MARIE LITTLE Factory Girl LP ARGO Psych Folk RARE Imp.

$

165

 argo zfb 19
1971 issue
uk import
laminated lp jacket vg++ to vg+ light crease wear along spine and seam upper left corner
lp vg+ to vg/vg+ one scratch in middle of trk 4 side a that makes noise and pops
Argo issue number: ZFB 19

Producer: Frederick Woods
Engineer: Ade Martins

Musicians
Marie Little – vocals, guitar
Robin Dransfield – guitar
Barry Dransfield – fiddle
Smiley (Tom Bowker) – dobro and banjo
Dave Moses – bass and recorder

Musical arrangement: Bill le Sage

TRACKS

Side One
The Twa Corbies (Trad)
The White Cockade (Trad)
Friendless Mary (Trad)
The Baron O’ Brackley (Trad)
The Story Of Cotton (Trad)
The Foggy Dew (Trad)

Side Two
Morning Of My Life (B. A. Gibb)
A Song For All Seasons (Peter Ryder)
Galleries (Joni Mitchell)
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (Dylan)
Last Train And Ride (Ralph McTell)
Factory Girl (Ralph McTell)

Notes
A couple of contemporary reviews of the album, which is what you’d call a collector’s item these days :

Melody Maker (26/6/71):
‘One gains the impression that Marie’s voice is still progressing towards a maturity that could do full justice to the material she has chosen to sing… Although her performance seems very tense, it would nevertheless be over-zealous to dismiss the album. The content is sensibly divided into one side of traditional and one of contemporary songs’.

The Gramophone (September 1971)
“Marie Little, a 21-year-old singer from Salford, makes her debut on Argo with “Factory Girl”. On Side 1 she has as good an accompanying group as anyone could wish for, first time out: the Dransfields (fiddle and guitar) and “Smiley” (dobro and banjo).

“The Twa Corbies and The Foggy Dew are sung nicely enough, but it is “Smiley’s” dobro-playing on the latter that remains in my mind. Side 2 draws its material from quite another songbag – Joni Mitchell’s Galleries, Dylan’s Just Like Tom Thumb Blues, a couple of Ralph McTell compositions – and has orchestral accompaniments. These are fairly consistently either mundane or emptily decorative, and the ‘all-out arrangement’ of Tom Thumb Blues is grotesque.”