Sara Banleigh is a singer of spooky 500-year-old folk songs from the British Isles. Finding material in old folk books, scratchy records, early broadsides, and even contemporary folk albums, she lets songs creep into her subconscious where they brew and bubble and start to form roots in her soul. She sings them softly to herself for years before deciding to arrange them for piano and play them for interested listeners. She hopes you are one of them.

One of the few native Brooklynites on the music scene today, Sara traces her interest in the music of Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales back to her early exposure to old country music. In a time and place where there was maybe one crackly country station leaking in over the radio from the hinterlands beyond NYC, Sara remembers her Dad driving down Brooklyn’s Shore Parkway, blasting Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, and Johnny Cash from his collection of old country tapes!

This early acquaintance with old country music led her to uncover artists on her own, such as Linda Ronstadt, and Dolly Parton, all of whom drew from the rich tradition of Appalachian folk music. From there, Sara started tracing the roots of the Appalachian ballads and up-tempos back to their origins, and discovered the great wealth and beauty of the Irish and British folk tradition. Sara’s musical influences are thus drawn as much from the pioneers and legends of old country music as they are from the printed pages of forgotten folk books and the modern albums of influential Irish and Scottish folk artists such as Planxty, the Bothy Band, and Rebecca Pidgeon. In either case, the listener is drawn into a world of storytelling, where true lovers pine for each other, betrayal torments the soul, and the heart crumbles from despair.

Sara is a new artist, a young woman with a young spirit, and she often gets asked why she has decided to record and sing ancient British and Irish folk songs, when her contemporaries are creating catchy indie pop with whirly synth loops and crispy beats. Sara likes synth loops, and perhaps, in the future, she will create music with machines, but at her core she has a special fondness for honest, unfiltered, acoustic folk music that tells the ageless, heartbreaking stories of the human condition. She is a happy person with a sad soul; or maybe it is the other way around: A sad person with a hidden champagne spirit. Either way, these songs help her get out some of the velvet green sadness.

The songs selected for Sara’s debut album, The Folk EP, have, in their own particular way, helped her deal with the torment of gut-wrenching relationships and negotiate many years of spiritual and emotional desolation. The idea of a one true love that is unique and irreplaceable is a popular theme in British and Irish folk music, and one that is woven throughout the material on the album. Much of the heartache and suffering in these tunes stems from the death of the beloved, or from his betrayal, and the highly-narrative stories, with their developed characters and tragic outcomes, bring the listener on this profound journey through love and loss. Of her relationship to the songs on the album, Sara says, "I connect deeply with the characters in the tunes - I desperately want Mary Hamilton and Geordie to live, and I am absolutely shattered that the girl who's lost her heart to her 'railroad boy' is so consumed with anguish that she takes her own life. Even though I know the ending, I am continuously and repeatedly devastated by this final and inevitable outcome of unrequited love.” Sara continues, “The songs are special. They are living. And it’s the eloquence and universality of the narratives in these songs that make them something that I believe anyone can relate to - anyone who’s ever felt for another human being.”

Sara offers some final words on the traditional folk music that creeps around her psyche:

“I sing this music because I need to sing it. I am compelled to. These songs, which relate dark and haunting tales of immortal love, murder, death, suicide, vengeful lust, and the supernatural are the primal, sweat-filled howl that reminds humanity of it's own broken heart. They are the layers of thick wool that one wears to protect the body against a biting wind, and they are the wind itself. They are the beginning of love, and the end of it. The rose bloom of health and the grey pallor of illness. Something entirely special and unique to this world, and the most common, front porch melodies that any one man or child can carry. They are just enough for one person to carry.  These songs are the beginning of life and the beginning of death - birth and departure, captured in a melody and a lyric phrase. Triumph and tragedy. Union and disunion - of friends, lovers, families, and countries. A soft coo and a bitter dirge. They are a cry and a wail. But more than that, they are honest. When everything else fails, these songs are the last honest friends you’ll have. This is why I sing them.”