Val Murphy "A Time to sing" 1966, rem. 2015

But even at the height of her folk stardom, she was leading something of a double musical life. On Saturday nights she would put on earrings and a dress she had made herself and sing popular tunes with the house band at the Zodiac, one of only three licensed restaurants in Wellington at the time. Her closing number, a guaranteed showstopper, was always ‘Hava Nagila’. “It paid my rent for the week and I got a free meal”, she says. “After that I would go to The Balladeer, run by strictly folky Frank Fyfe and his wife. It must have been bizarre for him, but he loved that I did it.”..
...In 1965 Val appeared alongside several of her fellow Monde Marie habitués on Folk Concert Down Under, recorded live in front of an invited audience in the HMV studio. A second solo album, A Time To Sing, followed in 1966, drawing on a similar range of material to the first, her voice and nylon-string guitar occasionally bolstered by Ron Davis’s 12-string guitar, Max Winnie’s banjo and harmonica from Warwick Brock of the Christchurch-based Band of Hope Jug Band.
By the late 60s the folk boom had peaked. Some folkies were now going electric while others were turning their attention to the raw musical and emotional language of the blues, Val included. As she told John Davidson in an interview for the Auckland magazine Blues News, she gravitated towards blues because, of all the different styles of folk music, it seemed to best express her personal feelings. “The rest of it is so pseudo, the sweet stuff, the nice stuff,” she said. “I don’t feel sweet and nice, I feel mean and bitchy. And this is why I like singing blues.”
She had already recorded a heartfelt version of bluesman Bukka White’s ‘Fixin’ to Die’ on her second album. In 1968 she guested with the Band of Hope Jug Band on their self-titled album for the Kiwi record label, delivering a decidedly bluesy reading of Tracy Nelson’s ‘Walking To Chicago’ (backed by future economist Tim Hazeldine on piano). Still signed to HMV, though not having recorded as a solo artist since 1966, the label released a Val Murphy single in a blues vein: an arrangement of Skip James’s ‘Special Rider Blues’ backed by ‘My Man’, derived from the Billie Holiday song of the same name and learned from a version by Louise Spann on an album by her husband, Otis Spann.
Rather than emulate the originals, she would adapt blues songs to her own style, usually accompanying herself on her trusty nylon-string guitar. “I can’t pretend to be a black woman from the American South”, she says. “But I can take a song and wrap it up for myself, my version of it.”
A favourite of hers to this day is a Bessie Smith song, ‘My Sweetie Went Away’. “When I first heard it, I just about died laughing. When she sings ‘I’m like a little lost sheep’ she sounds like anything but a little lost sheep. She sounds like an axe murderer! But I adore the lyrics and the melody. And the humour.”
Sometimes Val sang backing vocals on recordings by other HMV artists, and it was in this role that she met musician Clive Cockburn from the group The Avengers, with whom she shared a producer in Nick Karavias. As Clive recalls in his memoir You Can Do It!, “We were [vocally] in perfect balance and to achieve that I was extremely close to the mic and she was a long way away which meant that she could sing and I couldn’t. We became great musical buddies and then we became a couple.”
When the two married, their wedding made the front page of the Sunday Times. “Val’s wedding dress was of cream-coloured crepe, Clive wore a trendy black velvet jacket, grey flared trousers and a dress shirt of the same material as Val’s dress,” the paper reported. - Nick Bollinger & audioculture

trax:
01 Johnny Be Fair 02 Fear A Bhata 3 Field Of Flowers 04 Liverpool Lullaby 05 Many A Mile 06 Greenland Whales 07 Special Delivery Blues 08 Wagon Of Fools 09 Pinywood Hills 10 Come Away Melinda 11 Tall And Dark 12 Fixin' To Die 13 Sing To Me Of Children 14 The Bells 15 Special Rider Blues (Bonus) 16 My Man (Bonus)
…served by Gaius…