Nell Bryden

Nell Bryden

Glory To The Day (Helen’s Requiem)

One of the hardest things to do in music is to make you feel a sense of loss for someone you have never met and whose life didn’t touch you in any way. The Beatles managed it with ‘Eleanor Rigsby’ and Jeff Buckley somehow made ‘Hallelujah’ a requiem for all the unnamed people lost over the years.

The ‘Helen’ mentioned here was a lady who drowned in her attic at the height of the Katrina floods in New Orleans and wasn’t buried until 11 weeks later – I never met her, Nell Bryden never met her but the reputation of the lady serves as a metaphor for the New Orleans women who would cook and give sustenance to all the starving musicians in the French Quarter in the town.
By the time this single finishes you not only feel the loss of Helen Royle but the huge sense of loss that every musician with soul feels about the devastation of New Orleans – the city that made music.

This is powerful stuff – Bryden’s voice is rich and soulful with a lot of the purity and power of Patsy Cline and perfectly suited to music with this sense of heart and loss. The music is secondary to the words but brilliantly evocative.
This would be a perfect New Orleans funeral dirge but it needs to be followed by an uplifting piece of dance – the New Orleans folks know how to do funerals; sorry to the grave and happy away – meantime it is a beautiful song and perfect for the period after the excesses of Xmas
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