Some of the oldest written music was melismatic. Melisma — that’s an oozy, radiant musicological word for the technique of singing multiple notes to articulate a single syllable. Think of Joni Mitchell’s sudden soaring on Blue’s penultimate track: I could drink a case of youuu-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oO-OO-Oo, darling — shooting the one-syllable you to the sky with eight extra tones. Think of the vocal acrobatics of a circa-2007 American Idol contestant, or of Bach’s Mass in G Major: Gloria. One word. Three syllables. 21 notes. That’s melisma.

Early Christian mystics felt melisma to be the ultimate externalization of spiritual feeling, an irrepressible gushing of holiness. Medieval monks called it “jubilated singing.” Sometimes jubilated singing meant one word was sung with 300 notes. St. Augustine called it “the expression of a mind poured forth in joy.” 

Augustine’s view proved tenacious. Over time, the tie between joy and jubilating grew so tight that the two terms effectively fused, giving birth to our modern, rejoiceful connotations for the word “jubilation.”

But joy is only one emotion to which melisma can give shape, just as the early Christian church is only one of many sources from which melisma springs. The technique is everywhere. It’s all over the country blues — hardly one word of Mary Price’s rendition of “Dark Was the Night” does not slide and wobbles with melismatic mourning. It’s what gives so much Hindustani classical music its sinuous, wavering beauty. It’s what you hear in the swooping ecstasies of certain Jewish prayers, or the plaintive curling of Appalachian folksong. 

When unrelated organisms independently develop similar traits, biologists speak of “convergent evolution.” Bats and birds don’t share a common ancestor, not for millions of years, yet both have wings. Chimpanzees and squids don’t share a recent common ancestor, yet both have eyes. What is observed in nature can be observed in culture. Irish sean-nós singing and the Islamic adhan lack shared roots, but both have melisma. There is something mystical about this fortuity. Wildly different paths lead to the same destination, and you can’t help but think: This is what the universe wants, this is what it’s working towards. Flight, sight, overflowing song. Everything that rises must converge.

One of the points on which things converge is an English folk-rock musician named Richard Thompson. If history once kept Gaelic, Arabic, ecclesiastical, and blues idioms relatively discrete, they touch in Thompson’s music.

You’ve heard his guitar drawing inky curlicues around Sandy Denny’s trembling voice in “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” You’ve heard his folksy acoustic rattling on the soundtrack of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, and his tight electric stomping beneath the voice of Linda Thompson on “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight.” You’ve heard Thompson himself sing with abandon on “When I Get to the Border,” a song whose theme is timeless: picking up, taking off, leaving a past world behind — the shit job, the parasitic boss, unfeeling fellow men, death itself — and you’ve felt how perfectly he transmits a desperate desire for freedom in the song’s final word, “border,” which serves as a vessel for a tight melismatic swell: 

The dusty road will smell so sweet

Paved with gold beneath my feet

And I’ll be dancing down the street

When I get to the bo-O-or-der

Or maybe you haven’t heard any of that. Thompson’s songs are not deeply esoteric cultural objects, but they’re also not “Mrs. Robinson” or “Harvest Moon.” “He has not yet achieved household-name status,” Talking Heads’ David Byrne once said of Thompson. That was in 1995. “If I’d been up there on the charts with Neil Young and people, I wouldn’t be playing here, obviously,” Thompson once said. That was yesterday. 

The audience laughed. It was a concert at the tail end of a small East Coast tour, and Thompson was up there onstage in his black beret, his saggy-tight black jeans, his black peacoat. He looked like someone’s estranged uncle. (He had a grey goatee.) He looked like a man who might work at Guitar Center, convincing teens to buy 50-year warranties on Fender Strat Squiers and regaling coworkers with tales of boinking buxom broads in the back of the gear van during his Def Leppard roadie days. 

Thompson continued his inter-song banter. Had he achieved Neil Young-level fame, he said, “I’d be in a massive stadium somewhere” — not playing to an audience of eight hundred in a municipal convention hall. The audience laughed again. He was just kidding. Right?

“I’d actually rather be here, thank you very much,” he said at last. Everyone whooped and clapped. And then a hush, as Thompson launched into “Withered and Died” from his most famous album, 1974’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, written and recorded with his ex-wife Linda. A weary, morbid number about regret and romantic disillusion.

It was precisely the kind of thing the crowd wanted to hear. All night long they’d been crying out requests. “Pharaoh!” “Persuasion!” “Just the Motion!” Without fail, each song requested was at least thirty years old; none belonged to the dozen or so studio albums Thompson had made since 1991’s Rumor and Sigh. “Ugh, nostalgists,” Thompson remarked in his deep English lilt, a tinge of genuine irritation beneath his good humor. This backward-looking tendency might have had something to do with the demographics of the audience, which included many men at that age where you grunt and sigh in public restrooms with a pained relief that must seem hyperbolic only to the young. What heads had hair tended towards the monkish — bare circles of scalp fringed by white. The old wanted oldies. 

The situation was not unfamiliar to Thompson. “We were playing to an ageing audience,” he once wrote in a memoir — of his early career in the 1970s. After the flash of the ’60s folk revival, folk-rock just wasn’t what the kids cared about anymore. “We felt ancient, being all of twenty-five,” Thompson had written. Thompson is now 76, and his core fans seem to have gotten no younger, nor his person more famous. But as he sang that bleak and tender ballad from fifty years past, a song originally performed by a woman he once but no longer loved, it was also clear that his music had lost none of its power. Power, in this case, to convey darkest sorrow: 

This cruel country has driven me down

Teased me and lied, teased me and lied

I’ve only sad stories to tell to this town,

My dreams have withered and died.

It was April 11, 2025, and it was New Jersey. On the Turnpike, all the cars looked like wet fat beetles with dead glinting eyes, and their wheels churned the roadrain to smoke. Garbage incinerators and oil refineries hulked by the highway, alongside billboards that seemed to say: This land was untouched by the hand of God. What they actually said was: I GOT HURT IN JERSEY.COM, luring the injured to the law. The sky was so clotted and gray you couldn’t tell where the clouds began and where the factory fumes ended. 

Back when I lived in the central part of the state, I would step outside some mornings and catch a special stinky something in the air. Microwaved eggs, or irradiated grease trap. “It smells like New Jersey,” I’d mumble to myself, or to my girlfriend at the time, for whom I’d come to New Jersey. I complained about New Jersey so much my girlfriend moved to Switzerland.

Anyway, there I was, barreling down I-95, eyes awonder at what man and nature had wrought. I kept dodging bloated trashbags and busted shipping pallets, for to not get hurt in New Jersey. I kept thinking the rain would relent, or the coal sky would crack open to blue. It was not to be, even when I swung east just before Trenton, leaving the Turnpike to wheel Jersey Shore-ward, to the seaside city of Cape May. The traffic thinned; the smokestacks fell away; the pine trees stood up; but an air of subdued despair yet soaked the land. 

This land is where Thompson now lives. This fact elicits our curiosity. What, one wonders, could possibly induce a folk-rock master from England to move to this part of the world?

It happens like this.

Richard Thompson is born in London in 1949. He is a shy child; he has a stutter. His father is a policeman who works 16-hour days — a “distant, authoritarian figure” in the words of his older sister — from whom Thompson nonetheless hears his first great guitar music: Django Reinhardt, Les Paul. His mother is a gentle, kind woman who buys Thompson his first guitar, a £3 acoustic from Spain. He takes to the instrument immediately. He does not stutter on the guitar. His sister shows him rock and country blues: Buddy Holly, Lightning Hopkins. Early folk influences are few — Phil Ochs, Lead Belly — but he unconsciously grasps the spirit of the genre by way of a classic British boyhood hobby, trainspotting: “I used to love steam trains because they were working antiques,” he’ll reflect in his middle age, “some of them were so incredibly old… and still chugging around.” Working antiques, aged, but somehow undiminished in beauty or utility, like a folksong. 

In 1967 he cofounds the Fairport Convention, the group taking its name from a three-story Edwardian house where two of the members live. They wear buckskin jackets and flare jeans and let their hair resemble buffalo shag. Their first show is in a church, their first album mostly covers of contemporary North American artists — Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen. Singer Sandy Denny joins thereafter, transforming the band, and Thompson, forever. She brings a greater love and knowledge of British folk, and it’s on her account that their second LP includes two old, haunting songs — “Nottamun Town” and “She Moves Through the Fair” — credited in the liner notes not to specific authors but to tradition, as “Trad. Arr. Fairport.” 

The band digs deeper into the past. On the inner sleeve of their third album are pictures of two nineteenth-century folklorists: Francis James Child and Cecil Sharp. More than anyone before or since, these two scholars created our image of the folk tradition of the British Isles through their fieldwork, their collecting of songs across England, Scotland, Ireland, and Appalachia. To a great degree, this image — of an unbroken oral tradition spanning the centuries — is a fantasy; in many cases, “traditional songs” thought to be from time immemorial have proven to be nineteenth-century compositions written by urban songwriting professionals, not rural amateurs. But if folk is not the distinct entity we imagine it to be, it remains an orientation of value. It is an attitude of receptivity toward the past, a desire not to arrogantly consign the past to obsolescence nor encase it in amber but to integrate it into the present with respect and curiosity. The Fairport Convention understand this attitude. They’re not purists after all, but hybridizers and updaters, rendering 17th-century murder ballads with electric guitars and multitrack recording.

Such is the attitude Thompson carries with him when he leaves the band in 1971 — to make six albums with Linda and a score of solo studio records. The ethos remains throughout the religious conversion (to Sufism), the explosive divorce with Linda (thrown bottles, stolen cars), the move from London to Los Angeles (“for the culture”), and the move from Los Angeles to… New Jersey…

Rain was pissing mightily over the eaves of the motel in Cape May, and the ocean beyond curled grayly. The seawind disemboweled my umbrella as I ran from the car to the lobby. 

The motel receptionist looked up from the front desk. “Are you here for a concert?” she asked. 

I squished the umbrella’s damp bones into a sad bundle. 

Yes, I said. I am.

“So is half this place!” She had a large bandage covering the right side of her nose. In the parking lot beyond the window, elderly guests in hoodies and bluejeans shuffled around in the wet.

“I’m excited,” I said weakly, turning back to accept my roomkey. 

I had been excited. I’d been listening to Thompson’s music for years and thought of him as an underappreciated musical treasure. But the journey through a land I associated with grief and botched romance had somewhat drained my enthusiasm. 

The motel room’s walls were brown. The motel room’s floor was brown. It was not the sort of place one would expect to get stuck in, but I was late to the concert. In part because I’d never been to a concert that starts on time. In part because I rejected the weather’s premise, that life was unlovely and grim. I could hold this position only so long as I stayed in my antiseptic chamber and avoided looking outside at the wet asphalt and drippy smears of sky. 

By the time I arrived, the concert hall was dark and the whole audience seated. I stepped in. Music was swimming overhead, clear and silver and strong. It took me a beat to register that I was hearing a recording of Richard Thompson himself. They were hyping the crowd up with his songs before the set started? It took me another beat to realize it wasn’t a recording at all. Thompson was already standing onstage, strumming and singing,

The boys all say you look so fine,

They don’t come back for a second time,

Oh, you can’t hide from the turning of the tii-i-i-ide

He barely moved, just his hands and mouth. He didn’t tap his feet or sway; his eyes were closed. Each note of his guitar chimed distinctly — a pulsing rhythm picked from the bass strings, bursts of light plucked from the treble strings — and his voice was ardent and steady. The tide rose and fell with melisma. I stumbled to my seat. 

Accounts of Thompson concerts invariably mention the freaky disjunction between what you see and what you hear: one guitarist sounding like three. You have the sense that he’s miming, that the music comes from some hidden origin, players hidden in the pit or backstage. That’s how good he is.

I felt this freakiness now. But less remarkable than such virtuosity, which in itself is as interesting and dull as all virtuosity, is how Thompson harnesses it, restrains it, makes it twine around and uphold his songs’ centers, which are never the strings themselves but the melody, the voice. It now boomed:

I’m walking on a wire

I’m walking on a wire

And I’m fa-a-a-lling

There are voices that hit you immediately — you hear them once, and feel a lift, an arborescent glow threading your body — and then there are voices you bump against. There’s some barrier to their reaching you, and they may never reach you. Thompson’s voice falls into the latter category. He’s got an almost abrasively powerful baritone, a gale blasting through an oak barrel. It’s pure but unwelcoming, and the melodies it delivers are of an unglamorous anachronism — tunes of the British Isles inflected by cajun, classical Arabic, and blues idioms. It sounds so earnest that one initially doubts its earnestness. To reach this voice, to be reached by it, you need to suspend disbelief, and to have faith that its theatrics can lead you to emotional depths. If you can do this, you access not only the glory of Thompson’s music but that of much folk music in general.

As much as the genre is associated with the organic and guileless, folk music is one of the most profoundly affected, theatrical forms. Start with the fact that when a folksinger says “I”, she is rarely just saying “I” but doing something between playing a role and genuinely speaking for herself. Bob Dylan once put this well: “It could be I, or it could be the ‘I’ who created me. And also, it could be another person who’s saying ‘I.’” The I is often a character of which the song speaks, and whose emotions the singer channels by finding analogous ones within herself. If this resembles acting à la Stanislavski, it’s also distinct from it: The folk singer rarely seeks to be the character, unlike an actor on screen or stage. Rather, she is a flickering hybrid of her own I and the song’s I. She exploits the strange nature of the first-person pronoun, which allows us both to quote and to mean at the same time.

What the hell do I really mean by this? I mean that in the I of a folksong one can simultaneously detect two different layers, two different kinds of voices: There is both what the linguists call an “author” and a “principal.” The “author” is the person who first wrote the song, who first meant it. The principal is the song’s current performer, the person animating the song, committing to its contents in the present moment. More often than not, there is more than one author behind a single principal, for folksongs are built from other folksongs, built of brazen borrowings and modulations. Even when a folksinger performs her own original song, you can still hear other authors lingering hazily in the background — the principal’s ancestors. There is thus a weird blend of citation and originality, acting and authentic expression, to the I of folk performance.

Thompson is onstage right now, giving us an example with the song “Beeswing”: 

I was nineteen when I came to town

They called in the Summer of Love

They were burning babies, burning flags

The Hawks against the Doves

I took a job in the steamie

Down on Caldrum Street

I fell in love with a laundry girl

Was working next to me

Nineteen — that’s about how old Thompson was when he left his parents’ home for northwest London in the late ’60s. The year of the Summer of Love — 1967 — was also the year he cofounded the Fairport Convention. So far so autobiographical. The I is Thompson; he’s both the “author” and the “principal,” at once the originator and animator of his words.

But the first lines of those stanzas — I was nineteen when I came to town / … / I took a job in the steamie — are also doing something else. They’re paying homage to an old reservoir of tunes that begin in kind, with the narrator looking back on his initiation into adulthood through working and loving and the self-transformations thereof: from “Katie Cruel” (When first I came to the town …) to “Off to Epsom Races” (When I was young and in my prime / About twenty-four years old …) to “The Foggy Dew” (When I was a bachelor early and young / I followed the weaving trade / And all the harm I ever done / Was courting a servant maid). So the I is not Thompson alone; it’s the many past authors and narrators previously designated by I in old songs; it’s a ventriloquization of all those past souls. 

That’s where a modern folksong like “Beeswing” gets so much of its power. We are stirred by the dead old voices moving within the living singer’s. We are also stirred by the very fact that it’s possible for this singer to channel these voices so well, that such sympathy across time and person is possible. We marvel as the singer’s private pangs and joys fuse with shared ones, become more meaningful in their commonality. And so do ours. 

Thompson continued to sing:

She was a rare thing

Fine as a beeswing

So fine a breath of wind might blow her away

An hour into the show, Thompson’s voice was joined by another’s. She had brown hair and was wearing a dress the purple of coneflowers, the hem to her ankles, the sleeves to her wrists. “The next few songs are improved with a bit of harmony,” Thompson said, “so please welcome to the stage Zara Phillips.” 

The woman took her place beside him, and the two started up “Hokey Pokey,” a bawdy, bouncing track from Thompson’s 1975 album of the same name.

Phillips, I would learn, was Thompson’s wife, and the magnet that had drawn him to New Jersey just a few years prior. Pulled to this region by love… I could appreciate that. To make such a leap in your 70s, to yet be driven by romance — still chugging around — that was a beautiful thing.

For the rest of the concert Thompson sang with Phillips, and time moved in the weird wax-wane way it does when your attention is compelled, the seconds savored and thick, the minutes swiftly dissolving. Thompson had given the crowd what they wanted for most of the night, the beloved songs from the ’70s and ’80s, but now closed with a new, unfamiliar tune called “Tinker’s Rhapsody.” It was an original composition, yet sounded like its roots dove through centuries of cultural soil. A waltzing rhythm, the bassline bobbing repetitively between the roots of G and D, while the upper strings made sterling spirals, and the voices called:

Oh, the winter time it is tough now

And the living is rough now

The firewoo-ood is rotten

And I shiver all day

Oh, nothing in life can beat

A June morning so sweet

All hardships are forgotten

On a fine summer’s day

It’s not easy to say why none of this felt trite or precious or weak — the old-fashioned possessive in a fine summer’s day, the artless rhymes of beat/sweet and rough/tough, the prosaic theme of rejoicing in summer’s return. I suppose this is the alchemy of a successful folksong, whether written in 1200 AD or today: to raise the common beyond the realm of the cliché; to reveal the persistent power of the archaic in the contemporary; and to make us realize that we, too, will age into obsolescence, unless those who succeed us carry on our words and experiences in memory and song.