Rum Ragged’s 2019 album The Thing About Fish has gotten a lot easier to find — it was added to digital services last week. It’s a fantastic album and everyone should add it to their playlist. From the title track (by Jim Payne) to the album closer ‘Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary’s’ (by Otto Kelland) it is a solid, entertaining and thoughtful take on modern NL folk/traditional music.

I don’t want to gush… but I’m probably going to anyway. I’m a huge fan.

Today I’m listening to ‘Land of Fish and Seals’ on repeat. It is a beautiful track. It is based around a poem of the same title by Scottish-born writer Margaret Sharpe Peace. Peace lived in St. John’s Newfoundland in the mid 1800s where she wrote her book The Convict Ship and other Poems (PDF). Land of Fish and Seals did not appear in that book but was in Murphy's Sealers' Song Book (PDF). It’s a beautiful poem in which Peace contrasts life in Newfoundland with that of other nations:

--Margaret Sharp Peace

Survival has never been easy in Newfoundland and the poem acknowledges that, but it also celebrates that living here, especially in the 1800s, took (or maybe fostered) character and bravery.

Rum Ragged’s take on the text is haunting. The melody, and their production/delivery, lend an emotional punch you can’t ignore.

It’s fantastic stuff — take some time to check it out.