George Washington danced to the song that opens this record. I have every reason to believe it, and the detail stayed with me the whole way through these five tracks, sitting with an Oxford folk collective who went to Carlisle to record old songs and trying to understand exactly why it worked on me as well as it did. There’s something about knowing a piece of music has a real paper trail, a real history, real feet that moved to it in a real room, that changes how you hear it. Or maybe that’s just me constructing a reason after the fact. Either way, the cotillion that opens this record felt different once I knew.
Floyds Row formed at the University of Oxford and made early recordings together there before taking these sessions to Carlisle. The biographical detail matters less than what it produced: a group of musicians who share a specific kind of relationship to old material, one that’s genuinely fond and unsentimental about it. You hear that in the playing throughout. These songs are being treated as things worth doing properly, and that care shows in the arrangements and stays invisible.
Floyds Row found a box of old songs and decided to play them seriously. That’s the simplest description of what The Carlisle Sessions is. Not a contemporary reimagining with obvious winks toward the present. Just musicians playing old songs with genuine attention to what each one needed. The George Washington cotillion that opens the album is celebratory, slightly absurd, full-bodied: a country dance tune given a complete modern treatment and it comes out swinging. I thought I knew where the record was going. Then “Henry Martin” arrived with a soprano and accordion and a completely different emotional temperature, and I had to readjust. That kept happening.
The soprano is the thing that stays with you. The voice on “Henry Martin” and the closing Robin Hood track has a formality that sits oddly against the folk songs and somehow works anyway. I spent some time trying to figure out why. My best guess: trained vocal formality against very old songs creates a kind of productive distance, and that distance is where the album finds its own character. A cleaner theory might exist. That’s the one I have.
“Henry Martin” in particular is worth slowing down for. It’s a Scottish ballad, old enough that the exact origin is fuzzy, and the soprano delivers it with a restraint that keeps it from tipping over. Accordion underneath, the melody doing most of the emotional work, and the whole thing feels like something being passed on carefully. Folk music at its most functional is exactly this: a story that survives because the tune holds you long after the words fade.
“Jackaroe” has actual blues in it, audible blues, and the maritime love story underneath plays against that in ways that feel right. This is the track where the contemporary treatment is most obviously present, and it lands. “Maiden Lane / Kettle Drum” opens with a string solo, quiet, almost tentative, and the full ensemble arrives and the song opens up in a way that caught me off guard. That moment is the album’s best. “The Song of Robin Hood & his Huntes-men” closes everything with the same soprano from “Henry Martin”, but by this point the album has covered enough distance that the familiar voice sounds like it belongs somewhere new. It simply works.
What the record does well, and what I kept noticing across repeated listens, is that it covers a lot of ground and holds together anyway. The George Washington cotillion and the Robin Hood song are from completely different musical worlds and they share an album that holds them both comfortably. That’s harder than it sounds. A lot of folk revival projects pick a lane and stay in it. This one moves around, track by track, and the transitions hold because each song is being played for its own reasons rather than to service a larger concept. The concept is just: these are good songs, here they are. That simplicity is its own achievement.
Five tracks. The record moves from outdoor country dance to intimate ballad to blues-inflected maritime story to full orchestral pivot to nightclub-adjacent closer, and the journey holds together because the musicians playing it clearly know what they’re doing and care about the songs they chose. Whether this is preservation or revival or just a group of Oxford musicians doing something they found interesting is a question I’d leave open. What I can say is the record gets better on repeat. And a third. That’s a reasonable thing to say about five tracks, and it’s true.
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