Tia Blake And Her Folk-Group – Folksongs & Ballads

Label: Ici Bientôt – IBLP-03
Format: Vinyl, LP, Deluxe Edition, Reissue, Remastered
Country: France
Released: 17 May 2022
Genre: Folk, World, & Country
Style: Acoutic

It goes without saying that everything gets reissued these days. Pressing plant schedules are clogged with pink vinyl record store day represses of albums that you can get original copies of for nothing. But just occasionally the real thing appears. A ‘lost’ recording that has haunted your wants for years is finally re-pressed, and done properly. Aged 18, Tia Blake arrived in Paris from New York with 60 dollars in her pocket. A nannying job the previous summer with a bohemian Irish couple in Manhattan had yielded a single contact in France. His name was Benito Merlino, a Sicilian folksinger, record producer and record store owner. Tia looked him up, they met and of course they fell in love. With no money and no prospects in sight he idly asked one day if she could sing. On hearing her cool clear voice he got straight on to his music industry contacts and a studio session was arranged. A scratch group was put together to back her and an lp was made in an afternoon. The songs she chose were all in the public-domain, presumably to avoid licensing, mostly British and American ballads like Polly Vaughan, The Turtledove and Black is the Colour. They are delivered in a spare, shy, unadorned style to minimal backing, just fingerpicking guitar with hints of flute and dobro. The result is hypnotic. At its best, it stands alongside classics of the genre, truly special records like, The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier, the first Anne Briggs, the Jackson C. Frank LP or New Folk, New Routes. It also joins the hallowed few truly unknown, truly good rediscoveries, it’s easily in the same bracket as Sybille Baier’s Colour Green or Molly Drake’s home recordings. That good. Being a record from the end of the sixties there are a couple of songs that break the spell, I could live without Plastic Jesus and the version of Betty And Dupree that opens the LP. But even these are delivered with such detached charm that the mystery remains. By the time a scant number of copies were released in France on the SFP label, Tia was back in the US and had written the whole thing off as a youthful experiment. And so it remained for years. I guess it started to circulate as a cult record in the 90s-00s loner-folk/soft-psych boom. I first came across the record when it was reissued on CD in 2011 by the excellent Water label (Patty Waters, Judee Sill, Sonny Sharrock et al). It’s completely fitting that now  the story returns to Paris where local-hero David Boule-o decided to put this beautiful music back on vinyl. And thank god he did.. (Mint / New - with insert - shops please get in touch for wholesale)

Tracklist
A1 Betty And Dupree 3:22
A2 Black Is The Color 2:17
A3 Single Girl 2:27
A4 I'm A Man Of Constant Sorrow 2:43
A5 Jane, Jane 3:30
A6 Jimmy Whalen 2:10
B1 Rising Of The Moon 3:45
B2 Hangman 3:22
B3 Turtle Dove 2:46
B4 Jesus 2:25
B5 Polly Vaughn 4:16