The Ballad of Shirley Collins (2017) User Reviews

An interesting documentary about a fascinating woman

[pscamp01 · 7/10 · 11 January 2019]

Shirley Collins is a little known name (at least here in the States) but she is a seminal figure in the worlds of both English and American folk music. This documentary is an attempt help her reclaim her place in music history. Rather than a straightforward biography, this movie takes a three prong approach to its subject: showing her talking with friends and admirers about her life, reenacting a trip she took in the 1950's to record American folk music with Alan Lomax, and filming her attempt to record her first new album in decades.

The movie is short, but some of the scenes linger a little too long and make the movie feel longer. But the music and cinematography are both beautiful. My main quibble is this: the movie spends way more time on Collins's trip with Lomax than it does on her singing career. Her recordings with Lomax are incredibly important, but that was only one part of her life (and it only lasted a couple years). Her singing career lasted over twenty years, and it was directed by her (and her sister), and it helped shape all English folk music that was to come after. So it is odd that it got such short shift here. But maybe they are saving it for a sequel...

Botched documentary about a great folk singer

[Red-125 · 7/10 · 16 March 2022]

The Ballad of Shirley Collins (2017) was directed by Rob Curry and Tim Plester. It is a very strange documentary.

Shirley Collins--in her prime--was probably the greatest English folk singer of the 20th century. Between 1969 and 1979 she made album after album of folk music. Some of it was traditional, some of it pushed folk music in new directions. All of the albums were great, and I own several of them.

As another reviewer pointed out, we don't get any sense of that extraordinary period. Instead, the movie keeps circling back to her time (in 1959) when she traveled to the U. S. South with American folklorist Alan Lomax. She and Lomax made field recordings of traditional singers. We hear some of the recordings, and they are great. We also see "16 mm" images of that time. (In the credits we learn that these are re-enactments.)

Shirley Collins "lost her voice" in 1979, due to emotional stress. She dropped out of folk music circles and took low-level jobs until she could retire.

We witness her, as an older woman, again using her voice to make a folk music recording, and that's interesting. However, we never get the chance (in the entire film) to hear her sing one song from beginning to end.

In addition, the directors appear to have thrown stock footage against a wall, and used whatever stuck. Just as one example, Shirley is telling us that she and Lomax once drove 800 miles in a day. We would expect stock footage of a U. S. highway from the late 50's. Instead we get a colorful highway where people are driving on the left.

This could have been a superb documentary about a superb musician. Instead it's a hard-to-follow set of disparate scenes, without much music.

We saw the movie on the small screen, where it worked well enough. The film has a solid IMDb rating of 7.5. I didn't think it was that good, and rated it 7. (I would have rated it lower, but I didn't because of my respect for Shirley Collins as a folk icon.)