Reg Meuross

This is the fourth time Reg Meuross has been to the Carrington Triangle and more than ever I am struck by how lucky we are to have such a major artist at our little folk club. Reg seems to be able to write great songs about a huge variety of subjects and he makes each song hit home with real emotion.

He started off the first set with three songs from his latest song cycle Fire and Dust, which is about the life and songs of Woody Guthrie. Pete Townsend from The Who had the idea of drawing a direct line between Guthrie and Dylan up to Meuross (he produced the LP) and in these songs you can see that Reg is a worthy bearer of their torch. The first song, Fire and Dust, starts off with the verse,

You are the voice you are the call
You are the word of one and all
You who know a lesson learned
in fire upon your heart is burned.

Fire played a tragic part in Woody’s life and dust refers to the dust bowl where he was brought up and wrote many songs about. In the next song A Folk Song’s a Song, Reg sings

Hey hey Woody Guthrie I made you this song
from the words you’ve been saying
and the tunes you have sung
I wrote it to say we’ve been listening to you
from those who have been having
some hard travelling too.

The last song from Fire and Dust was the Gypsy Singer, sung in the voice of Bob Dylan when he went to see Woody Guthrie in hospital dying of Huntington’s Chorea in 1961. It’s a haunting, lyrical account -masterly songwriting.
Reg sings in a distinctive tenor voice — and fingerpicks and strums his 1940s Martin guitar in a non-flashy way that never gets in the way of the lyrics. He talks to the audience fluently and warmly between songs, telling us lots of stories about his life and about the songs he’s singing.
After telling us a lovely story about his Appalachian dulcimer called Dave he sang the song I am a Fish-house Woman from his Hull trawler disaster cycle.
He then told us about how he wrote the song cycle Stolen from God (2022) which is about the pernicious slave trade between the 17th and the 19th centuries. He sang Good Morning Mr. Colston (which has become a classic) and ended the first set with I Bought Myself an African. Both songs employ a biting sardonic humour in the English satirical tradition:

Their purpose is to labour for your need
Sanctioned by his holiness, by royalty decreed
and it’s the right of every English man
… so I bought myself an African.

Reg started off the second set with two much more personal songs – the Shoreline and the Sea and Jealous– both show that he is just as adept with emotions as with social and political subjects. He continued with another classic, Angel in a Blue Dress, a paean to an NHS nurse. He also sang Leaving Alabama, Cry a New Song and I Believe in You.
He finished with another all-time classic, England Green and England Grey — one of the only songs I know that captures our ambivalence towards a country so beautiful and so marred by corporate and capitalist greed.
This was an inspiring and inspiriting performance, delivered with warmth, humanity and passion and we all sang the encore Shine On with, I like to think, similar passion!

‘Shine on like a diamond in the mine
Shine on like the spirit of mankind’.

Mike Wareham