When a modest and decent person leaves this life it is always with sadness, there may be joy in the memory of what they have left behind, the art perhaps they have created living on, collecting new fans, making new friends each subsequent nudge and praise in the right direction, but it doesn’t stop the hurt, the loss of having had something so beautiful, wholesome and uniquely fascinating that their spirit seems to have somehow find a way to inhabit your thinking, then you know that they were special, that you may be able to revisit their roots, but you will miss out on their future, all that could have been.
We, as fans, as lovers of the art, have no right to complain, not when we measure the loss against those who knew them better, who were loved in return rather than simply entertained, and yet the recent passing of John Cee Stannard and his last album recorded and put together in life, the Folk Song Revisited, is arguably more poignant, certainly more personal, an affair of remembrance than anything the man, the musician had done before.
That is of course not to dismiss the huge amount of work laid down before, that would be tantamount to a kind of artistic heresy, but it is to be acknowledged that in the face of life’s final hurdles and the shaking of hands with the carrier of our souls, we produce perhaps our most beautiful songs, even those that once saw the light of day in a different time, once returned to the spotlight, can find a special place amongst the great works created.
Folk Songs Revisited might be considered in time to be the epilogue of John Cee Stannard’s time, the curtain closing on an excellent career, but the album is more than that, and with tracks such as High Hill, the recent collaboration with Mike Baker in No One There, I See A Boy, a harkening back to the original Tudor Lodge days in If Only She Was Here, No More Tears and the heart breaking comfort and surrounding story that entails Silver Chalice, the scene is set for an encore like no other, there may be the small detail of the final curtain, the winch and pully poised to come down lightly on the most emotional of sounds but as Dylan Thomas insisted, “Do not go gentle in to that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light” for in the life of John Cee Stannard, there is a light that burns, and will do so, forever.
A send-off that sums up the musician perfectly, a man who will be very much missed.
John Cee Stannard’s Folk Roots Revisited is available to purchase now Cast Iron Recordings.
Ian D. Hall