The Langely Linnet - Jennifer Reid - Compact Disc Edition

- Industrial Folklore Tapes Volume IV
- Songs sung and poems read by Jennifer Reid
- Created by Jennifer Reid, Mary Stark & David Chatton Barker
- CD in gatefold sleeve 10" facsimile edition
- Twelve page black and white booklet
- Limited edition of 100x

CD reissue of Jennifer Reid's triumphant broadside ballad album, originally released on ten-inch in 2019. The fourth volume in the Industrial Folklore Tapes series.

At the core of Industrial Folklore Tapes’ project lies a desire to reconnect the past to the present, and solidifying continuity with the future. Few traditions appear more palpably than in the form of folk songs, and few recorded examples truly occupy the spaces of their inception. Volume IV: The Langley Linnet hosts the voice of Jennifer Reid, lilting and rousing, grounded in her native Lancashire dialect alongside the low murmur of infrastructure — dual carriageways and motorways — throughout songs like ‘The’Coaler’ and ‘Merry Little Doffer Lad’. Shepherded by producers label co-founder Mary Stark and David Chatton Barker around mills, dells and moorlands across post-industrial spaces throughout the county of Lancashire, Reid’s apt song choices demonstrate a vibrant specificity — ‘All Along the Rossendale’ and ‘Lancashire Witches’ firmly rooted to times and spaces long-gone, possessing the kind of magic curiously found in place names — and, moreover, startling relevance to the decline of British industry today, and a reminder of those still caught within it.

These songs are historically the cultural expression of Lancashire’s many weavers who, during the nineteenth century, were driven by poverty from their handlooms to the mechanised looms of newly-built factories in industrial Manchester. While British industrialism began tightening its vice grip around a fledgling working class, upon whose backs the Industrial Revolution was built, the shattering of communities by labour alienation seemed tragically inevitable. The Langley Linnet is a reminder that community can thrive even under threat. These are far more than the songs of the ancestors; these are strategies for resistance.

Dafydd Jenkins
Glasgow
December 2019