bob Dylan parody “What a World”.

It’s a wild ride, in other words. So was the UK and Irish folk scene of 1965. This was a spatiotemporal moment open to many different ways of sounding the folk, and A World of Our Own portrays it accordingly. For every medieval romance that circulated through this creative network (a recording of Martin Carthy singing “Scarborough Fair” is featured here; Carthy taught the song to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel), there was a contemporary plea for peace (Donovan covers Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier” right in the middle of the compilation).

National borders did not creatively isolate the artists; as this album’s booklet tells us, the solo Paul Simon version of “The Sound of Silence” on disc two is one in which Simon incorporated English folk sounds after spending extensive time with UK folk artists. The real intervention of A World of Our Own is in its willingness to hold all of this at once and give us a truly expansive history.