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Self-produced, The Granite Way, Seth Lakeman‘s thirteenth solo album finds his distinctive vocals and fiery fiddle in fine form with a set of songs that again draw on West Country history and heritage. The album opens with the urgent drive of Louisa, which tells how, in 1899, the titular Lynmouth lifeboat undertook a daring rescue mission overland to Porlock Weir during a fierce storm which included a quarter gradient climb of 434m over Countisbury Hill and a trek across Exmoor, to launch a rescue mission and save all 18 of the crew of the stranded Forrest Hall. It’s a rousing, spirited number and a testimony to the courage and determination of the crew.
With Benji Kirkpatrick (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, harmonica), Ben Nicholls (double bass, electric bass), Cormac Byrne (percussion, bodhran), and Alex Hart (vocals) providing the core backing with Archie Churchill Moss on accordion and Dany Crimp on whistles, Lakeman’s also joined by special guests Ian Anderson and Ward Thomas on the mandolin-led, coming together pub-swayer One More Before You Go, as much about belting out another song as raising another glass, the singalong chorus set to a traditional Celtic tune.
Returning to local history, documented by Charles Causley in a poem, mandolin again prominent, suitably downcast and building to a fiddle flourished climax, Charlotte Dymond concerns the 18-year-old domestic servant’s April 1844 murder on the edge of Bodmin moor by her boyfriend, farmhand Matthew Weeks, who was convicted and hung, Lakeman’s telling presumably sung in the voice of her other suitor, Thomas Prout, lamenting that she has been taken from him.
From history to folklore, opening with a dramatic burst of fiddle and riding an urgent rhythm riven by both that and bodhran, The Black Fox draws on the legend of the Black Fox of Dartmoor, believed to be a supernatural guardian of the moors, which has become a symbol for anti-hunting movements, the lyric celebrating how the sly fox gives hounds and huntsmen the slip. Further dark Dartmoor legend fuels the steady metronomic rhythm of the brooding five-minute The Huntsman And The Moon, from whence comes the album title, based on stories of Old Crockern. An ancient tor traditionally the centre of where the tin miners would meet to adjudicate disputes, it supposedly has a guardian spirit, the so-called Huntsman Devil of Dartmoor, a spectral figure on a skeletal horse, who, originally conjured as a protest against encloses, here roams the moor to prevent lost souls from finding safe passage (“Quickly from the reins you fall/A crying pain a shrieking call/For now, alone you can but crawl/Along the granite way”).
As you might assume, Gallows Tree is a version of the oft-covered traditional ballad about a condemned man/woman hoping someone will come and pay to save them. The heady version here, arranged for banjo and fiddle with tapped percussion, is a variant of Child Ballad No 95.
The first of two collaborations with Reg Meuross, Slow Down with its accordion and whistles, is about a weary farmer exhausted from tending fields and livestock from dusk to dawn, “Never ceasing or not pausing/To marvel at nature’s grace” whose “busy life was empty/With no one to share it with”, a gently swaying reminder to appreciate the beauty of stillness and the simple things in life, summed up in its chorus refrain “Slow down, and count those years running/Slow down come now hold up/Let time be that reason enough”. Good news though, as “one day in those pastures green/In a fresh corner of the field/His weary eyes caught something/That the morning sun would yield/One tiny bud was growing/So delicate and small/A rose that blossomed in his eyes/Through the chaos of it all”.
With a decided West Country feel, Come And Go is, as the title suggests, about life in motion, the promise of new journeys and beginnings, here captured in the imagery of watching boats sailing on the waters, and a reminder that, in the crowd-friendly chorus, troubles too will also come and go.
The second Meuross co-write, with its skirling fiddle and clatter, Born To The Strain is also about ships, with a less romantic reverie as it tells of the decline of Devon’s shipbuilding industry (“now the shipyard gone we lost our pride/And the town got sick, and a town just died”) alongside those of fishing (“The docks shut down and the fleet’s moved on/And the fishing grounds are spent and gone”) and tin mining (“Now the town all quiet and the old men sit/And they tell their tales since they closed the pit/their houses gone and their families broke”), the chant-like refrain distilling the loss and the suffering as he sings “Born to the steel, born to the strain/Born to a hurt that you’ll never know/Born to the work born to the pain/Born to a life that you’ll never know”.
The sea provides the album’s last stop and, if it opens with a rescue, the five-minute plus Roll Away The Years ends with an old woman lamenting how her fisherman father was lost to a storm at sea (“Battered and torn the boats came to shore/As the twilight crept over the Quay/One boat was lost never came back”), the line about how those back home “stood there on Mount misery” a reference to a Dartmoor landmark associated with ruin. To mournful fiddle and a slow march rhythm, it tells of her lonely life, declaring she’d die an old maid rather than have a husband suffer the same fate. In the telling, her heart is eventually captured as she “followed her stern destiny…and married that man, from the sea”. I suspect the tone of the music and how “On the dark winter’s night when a storms in the air…the sound of her sigh comes back on the wind/And the sting of those tears in the rain” hints at fate repeating itself.
It’s now 23 years since Seth Lakeman’s first solo album, The Punch Bowl (2002), and the music he makes and the passion with which he makes it has never faltered; as solid as the granite way of the title, this is another exemplary reason why he’s the benchmark of contemporary English folk music.
The Granite Way (14th February 2025) Honour Oak Records
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