Rewilding Culture: Sam Lee and Cosmo Sheldrake’s Love Songs to the Natural World

Cosmo Sheldrake in the field. Photo by Pete Flude.

One spring morning, as I stood in my doorway in the Scottish seaside town of St Andrews, I became convinced that the usual chattering chorus of birdsong in my garden had grown louder. It was April 2020—the first taste of COVID lockdown—and I, like many others, was witnessing the quickening new life of the season with an added layer of astonished appreciation. While the fabric of our daily lives unraveled before our eyes, nature sang out louder than ever.

It would take several months and an internet search for me to realize my mistake: the skylarks and seabirds outside my window were not any louder, but a sudden lull in the sounds of human life had created space to listen.

Music as we know it was originally lifted from and returned to the landscape. Our earliest musical instruments were flutes whittled from hollowed ivory or bird bones, and it’s not hard to imagine their first echoing harmonies arising out of devotion to and in communion with the living landscape around them.

For centuries, folk music traditions have tended the flames of this relationship. But as traditions fade and flicker, the wisdom they protect can disappear along with them.

To better understand what the messages of these old songs mean for us today, I met with Sam Lee and Cosmo Sheldrake, two British musicians who are treading a new path for folk music—or rather, as they might remind me, retracing its footsteps. Both have made a name for themselves in Britain’s emerging “eco-folk” scene, a subculture of folk revival which addresses the urgent reality of ecological collapse.

Spring found them busy with budding projects. Sheldrake joined us between recording sessions for his new album, Wet Wild World. Lee had just returned from a month of touring (and, he added with a laugh, a weekend at Sheldrake’s house). As they began parlaying between one another with a familiar warmth and buoyancy, I sensed the conversation was picking up where it last left off.

It’s easy to see why the two are friends. Both spent their childhood immersed in the rolling green landscapes of Southern England, where a shared passion for the natural world took root. Both are avid folk music collectors, and their styles are informed by a diverse range of international traditions.

“You and I probably owe much of our early musical diets to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings,” Lee told Sheldrake with a laugh. Searching through vast archives of song, the two became enchanted by the same idea: beyond any commercial or narrative end, music was the inheritor of a much wider sense of culture.

“That was an awakening for me,” Lee recalled.

Sam Lee and Stanley Robinson. Photo courtesy of Sam Lee.

An affinity for the vernacular music of the British Isles sent Lee in search of the living oral traditions of his own country. Folk aficionados advised him at the time that all the old tradition bearers had long passed on, taking most of their songs and stories with them. Unconvinced, he followed his curiosity north to Scotland. There, he began a formative apprenticeship with celebrated Scottish Traveler musician Stanley Robertson, who inducted him into a rich (but nearly forgotten) tradition of song carrying.

After Robertson’s death in 2009, Lee continued going door to door in rural Traveler (aka Roma or Romani) camps across Britain and Ireland, gathering unrecorded folk songs and lore from local elders. Living just below the surface of these oral traditions, he soon discovered, were deep-seated cosmologies that reflect a relationship of profound connection to the land. Across vast repositories of song and story, blackbirds, riverbanks, nightingales, and other hallmarks of British wildlife are as explicitly celebrated as any human or otherworldly character.

“The songs would have been sung around the fire, or while working the land, and repeated like a mantra throughout the year,” Lee noted. Their cast of creatures cycled with each turning season, recording the migration patterns of an ever-changing landscape. “It has all the hallmarks for me of a tradition of prayer and ritual.”

Read the full story, published July 28 2023, on Smithsonian Folklife.