The View
INTERVIEW
Dorset-loving folk duo Ninebarrow talk walks, writing guidebooks, caring for their very own woodland… and now, parenthood.
ALOT OF MUSICIANS have close connections to a particular landscape. But it’s very hard to think of a stronger bond than the one between Ninebarrow and Dorset.
Born and bred in the county, partners Jon Whitley and Jay LaBouchardiere are now on their fifth acclaimed album of beautiful folk-rooted songs and stories. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a folk music fan, it’s very hard not to describe Jon and Jay’s work as just straight-up exquisite, partly because most of it comes from walking.
Almost every song they write or adapt is drawn in some way from the landscape, and specifically from their home county. From history and folklore to geology and wildlife (they are especially passionate about blackbirds), their music evokes a deep love of the countryside, nurtured over many years of walking together.
“Sporadically we say to each other, ‘we might get bored of this one day’,” says Jon.
“But then every time we set out on a walk, we’re like… ‘Nah. Not yet.’”
The pair met at school aged 12, became a couple at 15, and have walked, performed and recorded together ever since. The second track on their recent fifth album The Colour of Night is called Walk With Me and is, the duo say, ‘an ode to sharing some time – an hour or a few decades – with someone who makes your life better just by being there’.
Walk with me
Take me somewhere else and show me all there is to see Side by side we’ll walk the hills and wander the edge of the rolling sea I could walk alone, But would you walk with me?
Elsewhere on the album are other stories from the Dorset landscape. Cast to the Waves is inspired by an old May Day tradition from Abbotsbury, in which children whose fathers were fishermen would make garlands of wildflowers which were then rowed out to sea and ‘offered’ to the waves to ensure good fishing.
The duo’s name is taken from Nine Barrow Down, a ridge in their beloved Purbeck Hills.
Ten Miles by Two tells of the men who quarried the prized limestone from the Purbeck Hills, and the connection they felt to the rock that was their livelihood. Among the Boughs is a musical setting for William Barnes’ poem The Blackbird (‘But there’s no time the whole day long/Like evening with the blackbird’s song’). The heart-rending Kitty’s Song evokes the medieval practice of ‘skimmity riding’ – the public humiliation of those deemed to have ‘fallen into sin’, which took place beneath the mask of the monstrous ‘Dorset Ooser’.
But it’s not just about the music. They’ve also released Ninebarrow’s Dorset, Vol 3: a new
