Shirley Collins

Shirley Collins (born 1935) is an English folk singer from Hastings who was central to the British folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. She travelled to the American South with Alan Lomax in 1959, recording traditional singers for the Library of Congress; subsequent records with her sister Dolly Collins — Anthems in Eden (1969) and Love, Death and the Lady (1970) — integrated early music instruments including portative organ and crumhorn into traditional English ballad settings with results of extraordinary strangeness and beauty. A period of silence following a personal trauma ended when she returned with Lodestar in 2016, re-establishing her as a foundational figure of English folk music.