TV music show Jools' Annual Hootenanny is a long-established New Years' Eve tradition in The UK. It's a pre-recorded show in which various stars pretend they're performing at a Hogmanay party, and while it's almost as famous for its predictability as it is for its countdown to midnight and communal version of Auld Lang Syne – one running joke suggests that the BBC broadcast the same show every year, but no one notices – occasionally, something bright shines through the musical murk.
This year it was the turn of 17-year-old Muireann Bradley, an Irish country blues guitarist and singer from Ballybofey, County Donegal, who received a standing ovation for her cover of Candy Man, a 1920s song attributed to blues great Reverend Gary Davis and later popularised by the likes of Jack Elliott, Dave Van Ronk and Hot Tuna. The clip of Bradley playing the song has since gone viral.
The teenager appeared on the show alongside established faces like Rod Stewart, Joss Stone, P.P. Arnold, Sugababes, Ruby Turner and Pogues founder Spider Stacey. "To see all them legends was just crazy for me," she told the BBC. "When I came home the next day it just felt like a dream, to be honest. It was crazy. I was pretty nervous, but once I kind of got on the stage it kind of all went away to be honest."
Bradley is signed to San Francisco folk label Tompkins Square, and released her debut album, I Kept These Old Blues, last month. It includes covers of songs by the likes of Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten, Taj Mahal and Robert Wilkins. The songs were recorded live in the studio, without overdubs.
"Most of these tunes were originally recorded by the great blues men and women who were making records from the 1920s and 1930s right up in some cases to the early 1970s," says Bradley. "I have also found inspiration for the renditions recorded here in the playing of some of the musicians who began recording this music in the 1960s and later, and who in some cases learned at the feet of the greats."
In November Bradley released film of her cover of When The Levee Breaks, first recorded by Delta blues pioneer Lizzie Douglas, a.k.a. Memphis Minnie, during her debut recording session in 1929, and later made famous by Led Zeppelin. The video is below.
I Kept These Old Blues is available from Bandcamp.
