Self Portrait

Ruth Copeland left Consett for Detroit in the early sixties, and one way or another found herself involved with the P-Funk collective; she had writing and a production credit on Osmium.

Self Portrait was her first solo album, Like Osmium it displays a range of styles, possibly too many for its own good. Having said that, she wrote, or was involved in writing all the the tracks here except one, has a fine voice, a way with a personal lyric, and the backing here is provided by P-Funk members on most tracks. Her song The Silent Boatman, that’s on Osmium, is here too, though in a different arrangement.

The opener, Prologue: Child of the North, a spoken word meditation on County Durham from the perspective of a woman in Detroit, is a tantalising start (although her accent is like no one from Consett I’ve ever met, and my dad’s family are from Annfield Plain and still live nearby). Whatever it is, it isn’t funk, or folk, or rock. It’s very individual though. Thanks For the Birthday Card is as good a broken-heart song as I’ve heard, sitting somewhere between Motown musically and Tom Waits lyrically, and she sings it well. The rest of the album is all of a decent standard. The only track I find anomalous is her take on Puccini, which doesn’t fit.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what to make of the album: on the one hand it is much better than a lot of 1970 stuff I’ve listened to this year, and its interesting that she found a measure of success in Detroit rather than County Durham; on the other hand, even though I like it, I’m not sure that it entirely works. Having said that, Copeland shows far too much promise as a writer and an artist to dismiss the record as a curio. Treated as a calling card, the obvious talent on display here really should have been a gateway to a more celebrated career. I suspect one good TV appearance here in the UK would have led to a different outcome.

As it happens, after two more albums under her own name, she left the music business. There’s more about her here: https://gnaughto.wordpress.com/2019/11/24/child-of-the-north-from-2015/

I listened on Spotify, and there’s a playlist on YouTube.