Another Christmas album from Kate Rusby

Once again Kate Rusby has released a December Christmas album. This is the fifth one and it is called Holly Head (hard not to say that in a North Walian accent for some of us). It follows a similar format to previous albums and so seemed a little tame at first but I am getting into it.

We kick off with Salute The Morn an eighteenth century hymn with some nice guitar work from husband Damien O'Kane. Christmas Is Merry is the first of three originals but with a traditional tune.  The Holly King is very much on the pagan side of things. Hippo For Christmas revives a forgotten novelty hit from the fifties, complete with tuba accompaniment.

There are four traditional carols on the album next. Yorkshire Three Ships, Lu Lay (or the Wexford or Coventry carol) and a laudable sixth version of While Shepherds Watched follow each other in swift succession and are done well. We have to wait one track until the great Victorian hymn Bleak Midwinter done to a Yorkshire tune.

The Mistletoe Bough turns to an 1844 song apparently published in Songs, Ballads and Other Poems. By Thomas Haynes Bayly (of Home Sweet Home fame) and Sir Henry Bishop it is based on the sad story of The Mistletoe Bride which, first related in 1823, tells of how a young bride suffocated on her wedding day unable to get out of a large chest where she had hidden in an ill-fated game of hide and seek. The legend has been ascribed to several different counties, this one is about Lovell Hall, Oxfordshire. It is a jolly song despite the tragic content.

Celestial Hearts is a Yorkshire variant of ‘New Celestial’, arranged by Rusby and O’Kane and I Am Christmas is a simple treatment of a 2010 song written by Bill Meek and John Conolly,

The album closes with another episode in the story of Barnsley's own Big Brave Bill B.B.B.B is Bill, Beryl, Belinda and Bob this time. This time he gets rescued.

Sorry not to hear any banjo this time. The brass and guitars, etc, are here still. Great arrangementss but it is the voice that wins it. The Barnsley lass seems to have pulled it off again. We are looking forward to seeing her soon.