I Am Your Singer and the Dolmetsch Family
One of the most charming tracks on Wings’ first album (December 1971) is I Am Your Singer. The track is distinctive because Linda McCartney is the lead vocalist for many of the verses. As I recount in Paul McCartney After The Beatles: A Musical Appreciation Volume Two, not all critics were enamoured of Linda’s skills in this department.
Nevertheless, there is much to admire on this lesser-known tracks. In particular, the song features a full consort of recorders played by the Dolmetsch family.
So who were the Dolmetsch family? Their story can be traced back to Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940), who was French-born but of Swiss origin and a scholar of early instruments. In 1883, he moved with his family to London, to the newly-opened Royal College of Music.
From the 1880s, he began to collect and later make viols, lutes and a range of early keyboard instruments. In 1925, Arnold Dolmetsch passed the direction of recorder production over to his younger son, Carl. In the 1930s Carl played a central role in the development and revival of the recorder, making high-pitched sopranino recorders and making recorders at modern pitch of A=440 hz.
The factory remained open until March 2010. Until then the Dolmetsch company had continued to make hand-made early musical instruments such as viols, lutes, harps, rebecs, harpsichords, spinets, clavichords, recorders, pipes and tabors. The video below includes many demonstrations by Carl Dolmetsch.
So when McCartney employed the Dolmetsch family to play on Wild Life, he was drawing on the skills of the most celebrated family of recorder players in Europe, whose musical heritage stretched back over a century.
The use of a consort of recorders on I Am Your Singer is an inspired choice of instrumentation. The melodic fills of the descant recorder adds a pastoral aura to a song that, despite its harmonic sophistication, carries a naïve charm.
Moreover, the full consort of recorders offers sumptuous harmony at key points in the song, especially at the end of each chorus.
Read more about this track and others here (click below) :
