Dear all, amen:

As many of you know, Shirley Collins has been one of the biggest influences on me both personally and artistically. And she has been one of my dearest friends for many years now. My association with her goes back to when I first became obsessed by her work in the late 1980s and started collecting it with utter dedication. I was then lucky enough to meet her, beginning a friendship which has lasted until now. I released two albums of work, Fountain of Snow and Harking Back, by her and her wonderful sister Dolly, whom I also knew and with whom I was planning to record an album of some of the ballads collected by Francis James Child, a project sadly curtailed by Dolly’s sudden passing. I was also delighted and honoured to be asked by Shirley to write the introduction to her superb and gorgeous autobiography, America Over the Water.

And now, the team behind 2011’s feature documentary Way of the Morris are in the process of making a film about Shirley which is being funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Please join it, if you can. Shirley, her life and her work are more important than I can adequately spell, and there is only a week or so to get the amount needed to start work on the film. I love her utterly.

The team behind the project have released the following press release.

The film will be a unique cinematic blend of reconstruction, audio archive and field-recorded performance – with very little of the conventional biopic apparent.

This is a film about stories and storytelling – the story of Shirley’s life, the story of a near-mythical road trip she went on in 1959 with song-collector Alan Lomax, and the experiences she had, the fantastical stories she was told along the way, and most of all the stories which lie buried within the songs she has spent her life unearthing and singing.

At the heart of the film is Shirley herself, whose vivid recollections transport us over 50 years back in time to rural Appalachia and Red State America – and back again, to intermingle and joust with the rich traditions of the Sussex Weald from which she came.

We are currently raising funds for a portion of the shoot through a crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter – and we have to reach our goal by July 21st! You can find out more, and explore the fabulous rewards we have on offer at:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shirleycollins/the-ballad-of-shirley-collins