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Under the name The Waterson Family, they made their recording debut for Topic, one of four upcoming acts on the showcase compilation Folk-Sound of Britain (1965). Dispensing with guitars and banjos, they hollered unadorned close harmonies into a stark, chapel-like hush. The consensus was that they ‘sounded traditional’, but in a way no other folk singers did at the time. It was the result of pure intuition: there was no calculation in their art. When Bert Lloyd once commented joyfully on their mixolydian harmonies, they had to resort to a dictionary. Later in 1965 the quartet gathered around the microphone set up in the Camden Town flat of Topic producer Bill Leader and exhaled the extraordinary sequence of songs known as Frost and Fire. In his capacity as an artistic director of Topic, Lloyd curated the album’s contents. Focusing on the theme of death, ritual sacrifice and resurrection, he subtitled it A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs. The fourteen tracks are divided by calendrical seasons, and the four Watersons begin and end the album as midwinter wassailers, a custom popularised in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as groups of singers – ‘waits’ – made the rounds of the towns and villages, proffering a decorated bowl of spiced ale or wine and asking – in the form of a song, or ‘wassail’ – for a charitable donation. Midwinter comes shortly before the time of the first ploughing in preparation for the sowing of that year’s new crop, and the waits’ money, or food and drink, can be considered a form of benign sacrifice against the success of the next growth and harvest. The wassail-bowl’s rounds were often associated with the singing of Christmas carols.
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