Sam Lee (photo by Fredric Arranda)
Across the US and the globe, the effects of climate change have become shatteringly clear this year. The historic town of Lahaina on Maui torched by wildfires, flooded homes in Vermont, Southern California visited by a hurricane. These images of climate catastrophes have become a regular occurrence and show a terrifying future to come if we can’t curb global emissions immediately.
For UK folk singer and activist Sam Lee, the story of climate change has a much smaller scope, but no less powerful implications. Lee is a devotee of the humble nightingale, a European songbird with a remarkable ability to not only create multifaceted melodies, but to share music with humans. For the last several years, he has led Singing with Nightingales trips, annual excursions to British woodlands that encourage musicians to interact with nightingales in “the amphitheater of the night,” as he calls it, and to duet with them live. There are no nightingales in the United States, but the bird should be familiar to any fan of folk music, since it figures in song traditions in the Western world and beyond, often playing the role of spiritual messenger. Lee traces many of these songs in his 2021 book, The Nightingale: Notes on a Songbird, and he also lays out an unheralded tragedy of climate change: the possible loss of the nightingale in the UK.
Through a relentless combination of climate change, human overdevelopment, invasive species, and declines in insect populations, the intrepid nightingale increasingly struggles to make its annual journeys between Africa and the UK. The result could be the silencing of a voice of the woods so powerful and influential that it has embedded itself into cultural touchstones over continents and centuries. By shining a light on the threat to our smallest compatriots, Lee is exposing the larger reach of climate and environmental change driven by humans.
A Musical Dialogue
Well known internationally through his singing in various films, especially the films of Guy Ritchie, Lee is a masterful interpreter of British traditional song and a student of the history of British folk music. Inspired by the British folklorists of old that used to roam the countryside looking for folk singers, for years Lee visited the homes and encampments of the nomadic British traveller community, learning their songs and absorbing their reverence for the natural world. Often disregarded by folk music scholars, the elder singers among the British travellers, often referred to as Gypsies, were still alive and singing, and Lee found that at times their music traditions bordered on the pagan. Lee points to ancient songs like “The Everlasting Circle” that lay out a vision of spirituality tied to the World Tree and an almost druidic sense of the cycle of life. In America we know that song via Pete Seeger (and Barney!) as “Green Grass Grows All Around.”
Lee’s reverence for nature is put into action each year with his Singing with Nightingales series in the hinterlands of England. From mid-April to late May, Lee camps out in the woods for days on end searching for the songs of the nightingales, and each night he brings a group of keen listeners along to interact with the birds directly. Lee invites fellow musicians, hoping that they will be able to strike up a musical dialogue with the nightingales. When this happens, it’s a magical exchange between a human and an animal, with each riffing off of the other’s melodies and diving into the collaboration. “It’s different every time,” he says during an interview at this year’s Folk Alliance International Conference, his enthusiasm transcending the sterile conference room. “It’s me holding a dinner party around a campfire for 45 wonderful people every night, five to six nights a week, and then after about 11 p.m. I take them down to where the nightingales live. We do a silent walk and we sit in the bush underneath the bird in a little ceremony, really. Everybody sits there, or lies back on the grass or the leaves, for whichever bird we find that night. The guest musician will play and usually has never done this and is having a transcendental experience, having never played music in that way. Everyone has their mind blown, tears are shed, and smiles are cast and, yeah, home is renewed.”
Zimbabwean-British artist Anna Mudeka has been twice to play with the nightingales, at Lee’s invitation. Her first experience was incredible, she says over the phone from the UK. “Mother Earth was there in all her glory,” she remembers. “Meeting Sam in that environment, he is so passionate. He believes so much in people living with nature.” Camping and cooking by the fire reminded Mudeka of her home village in Zimbabwe, and she was amazed to find out how much the little nightingale seemed to enjoy her mbira, which she describes as a healing instrument with flattened metal keys mounted on a wooden board and decorated with shells or bottle tops to create a sound known as the voices of the ancestors.
Anna Mudeka (photo by Gideon Graylyons)
Mudeka was also surprised at what a powerful singer the nightingale was — the birds’ songs are loud and piercing, able to reach up to a mile away. Returning for a second time, Mudeka felt even more in tune with the nightingale as they began improvising together. “We were working together,” she explains. “Our voices were in tune, we were doing call and response … It’s one of those experiences in a lifetime that you never forget.”
Scottish harpist Esther Swift also experienced this deep connection with the nightingale at her session. It was early in the season, and the nightingale was a bit tentative at first, but they both grew in confidence while playing together. “There was a moment after about 15 minutes when I realized we were locked in and dueting,” Swift says via email. “I had never played the harp quieter and yet it permeated the still air. I felt us all lost as one in its power and taken into the realm of ancient sounds.”
A Strategy for Hope
For centuries, the ancient sounds of nightingales have figured in the folk songs of European and global cultures. With the nighttimes of the pre-industrial world tuned in to the nightingale’s song, the bird has always loomed large in our imaginations.
More recently, one of the first pieces of viral media was a series of duets between nightingales and British cellist Beatrice Harrison, recorded in one of the earliest live radio broadcasts from the field in 1924. Harrison and her nightingales became a sensation, with duet recordings continuing up to World War II and still talked about today.
Lee traces this story, and the presence of the nightingale in the long history of folk songs, in his book. Most poignantly, he points to the coming end of the nightingale in the UK, as climate change reduces their habitats and food supplies. The birds are particular to a kind of wooded scrub land that can shelter them but is at risk from development, and the decreased habitat and increased effects of climate change mean they don’t have enough food to make their annual journey to North Africa and back.
“I am of the firm belief that to change society’s behaviours, we need to change people’s minds,” Lee writes in The Nightingale, “and to do that we have to go through their hearts. Art — be it music, theatre, fine art, or any other vibrant way that we express our relationships to the world — is that most powerful agent in this campaign for ecological survival.”
Laura Moody plays her cello in a thicket during a Singing with Nightingales excursion in 2017.
When we speak at Folk Alliance, though, a couple of years after he’d finished the book, he is far less hopeful. “I’ve always gone on the belief that hope is about having a strategy,” he says. “And my hope is not that it will be all right and that we’ll turn this troubled world around. That ain’t gonna happen. Very soon, we’re going to start seeing disproportionate amounts of environmental disruption. So what do I do? I go into a gesture of love and of devotion and doing all the listening and all the appreciation I can, because I know that I might be the last person to hear this bird. My preparation is about knowing that when the dark times come, I did everything I could. That might not be enough, but …” Here he falters, before continuing with a sobering statement: “ … humans have faced apocalypses, genocides … my family, other families have, in relatively recent memory.”
Thinking of the nightingale’s place in our collective imagination as a spiritual messenger, it’s perhaps no surprise that Lee’s book, and life, are full of seemingly fated moments. In The Nightingale he relates the tragic story of a friend who traveled with him the very first time he heard a nightingale’s song in person. A young mother, she and her daughter were killed a year later in a car accident. After that, for Lee, as he tells it, “the nightingale occupied this space of exquisite beauty and impermanence and grief. That began the journey, just going to listen to the birds.”
It’s hard not to see a parallel between the humble nightingale, scraping along in the undergrowth and creating beauty in a place few people look to, and Lee himself, who’s done much the same in his own field work across the UK.
“Nightingales like this impenetrable scrub — hawthorn, blackthorn — that is marginal land,” he explains. “The sort of places that no one pays attention to … at the fringes.”
In the conclusion to his book, Lee speaks to the importance of collective action, but crucially to individual action. Find your own nightingales, he says; find the small thing you can defend in your own homeland and make a stand for it. Tell the stories of those who can’t speak, and the personal reward will be great.
“How long do you plan to keep doing this?” I asked him at Folk Alliance, referring to his Singing with Nightingales excursions. “Until I die,” Lee replies quietly. “Or until the nightingales go extinct, whichever comes first. I hope I die first. I don’t know.”
