Searching For Tia Blake.

It is another dark, windy and rainy day here. I won’t be going out today. I am listening to a CD called Folksongs & Ballads by Tia Blake & Her Folk-Group. I discovered Tia Blake quite by accident about three years ago. I was looking on youtube for a song by Fairport Convention called Rising For The Moon but got the title wrong and found Rising Of The Moon by Tia Blake. I knew this song previously as a rousing rebel song by The Clancy Brothers. It is all about the Irish rebellion of 1798, but Tia had changed it to a slow wistful, lilting and mysterious ballad. (I have shared it below) I was very impressed and listened to a couple more of her songs. I determined to buy an album by her to add to my collection of long-lost singers, but when I looked on eBay all that was available were vinyl copies of her only LP which were very expensive and no good to me anyway because I don’t have a turntable to play vinyl. Time went by, and recently I heard that the album had been re-released on CD and copies were available from a company in Germany called Grooves Inc (Or something like that) My search for Tia Blake was over and my CD arrived here a few weeks ago.

I’ll just tell you a little bit about Tia Blake. That is not her real name, she was born Christiana Elizabeth Wallman in 1952 and grew up in North Carolina. I think her mother was originally from Canada. After she left school, she worked for a publisher for a few months but got bored with that and headed for Paris aged eighteen. Friends had given her the address of a record store in the Latin Quarter called Disco ‘The’. When she met the owner Benito Merlino they fell in love, and she stayed. The shop was a popular hang out for the artistic, creative, bohemian types of Paris, and musicians would practice there. They encouraged Tia to sing and finally at the end of 1971 they recorded eleven songs in two sessions. 

The album was released in France in February 1972 on a label with the ponderous title Société Française de Productions Phonographiques. Tia and her group only ever played one concert, at Theatre Du Vieux-Colombier in early 72. Shortly after that Tia left France and returned home. I have read that she made some demo recordings in Canada a few years later that emerged on vinyl for Record Store Day in recent years, but the French album was the only work released in her lifetime. I have enjoyed listening to the CD very much indeed. None of the songs were written by Tia, they are mainly traditional songs that are in the public domain, songs that she had sung all her life. The opening track is Betty & Dupree. The guitar picking by Bernard Vandam, Francois Brigot, and Michel Sada is first rate and reminds me of Bert Jansch and Pentangle. Black Is The Colour is a Scottish song that I am very familiar with through Christy Moore. I wish I Was A Single Girl Again is a sad song of regret, and you can sense a feeling of underlying sadness and mystery in Tia’s voice on many of these songs. 

Jimmy Whalen has some nice flute accompaniment by Sydney Aufrere which gives the song a kind of South American feel. I like all eleven of the songs although Rising Of The Moon remains my favourite. It seems to me a bit of a tragedy that the album was only released in France in 1972. I think if it had been recorded in New York about ten years earlier when the Folk boom was at its height, and Tia had been singing in the clubs of Greenwich Village she might have made quite an impact. Maybe she wasn’t all that ambitious because I discovered that there was more to Tia than music… She was also a writer

Tia returned to education and graduated from Smith College in 1989. Then she became a freelance writer. I discovered that she had two stories published under her real name of Tia Wallman in the prestigious British literary magazine Granta which I know well. It isn’t really a magazine, more like a paperback book published quarterly. I wanted to read her stories. I found one of them online here- https://granta.com/forbidden-games/.  I found it fascinating. Her parents were divorced, and the story tells of her father buying 10,000 acres of savannah grassland in Brazil, and Tia’s life there. It shows she had a very eventful life even apart from heading to Paris. There is a vivid description of a grass fire breaking out and their efforts to beat it out while being infested with little creatures and insects that are hopping and jumping ahead of the flames. There are trips to Guyana in which even Fidel Castro makes an appearance. Her father seems to be a mysterious figure who might have been working for the CIA. Tia wonders why he is known as Havana Jack. I had to buy Granta 94 on eBay to read the other story called We Went To Saigon which is even more amazing. Tia’s stories read like a Grahame Greene novel. Her father who was now in Vietnam wanted to see his daughters, so at the height of the Vietnam war he flew Tia and her sister to Saigon. What sort of parent would give their kids a holiday in a warzone? There is no doubt that Tia was a talented writer as well as a great singer.

Sadly, Tia Wallman /Tia Blake passed away in 2015 from breast cancer. She was laid to rest in Quebec alongside two of her brothers. I am glad to have discovered her music and writing. She never achieved fame and fortune, but maybe she wasn’t all that bothered about that, and for her, being creative was its own reward. I think the one record she made will be enjoyed by a small number of people for a long time, so she will never be forgotten.