Mr Moon and Grace: Sous un Arbre
There are two ways of looking at this collection of folk music in the raw: either it is terminally amateur, only ever approximately in the area of anything you might call musical accomplishment; or, it taps into something deeper and truer than you’re ever likely to hear on disc. Sometimes, the spirit is way more important than the performance, and the spirit here runs right to the core of what you’re hearing.
Mr Moon, a man of mature years, has been an itinerant musician for a long time and has clearly soaked up everything he can in terms of the folk tradition. Recently hooking up with dulcimer player Grace (well the single name thing works for Madonna, Beyoncé and, err, Cheryl, so why not?), they play a wide selection of material that’ll take in old, old tunes like Froggy went a’Courting and Sail Away Ladies as well as Mr Moon originals that sound squarely in the tradition themselves. This set was recorded in France last summer and sees Mr Moon mostly sawing away on his fiddle, raw Appalachian style, and sounding something like Michael Hurley. Like Michael Hurley, this is a man with his own unique music in his head and he can do no other than let it flow out of him. Like his fiddle sound, his singing has something of a rasp to it and there’s a determined drive to both playing and singing that carries him through – carrying us, too, if you’re prepared to engage with what he’s doing. It’s the very antithesis of smooth, produced music but somehow it carries the germ of real folk music – impromptu, heartfelt, communal in spirit. I couldn’t pretend it was an easy listen but it is very affecting in some way, as if it springs from the world before all our music was commercialized.