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Initially commissioned by Celtic Connections and developed in association with Perth Theatre and Concert Hall into a stunning, three-act multimedia performance, Folkmosis is essentially a musical coming-of-age autobiography rooted in Beth Malcom’s formative years, her discovery of and immersion in traditional Scottish music and her native Scot’s tongue.
Hailing from Perth, Beth Malcolm began performing at an early age, with regular floor spots at the Glasgow Star Folk Club. In 2022, she was named the Scots Singer of the Year at the MG Alba Scots Trad Music Awards in 2022, building on the accolade to release her debut album, Kissed And Cried, the following year. Now, working with producer Dorian Cloudsley, who contributes electric guitar and piano, alongside assorted musicians from Scotland’s folk and jazz scenes, she has crafted an ambitious 20-track album, combining of song and spoken word that explores what it means to belong and celebrates the connections we have to land and language through the music we share.
The first act is rooted in the classic folk songs she grew up listening to and opens with Osmosis, a medley (or indeed overture) that, partly sung in dialect, mingles original and traditional lyrics and music as she asks, “Who will sing in oor language/That you love your brother in/That you tell your story in?”, the medley references The Battle of Harlaw and the Scottish nursery rhyme Ally Bally Bee (Coulter’s Candy), written by former 19th century Galashiels weaver Robert Coltart as an advertising jingle for the aniseed-flavoured confectionery that he manufactured in Melrose. The track also credits Blackbird, from Martyn Bennett’s Grit album, which featured Lizzie Higgins singing lines from What a Voice. Malcolm notes, “These are the sounds, the songs/I drank up as a wee one/Drunk on milk and auld Scots song/I slept and cried and wailed along/My folkmosis had begun”.
The first of the spoken passages, Halloween, relates her memory of a trick-or-treater story she heard as a 12-year-old about an ‘auld wifey’ opening the door to “three excited bairns…One was dressed a round, orange pumpkin/The other two were non-descript spookers, with ASDA labels” and sending them on their way for not repaying her with “a song, or a joke, or a story for my troubles”.
Cloudsley on piano, singing in her Scot’s tongue, she moves then to the rhythm rolling, bodhran-propelled, fiddle-laced Edward, a Scottish variant of the traditional murder ballad in which a mother questions her son as to where the blood on his sword came from, he, in this telling, finally admitting he killed his father. Backed by rippling acoustic guitar and sparse piano, Aberdeen Angus Bairn is the second spoken passage, recounting her early years as “a little folky sponge” (“I was born to two folkies in the late nineties/By the time I could speak, my education in the traditional music of Scotland was well underway /I spent much of my childhood in the back seat, driving through a songbook, from Perth, to the Red fields of Angus, to sing with my Granny/Who grew up in the bonny high hills in Glen Artney”).
Adapted from a poem by Violet Jacob, and with simple guitar, piano and whistle setting of Tommy Peoples’ The Beautiful Goretree, the breathily sung (Meet Me By The) Goretree is a lost love lament (“Ye gaed awa, ye gaed tae France/And the toon is grey wi empty streets/Nae mair, nae mair can I see yer face/Lad, ye live, and it’s mysel that’s deid”). The last of the songs in the first act is Ghosted, another adapted poem, this from Cara Matthews, and, anchored in minimal double bass, piano and hollow drums, a soulful blues about moving on from a stagnant relationship (“There is nothing wrong with us/But that is not enough ///I feel lit up inside when you decide to take the time/But I haven’t heard from you in days/So I’ll be on my way”).
It’s framed by two spoken passages, the transitioning The Seam Between (“I grew up in the seam between the old world and the new…Folkmosis is my story of a lost bairn/And her journey back to the carrying stream”) and To Glasgow, her initial rejection of her musical heritage (“Where I’d rather have stuck a fork in my eye/Than to sing of the land /And the times gone by”) and her embracing of “Pop, jazz, electronica and disco…and a world beyond folk music”, as she rejects folk songs to “turn on Amy Winehouse instead”.
Act Two then concerns the teenage rejection years, opening with the clarsach tones of Growing and spreading wings and expectations in her new life (“In this here house, these four walls /Where I’ve come from all I’ve known I have outgrown…As I step inside I say goodbye to the young girl …In this here house perhaps I’ll lie with a love/In this here house perhaps I’ll find that I’m carrying life/With a heart wide open I’ll sow seeds for the healing/I’ll shelter my mother and I’ll grow with my brother/And I’ll sing with my old man in the bar”). Those rites of passage further unfold on the breezily fingerpicked, walking drum beat of the romantic A Man Who Loves The Worst Of Me where she confesses “I didn’t know my ugly side, til I fell in love/I learned to push my anger inside, til I fell in love …I people-pleased my way through life, til I fell in love… I’ve always needed to be touched to feel wanted/But his kind words showed me how to love… And all the time this man takes me in his stride”).
The first stirrings of her reawakening come with the spoken The Captain’s Bar (Bonny Glenshee), again speaking of her new life that has no time for playing music (“I leave my house before the sun comes up/And I am tired when I get home/The piano lid stays closed”) but, the title referring to a bar in Edinburgh where local folk musicians meet and perform, of her roots being revived on hearing someone singing the traditional tune and recalling it being sung to her by her grandmother and feeling the “strange joy to stumble upon a room of people/Singing in praise of the wise mountains” as she notes “I feel something swelling in my throat and it tastes like home”.
It ends with her moving on to a jazz bar, reflected in the jazzy feel of Little Lows and its shadows of depression and unease (“They lie with me as I toss and turn in my head”) and the memories of being safe at home (“you taught me child, you know that sun it will rise in the sky”) and finding the strength to “embrace the dawn/And to chase the dawn in time”.
The growing call of home and being settled provide the obvious touchstones to the hushed and gently picked Rolling Stone (“I always thought love would come slow/I never needed a home/I always thought I’d be a rolling stone… I always thought I’d be content being free…The more I’ve come to know you/The less I’ve felt I owed you”), though the love here seems more likely that of the land than a lover.
To Orkney is a spoken passage recalling a trip with her father and talking about “the impacts of the years of right-wing governance/Under-funded foodbanks /The destruction of the earth’s wild places for profits sake/The devastations of war and prejudice/And how disconnected I feel from all these issues day to day/Distracted into inaction by the dazzling lights of my mobile phone”. As such, it thematically leads to the act’s closing number, the strikingly a capella-rendered The Worker’s Song, a shortened cover of a song by County Durham’s Ed Pickford about the plight of the working people that ends with chorale accompaniment.
As she notes on By Process Of Osmosis at the start of the final act, “the power of Ed’s words/And that melody rips me from some teenage need to be free/Free from old songs, and indoctrinations/This life I designed so far from the tree… I ask myself why/Why won’t you sing?/If not you, not us, then who?”. And so begins her physical and metaphorical prodigal-coming-home as a now grown woman with the swirl of the intimately sung, echoey, piano-traced I Am Bound (“To this land/To this place/To my home”) as she confesses “I was lost and found/When I heard those familiar/Heard those familial voices” (cue background chatter) as the music gradually swells and ebbs.
A second Pickford song follows with the scratchy acoustic guitar and whistle-driven Come Gies A Sang, an ode to his homeland that’s also been covered by Dick Gaughan, its many landscape references setting the scene for the penultimate self-penned The Mountain (Glen Artney), an atmospheric, ambient, brooding hymn to the beauty and power of nature, her quivering hushed vocal backed by drone and sparse piano notes, rising and falling as it comes to its conclusion.
The curtain falls with one final spoken passage, the summarising End Of The Beginning – “So there ends this story/Of how this lost bairn came to be/Here I stand now, 27/I am rooted, and I am free/Maybe freedom is belonging/And like the graylag Geese each Autumn/We are all bound to roam/But we carry with us, messages of joys and woe/From the fields we grew from/Sung a thousand times before…When I sing them alone/Or aloud to you/I feel known/For the songs and sounds of Scotland will always bring me home”.
Folkmosis is a spellbinding album that speaks not only to the music and heritage that lives within Beth Malcolm’s heart and soul but, on a wider scope, to the way music of our homelands can root us in identity and place, however far from home we may be.
Folkmosis (18th November 2024) Self Released
Order via Bandcamp: https://bethmalcolm.bandcamp.com/album/folkmosis-2
NB. The album doubles as apiece of folk-theatre which will be performed live at Perth Theatre on 30th and 31st January 2025, with a Glasgow show for Celtic Connections and a spring tour to be announced.
