“The Grey Cock,” an English folk ballad whose origin lies sometime in the 17th century or earlier, concerns a pair of lovers who reunite late one night after a long time apart. When a crowing rooster interrupts their rendezvous, the woman sends her lover away, thinking morning has come. By the time she realizes that the bird has marked the day too early, and there is still an hour of night’s cover remaining, it’s too late: He’s already gone. There is some debate among scholars over whether the young man—sometimes called Johnny, others Willie—was still in possession of his mortal soul when he showed up at his girlfriend’s door. In a transcription of the ballad’s text collected in the 19th century, the reason for his predawn departure is left unspoken. But in one of the earliest known audio recordings, from the early 1950s, the singer says it outright: “O Mary dear, the cold clay has changed me/I am but the ghost of your Willie O.”
In one interpretation, the explicitly supernatural character of “The Grey Cock” is a comparatively recent addition, imported from an unrelated Irish ballad; in another, it is a remnant of the song’s original form, scrubbed from the official record to avoid the appearance of superstition and reintroduced via oral tradition sometime later. Shovel Dance Collective, on their remarkable new album The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore, go with the ghost story. Nick Granata, one of multiple vocalists in the London ensemble, delivers “The Grey Cock” with controlled vibrato, lingering on certain syllables and letting others rush by, sounding at times as if they’ve seen a spirit themselves. There are no instruments behind them; only the sound of softly rushing water. As for whether this is some exalted true and original version of “The Grey Cock” or a newer amalgamation, I suspect that Shovel Dance Collective don’t particularly care. For them, folk song is a living tradition, not a museum piece.
Some of Shovel Dance Collective’s nine members grew up playing folk music, and others started as indie rock or experimental musicians and came to it later. They’re part of a loose-knit London scene whose participants have a similarly varied relationship to strict tradition: bands like caroline, whose post-rock instrumentals draw upon English folk as one of many influences, and the Broadside Hacks, who perform centuries-old songs in communal and improvisatory new arrangements. Compared to those two, Shovel Dance Collective are spartan and rigorous in their approach. There is not so much as an acoustic guitar in the credits of The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore, which instead favors instruments that conjure a deeper and stranger antiquity: hammered dulcimer, bowed cittern, mountain banjo, pump organ. And though Shovel Dance Collective’s full ensemble playing is lushly beautiful, they mostly withhold it, focusing on the quiet intensity of two or three voices interacting at a time.