Harvest Home by Milborn House

Harvest Home is a majestic celebration of a working life in the Suffolk countryside in all its beauty and pain. It is also a unique piece of joyous music -making that describes the life of the rural working classes. In our over- ‘communityised’ society, here is a tribute to the original community that has underpinned our nation for many hundreds of years, yet is almost wholly ignored and forgotten today.

Harvest Home is also a miracle in itself. Written, played and sung by Chris Pitts, a man unable to read and write until his early twenties, written off educationally, scraping work in the fields of his native Suffolk, it is a testament to perseverance and a blazingly original talent. Swerving depression and addiction, he has survived to present us with poetry and melodies, that once heard, are not easily forgotten. If the poet John Clare was reincarnated as a musician, he would be a session player on music such this. Rooted in a particular Suffolk landscape, powered by a personal yearning for lost happiness, even remebered pain, this piece nevertheless describes universal themes of love, despair and exploited lives.

Harvest Home will roll over you, pick you up and take you with it.
Just listen to the darn thing.

Chris Pitts writes in the tradition of English landscape poets. He uses the medium of ‘Symphonic folk’ to give a sense of Pathos to his work.
Although a lot of his work is melancholy it is by no means all like that, the thumping fervour of Arnold Plum tells us that he can be tongue in cheek even when the lyric is serious.

Mark Surrudge

Castle Folk

chrispitts.co.uk