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.
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.