Brown Wimpenny (Album Launch)

It is fitting that Brown Wimpenny, a folk collective who mine the transcendent collective power of traditional music to the deepest extent possible, should have emerged from the most informal - and social - of places.

One Sunday in the spring of 2023, sisters Anna and Jess Korbel, tenor banjoist Seth Lockwood and mandolin player Archie Barker, met up in Lockwood's south Manchester living room to explore a collective budding interest in folk music. Then, the Sunday after that, they met again – and once more the Sunday after that, attendance growing gradually each time. Before long it had sprawled into a weekly 25-strong get together and shared meal – as much a jam session as it was a chance to eat, drink, relax and catch up together at the end of the working week.

The music they played was sprawling too – like all the best sessions. It was expansive, chaotic and constantly shifting, and unlike a regular jam in more ways than one. By taking traditional songs as their starting point, which have no true owners other than humanity itself, there was genuine creative decentralisation, “a true common understanding,” as banjoist Luke Morris puts it. Because the songs come with their own rich histories and meanings, it allowed them to delve deep in search of those that would resonate with them the most – “an addictive process,” says Lockwood – and then to focus purely on the act of channelling them into the present, allowing those ancient energies to mingle with their own.

As Broadside Hacks, the powerhouse label and collective at the heart of England’s current folk resurgence, gear up to release Brown Wimpenny’s debut album, ‘Long Live Brown Wimpenny’, it’s worth pausing for a moment to take stock of just how magnificently that channelling is achieved. The northern industrial ballad ‘Sheffield Grinder’ for instance, sees the intensely charismatic singing of accordion and musical saw player James Brown placed front and centre, skipping restlessly above a simmering bassline.

“It’s a song we found in Roy Palmer’s book Poverty Knock,” says Brown. “It’s about how workers in poverty, especially northerners, are often blamed and shamed by the rich and powerful for struggling to look after themselves. It was written as a protest song in Sheffield in the mid-19th century, when the Knife Grinders, notoriously poor artisans, were being publicly and unfairly blamed by MPs for their use of child labour, lack of education, and toxic working conditions.

“We wanted to do it because the north has a strong socialist folk history, and these important, rare songs are often underperformed,” he continues. Here’s it’s paired with a Morris tune, ‘The Black Joak’, “to turn it into something danceable and channel the bitterness and resentment expressed in the song into something upbeat and radical.” This is evident in the song choice for their upcoming album. As violinist Chris Bright says “we found ourselves drawn to the human narratives that define traditional songs. Tales of hardened shepherdess’ and maligned steelworkers, lonely drunks and sailors nearing death. It’s these stranger, often forgotten folk characters that really captured our imagination.”