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Ben Walker feat. Nancy Kerr - The Way Through The Woods

from Banish Air From Air by Ben Walker

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about

words by Rudyard Kipling

It turns out that this is a favourite poem of Nancy’s too and it’s an honour to have her sing and play fiddle on it. A lot of the arrangements for Kipling’s peaceful ghost story seem based around the tune to Poverty Knock, however this one has a lot more to do with a lockdown interest in clawhammer banjo! Having said that, the cantering rhythm suits the rhyme sequences of the poem and it could as easily be about the Appalachian woods as the English ones, they do have otters too, after all.

lyrics

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know

There was once a path through the woods
Before they planted the trees:
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ring’d pools
Where the otter whistles his mate

(They fear not men in the woods
Because they see so few),
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet
And the swish of a skirt in the dew

Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods,
But there is no road through the woods.

credits

from Banish Air From Air, released February 24, 2023

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Ben Walker Brighton, UK

With his work recognised as 'deft' (Telegraph), ‘stunning’ (The Guardian) and ‘second to none’ (Verity Sharp), Ben Walker has built a reputation among his peers for fusing tradition and innovation like no-one else.

In between producing and playing for other artists, Ben's characteristically warm, whimsical and virtuosic solo set delights folk audiences and festivals in the UK and further afield.
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