Flying Fish Records
1987
Darkness Into Light
About This Album
Priscilla Herdman gave birth to a daughter in 1985, and Darkness into Light, her fourth album, definitely bears the influence of her experience of motherhood. As usual, her role as a songwriter is limited: she adds some lines to Bruce "Utah" Phillips' "I Remember Loving You," which he performs as a duet with her, and sets Sojourner Truth's 1851 "Ain't I a Woman" speech to music. But the material she has chosen to record continually refers to mothers and children, even as she hews to the same sorts of works that have attracted her in the past. For example, she devoted much of her first album, The Water Lily (1977), to musical treatments of poems by the Australian poet Henry Lawson (1867-1922), and she adds one more here, "When the Children Come Home." It isn't actually about children; it's about an old ranch woman who has been widowed and abandoned by her children, but who still expects them back. Similarly, Judy Small (another name familiar to those who have Herdman's earlier albums) contributes an Australian story, "From the Lambing to the Wool," the autobiographical account of another old ranch woman whose children have grown and left, but who doesn't seem quite as badly off as Lawson's.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5 and 6)

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