Angeline Morrison - Singer, Songwriter and Multi-instrumentalist
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1. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
It's my current album, The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience (2022, Topic Records). It has been an intense journey and a real labour of love, requiring so much dedication, hard work, research, opening myself to horrifying narratives, and trying to find ways to allow those voices to have expression through me... I am really proud of having survived the creation process, and of the piece of work that is the end result.
2. What motivates you to do what you do?
Singing, writing songs and making music is just the same as breathing for me... I can't imagine not doing it. So I see it as more of a deep urge from within, rather than something I'm motivated to do...
3. What do you owe your mother?
My devoted love of Sam Cooke and collecting vintage dresses.
4. Which women inspire you and why?
Audre Lorde for fighting injustice with wisdom, beauty, brilliance and the awe-inspiring power of words.
Louise Bennett-Coverley for her lifelong and joyous collecting of Jamaican traditional folk song, dance, arts and culture.
Caitlin Moran for her fierce honesty, writerly genius, and foregrounding of women's experiences.
5. What are you reading?
The Watkins Book of English Folk Tales (Neil Philip).
Companion Piece (Ali Smith).
Britain's Brown Babies - The Stories of Children Born to Black GIs and White Women in the Second World War (Lucy Bland).
6. What gender barriers have you had to hurdle?
Specifically within music, it's mostly been a reluctance to believe I could have played any part in the composition of my songs. Thankfully that's changing...
7. How can the world be made a better place for women?
If more women held positions of power and influence, that would be a good start.
8. Describe your perfect day?
A rainy walk in the woods, a swim in the sea, books books books, digging about in a record shop or record fair, lots and lots of time and space and silence...
9. We've noticed there really aren't many (if any) statues of women around Cornwall - who would you like to see remembered?
There were many enslaved African women who lived in, or were trafficked through, Cornwall. There were also many Cornish women of the Wesleyan Methodist movement who were very active in the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. I would really like it if all of these women were remembered, though not necessarily in the form of statues - I think there are endless possible ways we can practice public remembrance and honouring
10. Give us a tip?
Fleece bedding has an immediate and profound effect on quality of life
Angeline Morrison is a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist in the genres of wyrd folk, trad folk and psych folk. Angeline's latest album 'The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience', produced by Eliza Carthy, is out now on Topic Records.
Website: https://www.angelinemorrisonmusic.com
BandCamp: https://angelinemorrisonmusic.bandcamp.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/angelcakepie/?hl=en