The Sunday Listen: 'Ay Walking Oh' by Sam Lee
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Sam Lee in a previous life, putting on events for The Nest Collective and The Song Collector’s Collective, around the same time I was also working at the English Folk Song and Dance Society. He’s certainly one of the most unique figures in the British music scene in the last 25 years, one who has been able to genuinely reinvent old traditional folk songs and make them resonate with contemporary audiences, bringing in modern compositional frameworks as much inspired by artists like Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Brian Eno as he is by oral traditions and archival field recordings.
There are many gems in Sam’s back catalogue, but ‘Aye Waulkin Oh’ – a standout track from his latest album, Songdreaming – has been featuring in my listening daily of late. It’s a traditional Scottish song about desperately searching the countryside for a lost love, one attributed to the famous Scottish poet Robert Burns. The phrase "waulkin" refers to the old Scottish term for walking, but in the context of the song, a more restless wandering is implied, and in Sam’s interpretation this is really brought to the foreground musically and emotionally.
(A side note: in my personal life, I often feel strong urges to suddenly stop what I’m doing, strap on a pair of walking boots and head in one direction for days on end. I don’t know if this sort of ideation is common for anyone else and it probably explains why this song calls to me.)
As much as I love the the raw, meandering vulnerability of Sam’s voice here, it’s the slowly growing, pulsing soundscape of strings, small harp, pipes, piano that seem to hit a special spot in my brain. It feels less like a carefully considered piece of architecture, every cornice and buttress carefully weighed and measured, and more like a landscape, something that is emergent rather than universally designed. You plant the seeds and, with a little gentle stewardship, slowly watch the garden grow.
This approach I think is often at the centre of all Sam’s songs. The mindset of "writing a song" and performing said song can be great, but it leans to heavily on hearing all the sounds first and then making editorial decisions about the hierarchy should be. Being a gardener of music you never know what you'll end up creating, and that's what leads to new ideas and genuine surprises. It’s a paradigm that neatly bridges both 20th century composition and traditional ballads: both a generative piece like ‘In C’ by Terry Riley and a ballad like ‘Ay Walking Oh’ insist, by intention, that they are turned into a different version of themselves every time they’re performed, marked and striating with the histories and memories of every person involved in its creation. It is the path made by walking it – no planning permission required, no maps, no plan.
What this means, really, is a rethinking of one's own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as Me the Composer, You the Audience, and you start thinking of all of us as people enjoying the garden together. It’s an important lesson for us all when we feel like we’re stuck musically. It’s not about you or me: music is everywhere and all of us. So keep walking, walking on.
Have a great Sunday!
Will
It's a traditional English folk song with a beautiful, haunting melody and a story about a young woman seeking her lost love.