Media Release

This year’s National Film and Sound Archive National Folk Recording Award has been won by Fred Smith in collaboration with The Spooky Men’s Chorale for their CD Urban Sea Shanties.

The result was announced today at the National Folk Festival in Canberra.

Both Fred Smith and The Spooky Men’s Chorale are well-known on the Australian folk music stage, but this is their first recording together.

Fred is based in Canberra, while the Spooky Men, with more than twenty singers, hail from the Blue Mountains.

Urban Sea Shanties shanghaies the listener into a rich musical journey from the bars of Birmingham to the flooded streets of New Orleans, from the Mosques of Karachi to the Dapto Dog Track. Fred Smith’s distinctive lead vocals switch between narration and singing, creating different voices and characters from around the globe. With vocal arrangements by the Chorale’s Stephen Taberner, the Spooky Men inhabit various roles in the cast, painting a musical picture of adventurous travel exploring a wide, colourful world. The CD is beautifully recorded, capturing in rich sound the various vocal and instrumental contributions.

This is the ninth year the National Folk Recording Award has been presented. CEO of the NFSA, Darryl McIntyre, said today that the Award was created to reward excellence in Australian folk recording. Entrants were selected from recordings submitted by performers at the 2009 National Folk Festival. The Award was judged by a panel of representatives from the National Folk Festival, ABC Radio and the NFSA.

The Award carries a cash prize plus accession of Urban Sea Shanties into the NFSA’s recorded sound collection.