While appearing in a production at the National Theatre in 1977, the English folk singer Shirley Collins lost her voice to nerves, and her musician husband to an actress. She rarely performed in public again, eschewing the peripatetic life of the entertainer to raise her children alone. But, in the previous quarter-century, she had travelled the American South, gathering archive material with the song collector Alan Lomax, and had been a key player in both the British folk revival in the 1960s and the nascent folk-rock movement of the 1970s.

Critical acclaim for new young folk singers such as Eliza Carthy and Kate Rusby has recently reawakened interest in traditional music. But unlike Martin Carthy and Nonna Waterson, who have been honoured for their contributions to sustaining England’s indigenous folk music, Collins has remained a relatively obscure figure.
Now, though, Collins is being celebrated by a four-CD career retrospective, Within Sound, on Fledg’ling Records (released tomorrow), and, during the course of our conversation at her little house by the sea in Hove, she reports that cheques arrive from the Performing Rights Society more regularly than they used to. The well-preserved 67-year-old, who, rather disarmingly, describes her old acquaintance Muddy Waters as “sex on legs”, appears to be enjoying a renaissance.
Within Sound begins with a recording made in 1955, when Collins was 19. She confesses that the grammar-school inflections in her accent on the first of the four CDs make her sound like “a little Rank starlet”, but the defining characteristics of her approach to English folk song are already in place. Her singing is egoless.

It resists stylistic flourishes, removes the obstacle of the performer’s personality, and directly channels the listener to the words and music, reconnecting traditional tunes with the strange worlds they emerged from. Collins doesn’t inhabit a song so much as surrender to it.  “All I did was perform the songs in a straightforward way,” she explains. “It’s the only way I can sing them, because when people start dramatising or enacting a song, I just become embarrassed. I think the best way is to draw people in, not to stand there and declaim it. I think because I was born into a semi-rural, working-class Sussex family before the folk revival had started, and because there were then still songs for me to hear from original sources, the instincts for this music were there in me from an early age. The older I got, the more I felt it was a direct link, with little strings tying me to however far you wanted to go back. I believed in English music. I believed in its source and I believed in the way I was doing it, even though it didn’t appeal to a lot of people.

One critic described me as having ‘a potato voice’.”  Having left home to sing in the emerging London folk scene, Collins met the American folklorist Lomax at a party held by Ewan MacColl. They became romantically involved and, in 1959, she boarded the SS America to become his assistant, making field recordings of traditional music. “The deep rural South was a fascinating, wonderful and dangerous place. People were keeping an eye on ns and it wasn’t necessarily friendly. I was 23 years old, which was the equivalent of being about nine today. I was young and naive. In the Mississippi delta, you felt like a tiny little speck in thousands of acres of low country and space. You knew how far from home you were.”

At the Parchman Farm penitentiary, Lomax recorded a work song by a chain gang led by one James Carter, who, 40 years later, found himself receiving a Grammy award after it was included on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Collins coaxed songs and stories out of the women. “On our last night at Parchman Farm, the woman who was my domestic came in to turn my bed down or something ludicrous and started telling me how she had been arrested for walking down a railroad track that had a ‘No trespassing’ sign on it.

She was illiterate, of course, but had still been locked up.”
Collins’s current return to live performance has been in the form of lectures based on her travels with Lomax, and a book of her story is with publishers, but she still misses singing. “I long to be able to sing again, but I physically can’t do it. I tried taking lessons three years ago, for a whole year. But there’s either this huge block or something’s wrong. I think it was psychological when it started, but now it’s physical. Sixty-seven is quite old to still be able to sing. I know what I can do is still understand a song.
But not to be able to sing them, well, it really kills me sometimes.”
Earlier on in our conversation, Collins had described herself as a “conduit” to a storehouse of old English song. Had she been hinting at an almost mystical dimension to her work? “I don’t think so. I don’t think along spiritual lines,” she answers, with admirable practicality, and then adds, laughing: “I haven’t got a spirit guide. Why are they always Red Indians? They’re either Red Indians or Egyptian princesses, aren’t they? I’d like a guardian angel, though, and, in fact, I sometimes think I’ve had one all my life. I’ve been so lucky. But have you read Philip Pullman’s books? Everybody has a daemon as a companion, not a guardian angel. And I like the thought of that. I wouldn’t mind having my own daemon.”