Folk singer Angeline Morrison, announced as the winner of the Christian Raphael Prize 2022, releases new album

Folk singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Angeline Morrison has been announced as the winner of the Christian Raphael Prize 2022, in association with the Cambridge Folk Festival - where she performed for this first time this summer, on The Den stage.

The Birmingham-born musician, who released a new album on October 7, is the fourth recipient of one of the most significant competitions in the country for key emerging talent in this particular genre of music. The previous winners are Mishra, Katherine Priddy and Nick Hart.

Angeline says it was “absolutely amazing” to discover that she'd won the award. She adds: “I had no idea I was even nominated until the day before my performance [at the Folk Festival]. I got an email and I honestly didn’t expect that I would be chosen because all the other artists were just amazing.

“I thought, ‘Well, it’s wonderful to be nominated’ - I was happy with that - but I was really blown away to be picked.”

Announced on the last night of the Cambridge Folk Festival, the prize, launched at the festival in 2018, contributes £3,600 for a year towards things like the travel and marketing costs of touring and/or time in a rehearsal space or recording studio. Also guaranteed for Angeline is a showcase spot in the Club Tent at the 2023 Folk Festival – one of five artists spotted ‘as ones to watch’ during the year – which leads to a slot on Stage 2 the following year.

“The prize is a wonderful thing because it really supports musicians in the ways that we really need to be supported,” says Angeline, who now lives in Cornwall. “It really helps us grow and helps us to make new music.”

Angeline’s new album, titled The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience, was produced by fellow folk musician Eliza Carthy (Eliza’s father, Martin Carthy, also sings on the album, as does Eliza) and was recorded in Cornwall at Cube Studios. Angeline notes that the record was completed before she won the prize.

“I’ve been very lucky this year,” she says. “I’ve never really got funding in all my life, but this year I was really lucky to get Arts Council funding for the research and recording phase of my album - so that was actually all completed by the time I was due to perform at Cambridge. So the Christian Raphael fund is kind of a foundation and support for me for the next 12 months, in my music-making.”

The money can be spent any way the winning artist chooses, as long as it relates to their career in some way. “One of the many amazing things about it is that it’s entirely up to the winner how they use the fund, as long as it has to do with music,” explains Angeline, who appeared on Later... with Jools Holland last Saturday (October 15), “because with a lot of other funding you have to detail exactly what you intend to use it for and provide receipts and these kinds of things.

“But with the Christian Raphael Prize it’s really up to the musician - as long as it’s spent on music, it’s completely their choice. So I’ve been doing a lot of travelling lately for my music, for things like interviews, appearances on radio, and gigs, and I now have a fund that I can use to get there! So everything is just infinitely easier and obtainable.”

Angeline has also used some of the money to make a video for Unknown African Boy (d.1830), the first single to be taken from the new album. “The video is by Marry Waterson - I really love Marry Waterson’s work and I’ve always wanted a video made by her,” she reveals, “and since I won the Christian Raphael Prize I’ve been able to make that happen.”

On The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience, Angeline says: “It’s what I call a work of ‘re-storying’... It really started from me wondering where the songs were in the canon of English folk songs that we have that reflected or represented black experience or ‘blackness’, because we do have a historic black presence in these islands that goes back at least 2,000 years, which thankfully is becoming more and more widely known now.

“But there didn’t seem to be any songs and I wanted to just re-story these black ancestors back into the folk songs that we have. So that’s really where it came from. I spent a year researching and finding out about real black people who lived in the UK and using a combination of history and my imagination, and writing in the style of UK folk music, so that the songs, which obviously are newly-composed songs - but I wanted them to sound as though they might be old songs... That’s what the album is about.”

Angeline didn’t find any traditional folk songs that looked like they might have come from a “black perspective” during her year of research, but says that her research is ongoing and states that she’ll always be interested in pursuing it. “There’s so much more to discover,” she insists.

[Read more: Classical pianist Alexis Ffrench to address Wolfson College, Cambridge, Interview: Award-winning Cambridge folk singer Nick Hart]

The Christian Raphael Prize was established and is funded by keen supporter of the Cambridge Folk Festival’s commitment to emerging young talent, Christian Raphael MBE. A man with severe and multiple learning disabilities who communicates non-verbally, Christian has been attending the Cambridge Folk Festival for many years.

This year’s prize was drawn from a list put forward by bookers at the event’s emerging talent stage, The Den, and the judging panel consisted of festival manager Rebecca Stewart, festival supporters Christian Raphael and his mother Vicki Raphael, development manager Amie Hoyland, and Richard Wootton, a roots music publicist.

The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience is out now. For more in Angeline Morrison, visit facebook.com/angelinemorrisonmusic/.