Folk/roots musicians are getting more mainstream recognition of late. Billy Strings, Rhiannon Giddens and Molly Tuttle come to mind but Hull could easily join this pantheon. Her talent on the mandolin, with an attractive voice, has already garnered awards but she’s not prolific and this is her first album in five years. Here she’s written or co-written ten songs and co-produced this acoustic record as a self release. Often the decision to release an album independently is the artist’s only option but after decades on Rounder Records Hull wanted the freedom that route gave her.
On A Tip Toe High Wire she’s added tunes that aren’t solely from a pure roots tradition and it’s lifted the whole experience. The intricacy and deftness of bluegrass in the musicianship, however, has been maintained. The quality of the playing strikes you immediately and Hull has used her touring band in the studio. Their empathy and familiarity with each other are evident as the solos and arrangements seem organic to the structure. Let’s Go is as intricate as a piece of jazz with different paces and rhythms. Her vocals, back in the mix, enable you to focus on some sensational playing. Come Out Of My Blues is a positive lyric about seizing the day. It catches fire after her initial verse. Tim O’Brien (Hot Rize) helps out and the band cut a rug with some memorable fiddle from Avery Merritt.
From earlier in her recording career she attributes her growing confidence to lead a band to advice from Béla Fleck, who urged her to step forward. On E Tune, as one of her heroes and influences, he joins the band on banjo for this instrumental. Again a sophisticated rhythm grabs your attention and the drama builds as the song progresses. She’s a capable lyricist and takes inspiration from her family. Spitfire is a homage to her grandmother who’s triumphed through many adversities. Muddy Water is a beautiful ballad that reminds you, for its gossamer wing fragility, of Alison Krauss. It’s a sweet melody that her voice nails and its lyric of finding strength within ourselves, when the time comes, captures a sentiment of support and affection that runs through many of the compositions. Not least she brings her mandolin to the fore whilst Erik Caveney, on bass, anchors the whole piece. Similarly, Redbird is a cathartic melodic starburst that arrives toward the end of the album. I have to repeat myself and say that if you’re a fan of Alison Krauss this is another track you’ll love.
This release is very much a collaborative affair, which summarises Hull’s approach and I’ve found the whole album gives up more on repeated listens. It seems I have one for my end of year list already.
My first full time job was at a factory in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire where I joined as a graduate trainee. It was a steep learning curve going from a happy go lucky student to a salaried employee. Relatively recently I’d found a page on Facebook talking about the company, Aveling Marshall. Sadly, the company is long shut and the factory in Gainsborough is now a shopping precinct! No doubt the size and reach of the global construction and agricultural manufacturers was always going to see off a little player. In following the Facebook page I got into a conversation with the author/administrator (Ian Palmer). He asked if I’d write up my time there for a quarterly magazine he published. See below.
To make this remotely interesting for the readers of the magazine I’ve peppered it with the names of staff I worked with. Unfortunately I never did get to know the names of the two strippers…
“When Ian asked me to write about my time at Marshalls I really hadn’t thought a great deal, for 46 years, about those two years at the Britannia Works, I now realise how much that time was integral to my growing up and an early education in business. I graduated from Manchester Polytechnic in the summer of 1976, at the tender age of 21, I had no idea what I’d do but my then graduate girlfriend signed up with a recruitment agency; so I did! They found the opportunity with Aveling Marshall and I trundled down to Gainsborough to meet the Training Manager, Peter Watkins. All I knew was that they were part of Leyland Special Products. This group contained the makers of refrigeration, military personnel carriers, dump and fork lift trucks and construction equipment. He asked if I was interested in Finance or Purchasing? With little thought but aware I’d taken three attempts to pass O Level Mathematics I plumped for the latter! From here I had a second successful interview with the Purchasing Director, John Walker and on October 4 (after a telegram advising of my successful application) I turned up for work on the princely sum of £2,512 pa.
The product portfolio was the Challenger, road rollers and Track Marshalls AM 100 and 105 although new products were coming. Overall in the Purchasing Department I had three jobs: Purchase Analyst, Buyer and Senior Buyer. My recollections of the first job were the pricing up of many pages of A3 size Bills of Materials. These Bills related to machines being transferred from Aveling Barford, namely the articulated wheel loaders/shovels. The hundreds of sheets bore down into exceptional detail and I well remember pricing thousands of fasteners! Doing this today with a laptop and spreadsheet would have been easy and relatively fast. With a biro and Tippex I just about got there although I’m sure the accuracy of all these manual entries would have been dubious. Not all the time was spent in the office I had a couple of several week blocks away at a college in St Helens doing a qualification in Purchasing. I must thank Aveling Marshall for a post graduate qualification from the Institute of Purchasing & Supply.
A Track Marshall crawler tractor
Shortly after I joined a Purchasing Manager was recruited, David Forman. David loved a document and I well remember his spending what seemed weeks designing dedicated Kalamazoo cards that kept all the detail about components on them. These were stored in a special filing cabinets. I think the administrative staff in the department kept them up to date. This must have been either Pearl, Shirley or Sandra. I’m still in touch with Sandra today who is a proud grandmother who still lives local to Gainsborough. When we worked together we’d have been amazed to envisage ourselves now as grandparents! I was sat next to Lennie Auckland. Lennie was in his sixties and was a kind and helpful guy who was fiercely proud of the town and drove a three speed Ford Popular. This car seemed ancient even then! I had been given a Triumph Herald by my parents a few years earlier but using the Leyland car discount I bought a Triumph Spitfire. I’m not sure how I found the money: no doubt a lot of debt.
Other staff included David May, Steve Tonks, Dyer who delighted in answering the phone with “Dyer here”, Cameron, a Scotsman, who could have three lit cigarettes on the go as he moved around the office from desk, to filing cabinets to other offices, Neil, a Jehovah’s witness and Alan who looked after non-production purchases.
The tractors are still common on the beaches of Norfolk taking and retrieving fishing boats out of the sea. I snapped this on a holiday.
It was an era of high inflation and suppliers sought regular uplifts. In line with the Government’s Price and Incomes Policy there was a lot of bureaucracy and justification sought. (Frankly, ask a supplier to justify an increase then they can!) However, I remember being sat in John Walker’s office as he often put suppliers to the sword trying to get the increases reduced. Also, in John’s office Cathy would appear with a memo from her boss the Managing Director, Fred Clem. All Fred’s memos were on green stationary. He was an elusive figure but I well recollect a dinner where he posed all the graduates the question ‘if you had one component in stock and you had a request from a customer via the Spares/Parts department for it or you could fit it to a new tractor and sell that unit what should you do?’ The correct answer, in an industry that depended on service and equipment to work 16 hours a day, was to sell it as spares.
As I got used to turning up for work five days a week I also got used to wearing a suit and tie. I recollect trying to make the same shirt last three days before I might disappear back to Leeds for my mother to do the laundry. Eventually I moved from week day digs in Torksey to a flat in Gainsborough where I moved in with Mike Gordon, another graduate recruit. This Scot joined as a Profit Analyst. He ruefully commented, after several months, that a better title would have been Loss Analyst! The week nights seem to have been spent listening to vinyl at the top of this two storey abode and I think I wore out Boston’s first album along with Peter Gabriel’s first solo album. However, the weekends could see us drive to the metropolis that was Retford to a disco. Alternatively, it could be a trip to Cleethorpes to see The Stranglers. It was the height of punk rock and I still have all my Sex Pistols 45’s. Sunday morning saw me often donning a white shirt and any other kit and striding out to play for the mighty Real Aveling football team. I only scored once from full back and I think I can remember the exact move and how I stroked it under the ‘keeper. Clearly I never scored many goals! If that was memorable so was the night at the Social Club when two strippers were on the bill. It just seems inconceivable that today a company venue would be used for such entertainment!
‘The Indestructible caterpillar returns’ – a poster I took when I left and had mounted.
After a couple of years I became restless and started to look for a move away. I wrote to Ford Tractor Operations in Basildon to join as a buyer and was successful and departed to Essex. I eventually left Ford to study for a Master in Business in Administration full time at the University of Bradford. I didn’t return to Ford but took a job as a Purchasing Manager at a furniture manufacturer in Yorkshire. I spent 23 years here rising to be a director and moving eventually into sales, marketing and then running their nationwide cabinet installation. The company had sales in excess of £100m and was the subsidiary of an American company. Today I’m very much retired and apart from family responsibilities I like to spend time riding my bike whether in the Yorkshire Wolds, across the USA, around Australia or all over Europe.
Wonderful memories. Thank you, Ian, for this trip down memory lane.”
With an album recorded at the beginning of the year Strings is back. In the interim he’s been touring and debuting the songs. A fan delight amongst comments on his social media is that they’re now recorded. His trajectory has been vertical. Widely feted by music or broadsheet media as a precocious talent; the narrative has been that he’d kicked his early years substance misuse and grew up with a taste for rock but whose heart lay in roots music after the influence of his stepfather. Always a major bluegrass act he’s now one that’s global.
We should treasure Strings for many reasons but not least because he’s made bluegrass an arena genre and brought it to many new ears. With so much pap filling the country charts and arenas it’s heartening, that with no compromises, he’s packing them in. He’s a musician who’s stretched the genre and popularised roots music with his rockstar vibe. This release, with its muscle car sleeve, is traditional roots music and throughout you are bathed in his acoustic mastery along with some other brilliant players in his band.
Strings wrote or co-wrote all 20 tracks and I’m pleased to see Thomm Jutz help out on three. The musicianship is peerless throughout with banjo (Billy Failing), bass (Royal Masat), mandolin (Jarrod Walker) and fiddle (Alex Hargreaves) keeping pace with his guitar pyrotechnics. Whilst faithful to bluegrass throughout there are a breadth of ideas and sounds within the genre. Three instrumentals sit with songs with his vocals that contain interesting lyrics whether a traditional dark and haunting bluegrass story about murder (My Alice), sad and happy love stories (Be Your Man, Don’t Be Calling Me (At 4AM) and Cabin Song), hell raising (Leadfoot) and smoking marijuana (MORBUD4ME and Catch and Release). On this latter song Strings tells of driving to a fishing spot whilst enjoying a smoke. Unfortunately, a State Trooper detains him by the side of the road and detects the dreaded weed. It’s all done with a Charlie Daniels’ comic tongue in cheek delivery à la Uneasy Rider.
Strings has a pleasing tenor voice and on occasion it’s a focus such as on Leaning on a Travellin’ Song that starts with just male harmony vocals over an acoustic guitar that delight or the sublime accapella Richard Petty (a dearly departed NASCAR racer) and Stratosphere Blues/I Believe In You where he slips from bluegrass to sophisticated folk. It’s maybe here that you detect the fingerprints of John Brion who co-produced the album with Strings. Seemingly Brion has no prior credentials in country or roots music yet has previously worked with singer songwriters such as Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple. An hour and a quarter of solid bluegrass might not be my chosen destination but this album is so sweet, jammed with melodies, phenomenal musicianship and enchanting vocals that I shall not complain as it sweeps up, royally, in the end of the year polls and awards.
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