Crosshanded Anita Best Price CD: CDN$23.95 Qty:

TRACKS

Lord Bateman

Tobacco

Blanche comme la neige

The Soup Supper in Clattice Harbour

Driharin O mo Croi

The Water Witch

Le jeune millitaire

Hush-o-bye Baby

Me Old Ragadoo

The Liverpool Pilot

The Spanish Captain

Gull Cove

"The twelve "unaccompanied" songs Anita Best sings on this album have kept company with generations of Newfoundland singers to whom they belong. They are accompanied thanks to producer Pamela Morgan, by a profound and welcome silence..

CROSSHANDED, is the first Amber Music CD of oldtime Newfoundland songs sung a cappella by a Newfoundland singer. It is our tribute to the many singers who have helped to sustain our singing traditions over the generations.

Here is a clip from a review of "CROSSHANDED" by folklorist Eileen Condon:

"The twelve "unaccompanied" songs Anita Best sings on this album have kept company with generations of Newfoundland singers to whom they belong. They are accompanied thanks to producer Pamela Morgan, by a profound and welcome silence. In the quiet surrounding each of these songs there is time and space to hear all the movements a singer can make in the freedom that comes with singing alone. Anita sings here in competition with nothing other than the tiniest of ambient sounds: the tapping of feet, the cry of a distant bird, or the rhythmic creaking of an old rocking chair. She is free to lift her voice up as if to defy the sea (The Water Witch, The Spanish Captain), to rant at the hard life on an ice-bound island without a chaw (The Tobacco Song), or to lull a child to sleep while she tells a story a child shouldn't hear (Hush-Oh-Bye Baby). On one track, she is joined by her singing partner Pamela Morgan (The Colour of Amber, Amber Music, 1991) and the complementary textures of these two voices are heard together, and apart, in complete clarity.

The songs Anita has chosen for this album create a historic portrait of singing in Newfoundland. Nearly half are the compositions of Newfoundland songmakers; others are several centuries older, having come with their singers from Ireland, England, or France to settle in Newfoundland. All are versions which Anita learned from other unaccompanied Newfoundland singers, rather than from commercial artists, commercial recordings, or singers from away.

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Received your CD the other day and was awestruck by the beauty, the tranquility, the moods, the humour and the splendor of what you have done. You can be assured of airplay from time to time from me. And great liner notes - to me liner notes are just as important as the music and I always feel cheated when I receive a CD with hardly any explanations or credits. No excuse for that as far as I'm concerned. What you have done is honoured those who came before so that we may all enjoy them.

Steve Fruitman • The Great North Wind - CIUT-FM 89.5