In his famous The Souls of Black Folk (1903), intellectual and historian W.E.B. Dubois wrote that what he called "sorrow songs" -- their own spirituals and ballads -- were the music that helped African-Americans survive their often brutal lot. They were a gift to mainstream American culture that it surely did not deserve but from which we have all benefited in a legacy of folk songs, gospel and blues, followed after by jazz, rock 'n' roll, soul and hip hop.

These forms evolved in the way they did because of the large, cruel role slavery played in the United States. It took the Civil War to end it, finally and bloodily, though without exterminating racism and discrimination. In Britain, however, "enslavement was only one of the many, many possible routes here," Angeline Morrison, the child of an Outer Hebrides father and a Jamaican mother, writes.

It is certain that British people with African ties had their own music. Still, The Sorrow Songs' subtitle, "Folk Songs of Black British Experience," is bound to raise eyebrows in those who know something of the way the most significant of the early English folksong collectors, Cecil Sharp, chose to conduct his inquiries, both in England and in Appalachia, in the opening decades of the last century. As much as anyone, Sharp was integral to the preservation of traditional music sung in English-speaking rural culture. That part is admirable, the rest not so much; Sharp had no interest in what people of color were singing, on the remarkably obtuse grounds (which skeptical others were applying to the white folk music Sharp championed) that they could contribute nothing of worth. The collecting, at least in America, would be left to other, wiser folklorists, musicologists and record-company a&r field representatives.

Sharp's example loomed so large in Britain that Black folk -- as in traditional -- songs are criminally under-represented in that nation's archives. Therefore Sorrow proves to be more an exercise in creative archaeology than the resurrection of authentically grassroots material. An English academic possessed of a magnificently expressive voice, Morrison does what she can, which is to take period-appropriate melodies and set them to lyrics she has written in the voices of real-life Black persons of another time.

The opening cut, for example, owes its inspiration to a headline in a 19th-century coastal newspaper, noting the washing-up on shore of a drowned, dark-skinned child. "Unknown African Boy (d. 1830)" has to be among the saddest songs I've ever heard. Morrison's presentation feels as if ripped from the heart of darkness itself, though the white people who knew of the event generally regarded it as little more than a curiosity.

Over the course of 11 numbers, with short interludes devoted to the racial contextualization of the stories, Morrison sets the tales of African Britons, some originally from the Caribbean, into the (it must be said) white ballad tradition, though the ironically titled "The Beautiful Spotted Black Boy" owes more to the music hall. But compositions like "Cruel Mother Country" and "The Flames They Do Grow High" nod to the best-known of the story-songs that helped define the British tradition. "Mad-Haired Moll O'Bedlam" clearly spins off from the grimly comic "Bonny Mad Boys of Bedlam."

Though hardly something you're going to listen to casually, The Sorrow Songs is a brilliant, affecting work of art on every level: songwriting, vocals, production, basic conception. Not least part of its success is the Sorrow Songs Band, consisting of acoustic musicians, some with ties to the African diaspora. There is also the always welcome Eliza Carthy, whose taste and musicality are richly documented in the body of recordings she has released on her own and sometimes with her parents Martin Carthy and the late Norma Waterson and other folk singers.

Plenty of albums document the experiences of Black Americans, but I haven't heard anything like Morrison's before. I'd be surprised if you have.

[ visit Angeline Morrison's website ]