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Introduction
Sara Grey, well-known for the emotional power of her singing, her mesmeric frailed banjo style, and her deep knowledge of traditional song, has been around the American and British folk scenes for a long time. She moved to Edinburgh in 1970, and has lived for most of the years since then in Britain. After the demise of her successful duo with Ellie Ellis, and a period working with combinations of Roger Wilson, Dave Burland and Brian Peters in a variously potent or chaotic outfit known as the Lost Nation Band, Sara reverted to playing solo. Since 2003 she has done most of performing with her son, Kieron Means. Kieron was brought up with Sara’s music and singing and I is no wonder that he has developed his own wonderful style with the songs and music. He has also become masterful playing the guitar and performing delta blues.

Early life
Sara was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1940 and is widely known and respected as singer of traditional ballads and songs as well and a player of old-time American music on the five string banjo. She grew up in New Hampshire but has lived in North Carolina, Ohio, Montana, New York, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Oregon, Wales, Scotland and England.

Sara’s Dad. Morris Heller, was stationed before the war in North Carolina, so she got to hear some banjo music when she was young. As she grew older, she started listening to more of it and begged her Dad for a banjo, and he got her one when she was about fifteen. By then her Dad was playing the fiddle: a bit of Cape Breton, a bit of classical stuff, some Quebecois tunes. And there were songs around her all the time, too, so it just seeped in, like osmosis. She was in a band with a guy she knew from school called Sterling Klink, and an old boy, R. J. Plunkett, a champion fiddler from Vermont. Then she got involved with the Golden Ring, which was a strong nucleus of traditional singers - people like Ed Trickett and Gordon Bok - and it snowballed from there. She started singing, and travelling, and collecting, and never really stopped. When she moved to the UK in 1970, the scene was really rolling in England and Scotland, and she never looked back."

Song Collecting
Sara's song collecting is something not too many folk revival singers ever found time for. It started in the late sixties with a venture into Northern Ontario accompanying Shelley Posen, now a member of leading Canadian trio Finest Kind. "There was a lot of singing in the logging camps, and I began to realise how little of that stuff had been collected. We got a lot of wonderful songs, and it helped that we were singers ourselves, who could exchange a song for a song, not just folklorists who stuck a microphone in somebody's face and said 'give us everything you've got'. It's bothered me over the years to see people like Scotland’s Jeannie Robertson get badly exploited. Jeannie’s daughter, Lizzie Higgins, used to tell me how difficult it was for her mother, and Sheila Stewart, daughter of Belle Stewart, said the same. Some of those American collectors were good at their job, but they were like bulls in china shops, they just wanted to get as much as they could. That's the last thing I've ever wanted to do. I don't like the idea of music being treated as a dead anthropological artefact; it's a living thing. When Jeannie had her stroke and couldn't give any more, the collectors just went away and forgot about her; she was expendable, an object rather than a living, breathing human being whose songs were an integral part of her life. To me it's important not to cut the songs off from the singer - they're inextricably bound together."

Sara also collected on South Uist, in the Hebrides, in 1970, living in an old 'black house' with an earth floor. "It was an amazing experience, with this gal called Kate Nicholson.... a gal?" Sara laughs, "she was ninety-four, she spoke only Gaelic, and for four months we communicated mostly in sign language, but we formed a great relationship. She was the strongest singer outside the Balkans that I've ever heard; I think the School Of Scottish Studies has the tapes."

Musical Career
In the 1980’s, she was appearing with Ellie Ellis in a high-profile duo which held down prime slots at folk festivals and got excellent audience reactions. Ellie's guitar acted as foil to Sara's banjo, and their repertoire contained a lot of contemporary material alongside old-time music, but perhaps the key to their appeal was a certain bubbliness and girlish humour. Sara, though wasn't happy with the direction things were going. "We worked together constantly for eight years, which is a long time for a duo, and that sort of thing began to creep in more and more. I felt it was too frothy and there wasn't enough depth to what we were doing. There was so much inside me that wanted to come out in terms of strong traditional songs, whereas Ellie was perhaps leaning the other way. After we parted company I heard a few people muttering: 'Ah, but can Sara hold a night on her own?' They didn't realise I'd worked on my own for years before that and, though I sometimes felt a bit swamped at festivals where I was a solo acoustic singer in the middle of all those bands, I've never felt as confident as then working on my own, and - of late - working with my son, Kieron Means."

Sara's repertoire has certainly headed back towards the tradition since parting with Ellie. "Bob Coltman, Joe newberry and Jean Ritchie are the only songwriters whose songs I still sing. They have a way of drawing on the old themes and sliding them forward right into the 21st century, so people can relate to them. But mostly I just hang on to my belief in the old songs. They've always been near and dear to my heart, and I spent a number of years thinking about the movement of songs across to America. Not many people had looked at it back then; there were pieces of the puzzle on both sides of the Atlantic, but nobody had tried to connect them all together. I suppose I was on a mission - one that I loved."

Song Migration
It's a mission that forms a large part of Sara's musical life now. Her workshops on the subject, have become very popular, particularly back home in the States where traditional folk enthusiasts are fascinated by the ancestry of their own songs. Sara has a huge store of American ballad variants such as her Little Musgrave, in which the cuckolded Lord Donald exacts his revenge not with sword, but with gun. Her interest was initially a reaction to British misconceptions. "When I first came over here, Tom Gilfellon, Mike Harding and Christy Moore were trying to get me work, but they were getting feedback from some of the Traditional Folk Clubs saying: 'we like her singing, but she's American and we're a traditional club'. That used to really gall me, when people refused to gather in the whole picture of songs making their way across the Atlantic, and all the permutations that resulted. It kicked me off thinking that maybe I could quietly show that these songs did migrate. It's taken years for some people to admit it; folk singers can get very 'precious', and sometimes they try to claim possession of the songs, and pretend they're unique to a particular place. But of course they travelled, that's the beauty of them."

The way in which old British ballads got honed down, mislearned, or improved by singers in the Appalachians or the Canadian Maritimes is a source of wonderment to those of us who've studied the results, be they magnificent or amusingly garbled. But Sara points out that even when ballads didn't change, the reasons are fascinating. "I sing a version of the broken token song Her Mantle So Green, which comes from County Fermanagh, but is also sung in just the same way in New Brunswick, just North East of my old home in New Hampshire. Why? Maybe it was printed on a broadside, and people learned it without losing the story or the tune, or maybe it was because of the isolation up there, with no outside influences to bring about change. Then there's Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still, which I learned from the version by Mrs. Martha Tilleft on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but which is also sung in Selkirk, in the Scottish Borders, where it's part of the old tradition of Common Riding. People sometimes say to me, don't you get tired of old songs, but I get really excited about the things that happened to them."

Western Songs
A natural move from studying the migration of songs is to find out more about the songs from the western states. Sara has gathered together songs into a presentation illustrated with old photographs of the west. The colorful history of the American cowboy covers a surprisingly brief span of time...mainly a couple of decades, but it has left it's myth-making imprint on the American psyche as has no other segment of our past. It takes in the American war between the states, the westward migration in the frenzy for land and gold, and the inception of the railroad.

The music of that time and place is very real, and possesses all of the vigor and unpretentious charm and the rustic poetry of those freedom-loving individualists whose way of life did so much to form the very personality of our nation. Some of this music drifted to the west from the older southern states with post civil war refugees from Reconstruction, some of it was brought directly from Ireland by Irish Immigrants who helped to build the railroads and then moved off to the cow camps for want of any other employment.

Many of our cowboys were Black Americans who sought a fresh landscape to match the glory of their new-won freedom. Each of these groups contributed its musical influence to the songs and tunes we now associate with our western heritage .... hoedowns, rags, one steps, waltzes, ballads, satirical songs. love songs. comical ditties, and the results live on as pure America.

Banjo Playing
Sara's love of unaccompanied singing was beginning to relegate the banjo to a minor role. "Yes, I began to realise I was putting the banjo down more and more often. But it's such a lovely instrument to accompany a lot of the songs I do. To me the song is the main thing, and I never try to push in an instrument just for the sake of it, but if it needs something to move it forward then I pick up the banjo."

A firm believer in the principle that the spaces are as important as the notes, Sara plays with a very open style and a slow, hypnotic pulse, and it can work even on British material. "I've been using it lately on Tiftie's Annie in a G modal tuning; it sounds so plaintive. I do tend to pulse a song with a banjo, like Rosianne (Bob Coltman's rewrite of Lucy Wan). The banjo is soft but there's something menacing about it in the modal tunings that works really well."

The banjo players that helped to shape Sara's style aren't household names: "Reed Martin and Pete Hoover influenced me a lot. They're fairly unknown in the UK, though banjo afficionados know them well. Kyle Creed was an influence as well, because I tend to play up the neck. shegot an old Weymann banjo which she used on some of the tracks on her CDs. It's a very simple old banjo with a vellum head and a lovely sweet resonance. It's got a pluckier sound, not as bright as the Whyte Ladle." Sara's referring here to her regular instrument.

Sara’s Commitment
There are more people especially younger ones performing the old songs, but few get as deep into them as Sara Grey does. She seems to connect with them at an unusually deep level emotionally "I do, yeah. I identify with them and they have great relevance for me and I think if I've achieved anything at all in all these years it's that I've been able to pass that on to Kieron, thats what pleases me the most . He has such a tremendous passion when he sings, it goes right to the very core of himself, he's totally immersed in them.

Kieron is a terrific performer on account of just that passion. His voice is especially striking, achieving the rare combination of a high lonesome edge with a warm richness of timbre, and it has a power to move the listener that few of his generation can match. His guitar playing is unconventional, its spareness a mile away from any notion of fancy picking, but it's highly effective, while his stage presence is charismatic, yet laid-back. His songs range from old-time, through the blues - which he sings with startling conviction - to the work of tradition-influenced songwriters, and his own compositions.

Discography
Sandy Boys

on Fellside 2009 FECD225

Sara Grey with Kieron Means

A Long Way from Home

on Fellside 2005 FECD196

Sara Grey with Kieron Means

Song Migration Booklet & CD

Sara Grey with Tom Spiers

Boy, She's A Daisy

on The Living Tradition 2002 LTCD1301

Sara Grey with Kieron Means

Back In The Airly Days

on Waterbug 1998 WBG0044

Sara Grey

Sara

on Harbourtown 1994 HARCD 028

Sara Grey

Promises To Keep

on Harbourtown 1990 HARCD011

Sara Grey

You Gave Me A Song

on Greenwich Village 1987 GVR231

Sara Grey with Ellie Ellis

Making The Air Resound

on Fellside 1984 FE039

Sara Grey with Ellie Ellis

A Breath Of Fresh Air

on Fellside 1981 FE031

Sara Grey with Ellie Ellis

Sara Grey With Ed Tricket

on Folk Legacy 1970 CD38

Collaborations
As Far As My Eyes Can See

on Fellside 2005 FECD195

Kieron Means with Sara Grey

Run Mountain

on The Living Tradition 2002 LTCD3004

Kieron Means with Sara Grey

Five Days Singing

on Folk Legacy 1971 FSI41

Various Artists inc Sara