The Pure Light Within It
You'd think having the blessing of the church would be anathema to counter-cultural credibility, but when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, calls the Incredible String Band's music "holy," he's onto something. Take "A Very Cellular Song," the 13-minute centerpiece of the Scottish folk oddballs' undoubted masterpiece, 1968's awe-inspiring The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. Across its long, shifting structure, Mike Heron draws connections between all life forms, from the divine down to the amoebic; the wonders of the universe alive in every spirit, every cricket, every dividing cell.
The lyrics are matched to musical pantheism, the song drawing broadly from religions —incorporating an English traditional, a Bahamian spiritual, and a Sikh hymnal— and sounds —featuring oud, gimbri, shenai, sitar, and panpipes— as it meanders into a series of strange, kooky, daydreamy shapes.
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, in its entirety, works with the same sense of complete inclusion; Heron and Williamson not letting their status as folk-revivalists keep them from taking music into weird new hybrids never before heard. This was, after all, 1968. With weed on the minds and dreams in the sky, the pair were drawn to folk music not for its traditionalism, but its radicalism. This people's music, as flowing with pagan rites as Christian tenants.
It's spiritual music, but it's the free-flowing, open-minded spiritualism of the hippy ideal: all cultures, all worlds, all creeds, all genres united under one weird strain of high, high, holy art.
1968
Where many classic albums have achieved that status because of their timelessness, this isn't the case with The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. This is an album forever tethered to a specific moment in time; a record whose absolute artistic goodness gives rise to the mythicism so many imbue 1968 with.
The album operates with a sense of pure libertarian, artistic freedom that, in the years prior, seemed not to exist. Williamson and Heron, themselves, started out with more timidity; their early days finding their folk less freaky, more coffeehouse; their debt to Dylan obvious. It took them a while —this was their third album— to feel such a sense of abandon.
Drawing from Indian, Afghan, and Moroccan folk, featured crazy cascading vocals, an army of bizarre interests, a sense of cosmic internal logic, and a happy balance between the transcendent and the absurd, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter is the happiest by-product of a cultural revolution.
For listeners, now, part of the appeal in listening to it is that it lives up to the imagined hippy ideal; gives rise to the myths of a golden age of counter-culture that, in many ways, never really existed. It's not a perfect portrait of the idyllic countryside like Vashti Bunyan's recently-beloved Just Another Diamond Day, an album on which Williamson, not coincidentally, played. But it is a wondrous, ridiculous, mind-altering record that's remarkably free from self-consciousness, self-censorship, cynicism, and the corrosive presence of cool.
Record Label: Elektra
Release Date: March, 1968
