Music Review: Back to the Garden – Natalie Douglas

Picture: Jeremy Ryan

Back to the Garden – Natalie Douglas (Club44 Records).

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

The larger-than-life New York chanteuse Natalie Douglas and her infectious giggle have been welcome annual visitors to The Pheasantry, the renowned Chelsea cabaret nightspot, for many years but is still far better known in her home country – she’s a regular at that Manhattan landmark Birdland, her musical home – than here.

This new album, her first for Club44 Records, can only enhance her reputation as one of the great modern storytellers in song as it underscores a vocal range that can switch from powerhouse to soulful clarity in a heartbeat and demonstrates her versatility in handling in her own special way all manner of material.

From folk classics like ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ and reimaginings of pop standards such as ‘True Colors’, a big-band arrangement of Cole Porter’s ‘Begin the Beguine’ and a rock-influenced version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ through to an Oscar-winning song ‘You’ll Never Know’ from the 1943 movie Hello, Frisco, Hello and a jazz-age take on ‘Who?’, written by the prolific Kern/Hammerstein/Harbach team for the 1925 Broadway musical Sunny, this lady holds you under her spell.

Of most interest to British musical theatre buffs will be ‘He Lives in a World of His Own’, a little-known Lionel Bart love song written in 1966 for Shirley Bassey’s audition for the movie version of Oliver! She didn’t get Nancy, the role going to Shani Wallis, and the song didn’t make it either, ending up on a rare acetate tape and largely forgotten until unearthed by Douglas when researching her Bassey tribute show. Sung so touchingly and with such yearning, it’s surprising nothing has been done with it for so long.

No surprise though to find a raw Nina Simone chain-gang number ‘Work Song’ in there as Simone was her “inspiration in all things” or to find a track from The Jungle Book – ‘Trust in Me’, known as The Python’s Song and composed by Walt Disney staffers Robert and Richard Sherman – as she’d been a Disney fan from an early age, as we all were.

Douglas wouldn’t have needed much persuading to include a gentle new ballad by her new Club44 colleagues Wayne Haun and Joel Lindsey called ‘Love is the Power That Heals’ but the one that resonates most with me is ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ because its author, folkie and political activist Ewan MacColl, and his paramour (later third wife), Pete Seeger’s half-sister Peggy, sang it at my folk club in Buckinghamshire in the early 1960s before the big stars picked it up and covered it.

It was written for Peggy after MacColl had been challenged to write a love song, most of his previous work being about industrial unrest and coal miners. The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Gordon Lightfoot, Johnny Cash and Elvis himself all recorded it before the extraordinarily beautiful Roberta Flack version turned into a mega-hit worldwide in 1971-72. MacColl, grumpy at the best of times, is reported to have hated them all.

The Douglas version is gently beautiful too and a standout on a rich collection that’s hard to resist. But this lady with the big personality and chatter that stops only when she bursts into glorious song is best seen. She returns to The Pheasantry from 9-11 May. Not to be missed.

Jeremy Chapman