32. Sam Lee. The Nightingale ~ totem, identity and hope

Is song connected to even deeper roots than time and place? Can music and song can bring us closer to the non-human world? Does musical meaning arise from the experience of inhabiting the world and is it shared freely between humans and birds and trees and ‘all our relations’? 

We explore all this and much more with the wonderful Sam Lee. A highly inventive and original singer, folk song interpreter, passionate conservationist, song collector and successful creator of live events. Alongside his organisation, The Nest Collective, Sam has shaken up the music scene breaking boundaries between folk and contemporary music and the assumed places and ways folksong is appreciated.

And he is the author of the acclaimed ‘The Nightingale’, a book about a bird whose presence and reassurance of nature represents an English totemism, a symbol of a visceral relationship with the natural world, myth and identity. Mixing grief, hope and vision for the future, we explore how Nature projects on to us, not us on to Nature.

Sam Lee website  

The Nightingale book 

Old Wow album 

 

Some of the ideas and references we make in this podcast can be found here:

Jeannie Robertson - MacCrimmons Lament 
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan 
Bernard Butler 
Buzzard 
Totem  
Anthropomorphism  
Heron  
Kestrel
Ornithology  
Totem Pole
Ray Mears 
Shamanism
Music Declares Emergency  
Wembley Stadium  
Hans Christian Andersen  
J M W Turner  
Hawthorn
Supermoon  
Ecology
Solastalgia  
Caroline Lucas MP  
Benedict MacDonald - Rebirding
Monsanto  
Siren Calling  
Fridays for Future