Anne Briggs

Since the 1960s, Anne Briggs’s a cappella renderings of traditional tunes have influenced a slew of British folksingers, including Sandy Denny and June Tabor. For 1971’s The Time Has Come, the second and final LP to be issued during her career (a third, Sing a Song for You, was recorded in 1973 but only released in 1996), Briggs shifted to her own songs and added guitar and bouzouki accompaniment. The title track, a laid-back number, gender-reverses the ramblin’-man trope. And on the haunting “Wishing Well,” cowritten with Bert Jansch, a steadily tolling low note evokes a well’s cold depths.

Briggs’s soprano, resonant here as if recorded in a country chapel made of stone, is an affecting amalgam of soaring clarity and human frailty. Her ever-present vocal ornaments wobble on their axes; long notes, drawn out toward downbeats, waver and stumble. Nevertheless, she sings with a go-for-broke punkness, hurtling with something like determined desperation through, for instance, the final lines of “Fire and Wine”: “We’ll sing till break of day / We will sing the frost away.”

Still, I’m growing weary of this bottomless appetite for long-ago songstresses who simply vanished from the scene in their primes, leaving them eternally suspended in nubile midtwenties luminescence. Andy Beta’s new liner notes for The Time reflect this kink, including the ridiculous claim that Briggs “embodies all mysteries of earth and womanhood, of life itself.” If only she could have survived and thrived as a musician in real time, instead of leaving us only decades-old traces to worship. — Sara Marcus