Once a year or so I hear an artist whose music is so joyous and distinctive that I am convinced on the spot that I will be listening to him or her as long as either of us is around to create or to hear. Last summer it was Austin singer-songwriter Chuck Hawthorne and Fire Out of Stone (reviewed here on 22 June 2019). This year it is Sam Lee and Old Wow.

The title comes from a quasi-mystical experience Lee, born in North London, had during a visit to rural Scotland in which he felt a profound connectedness with the natural world. The expression also refers, I suspect, to the sometimes dizzying, almost religious sense some of us feel hearing the sort of traditional music that links us to the humanity we share with long-dead, otherwise-silent ancestors. In their long pilgrimage to our ears, folk songs get stripped down to a bedrock reality devoid of pretense or extraneous detail. There are all kinds of true songs, of course, but traditional songs seem truer than most.

Lee is a remarkable man, with the energy of three or four normal humans, engaged in an array of musical, theatrical and environmental projects, with perhaps the English/Scottish folksong tradition an inspiration for most of it. Old Wow is his third album, if the first I've heard (though I will remedy that shortly). I'd read of him in the pages of the late, lamented fRoots, so the name was not new to me.

In his mid-20s Lee decided he wanted to devote much of his life to exploring and recreating Britain's native music. Nothing particularly unusual about someone's discovery of the delights of folk song, but Lee did something decidedly out of the ordinary: he began collecting songs, in his case from the Traveling People, whose centuries-long tie to ancient balladry was rapidly fading into extinction. In 2012 he released his first album, putting some of that material into innovative modern arrangements.

From what I infer, Old Wow is something of the same, vaguely reminiscent of Shirley & Dolly Collins's beloved Anthems in Eden (1969) but with its own sound, generally less orchestral and sparer. It is almost disorientingly beautiful. Lee's moody vocals draw the listener into a lost world/alternate reality of ballads and hymns, the disappearance of which from all but the far fringes of 21st-century culture falls among the many tragic losses of our destructive age. When I hear him singing "Sweet Sixteen," I wonder if I will be able to find my way back to my quotidian life, or if I want to.

The album is something of a song cycle. Some cuts are editorially reworked, with elements of other songs showing up in fresh contexts, occasionally supplemented by Lee's own judiciously rendered words. "Spencer the Rover" -- among the very few ballads with a middle-class hero, or with a happy ending -- gets a relatively straightforward treatment. "Lay This Body Down," which opens with part of "Long Time Traveling," feels even darker than its pitch-black sentiments. Ordinarily, the temptation among modern folk singers is to treat this 19th-century hymn in (so to speak) skeletal arrangement, but uncharacteristically for Old Wow, Lee goes for a full-bodied one, to scarily moving effect.

I keep returning to this album and each time bringing back something new. If you're familiar with it, you know the British revival boasts many heroes. At the beginning of what I hope will be a long career, Lee already stands among them. No hyperbole here: Old Wow is a masterpiece.