Davey Graham, guitar giant & wonderful friend

Davey Graham plays Down Ampney (Ralph Vaughan Williams)

When a great man dies, the whole world suffers. But when that man is a personal friend, personal sorrow is added to the world-wide pain.

Davey Graham, who died from lung cancer on the afternoon of Monday, December 15, 2008 in his home in Camden Town, London, was a giant of the guitar whose influence extended beyond the narrow confines of the folk scene, to which he introduced the music of jazzers like Charles Mingus (Better Git It In Your Soul), Nat Adderley (Worksong), Art Blakey (Buhaina Chant), Carl Perkins (Grooveyard), Kenny Dorham (Buffalo), Junior Mance (Jubilation), and Mongo Santamaria (Afro-Blue). He also led the way into an appreciation among folk guitarists of the music of composers like Bach and Robert de Visée.

The 6/8 tempo of Charlie Mingus's exuberant piece was used by Davey, in conjunction with bassist Tony Reeves and drummer Barry Morgan, for a series of improvisations which had a remarkable effect upon the further development of folk instrumental playing.

John Renbourn’s Waltz, on his album, Another Monday, also reworked when he and Jansch formed Pentangle, was based on this (Renbourn also credited Davey with introducing him to Kenny Dorham’s Buffalo, which he recorded on his second album), as was Bert Jansch’s Veronica. It even cropped up on Fairport Convention’s Nottamun Town, a tune which Davey had recorded with Shirley Collins.

The recording he made with Alexis Korner for Bill Leader and released on a ground-breaking Topic EP, 3/4 AD, was based on Miles Davis’s All Blues, on Kind of Blue, and mutated into Pentangle's I've Got a Feeling. As Bert Jansch once said, introducing the tune on TV: "I've got a feeling we stole this".

Davey was always more assiduous in crediting his sources and influences than most of his followers and imitators, but he never seemed angry at his lack of credit from his peers. “I am fortunate in being famous rather than well-known,” he told me once, I suppose meaning that he could shop in his local Sainsbury’s in Camden Town without being mobbed, as could well have happened with admirers such as Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page.

Probably Davey’s greatest innovation was to point up the links between Irish and Scottish folk scales, and what came to be known as world music. He was not the first to notice this.

I remember when I was working with Paul Robeson in London, helping him promote his autobiography, the great man was fascinated by the analogues he was finding between various musics, and when I recommended he get a chance when in Scotland to hear the McLeod sisters, he made a careful note of their names. In her biography of Robeson, Marie Seton describes a similar outburst of Robesonian enthusiasm, in more distinguished company in Moscow: “. . . Paul Robeson sat down on Sergei Eisenstein's small three-legged stool and told him how he had traced out American Negro syncopation in the rhythm of West Indian Negro speech and how – his voice quickened with excitement – he had found the same rhythm in Chinese music. He had brought his gramophone and as many albums of music as he could carry. First he put on a record made in Africa, then a Chinese one, then a Thai one and, finally, his own Negro Spirituals. They discussed the rhythms, playing the records over and over again.”

A decade or so later, Davey Graham discovered that the melody of Padraic Colum’s song She Moves Through the Fair, with its flattened seventh (G-to-G on the white notes on the piano), was similar to the Indian khammaj rag scale (sag a ma pa dha ni sa – sa ni-flat dha pa ma ga re sa, ascending and descending).

He used a non-classical tuning for his guitar on this melody – DADGAD – though he denied having invented it. “It occurred over in the States as well at about the same time,” he said. He also used a dropped second string tuning (EADGAE) and open-G.

David Michael Gordon Graham was born in Leicester on November 26,1940. His father, Hamish, was a Gaelic teacher from the Isle of Skye and also an amateur singer. His mother Winifred was from British Guiana (now Guyana).

Though he began to take an interest in the guitar at the age of 12, he did not actually own an instrument until he was 16. An early mentor was the guitarist (and taxi driver) Steve Benbow. Two years later, he was off on his travels, which broadened his musical horizons, as he played on the streets of Paris, in Greece, and North Africa.

He also appeared that year (1959) in Ken Russell’s Monitor documentary for BBC TV, Hound Dogs and Bach Addicts: The Guitar Craze, playing a typically off-the-wall version of Cry Me a River (a clip of which can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWeejHJxGjs). He also made an uncredited appearance in Joseph Losey’s The Servant in 1963, and performed Rock Me in Jamie Wadhawan’s Cain's Film, in 1969. Nearly half a century after the Ken Russell film, he was the subject of a 2005 BBC Radio documentary, Whatever Happened to Davy Graham?

They might well ask. It was symptomatic of Davey’s significance on the music scene that he had become a legend, rarely seen and seldom heard. Yet his nearly half a century-old composition Anji (variously spelled Angi or Angie) recorded by Bill Leader, was used as the theme music for the BBC 4 TV survey, Folk Britannia.

According to Davey, he was working on the Am-G-F-E7 chord sequence of Jack Elliott's Cocaine Bill when he hit the wrong strings and Anji came out.

Though much of Davey’s playing was finger-busting stuff that had his contemporaries scratching their heads in bemused astonishment, Anji was comparatively easy to play, and has been covered literally dozens of times, notably by Paul Simon on his Sound of Silence album. Bert Jansch actually released his version on his eponymous first album before Davey, having learned it from a tape lent to him by the composer’s half-sister, Jill. It was also recorded by Chicken Shack.

Over the years, constant drug abuse and ill-health began to take its toll. He suffered from chronic arthritis in his fingers, and years of smoking were playing hell with his breathing.

A very private man, when he was admitted to hospital, he instructed his long-time lady friend, Carol Ballard (who'd been working on my Acoustic Music magazine when she first met him nearly 30 years ago) not to tell anyone how ill he was.

He was a weird, astonishing, amazing man, in his life just as much as his music. He said to me once: “When I heard the Beatles’ When I’m 64, I went to the swimming bath and swam 64 lengths to see what it felt like.” When I used the term “wanker” to him, he gave me a lecture on the virtues of masturbation, and might well have demonstrated it to me had I not changed the subject.

He and his then wife, Holly Gwinn, were living with me at the time, and my children were fascinated by their emerging from the bathroom totally nude.

His friend and neighbour, the artist Jeff Sawtell, recalled to me: “Despite his ability to annoy, irritate and alienate people in equal measure, [he] could be as kind and considerate, [I] especially remember him singing lullabies for my daughter at the foot of our stairs and turning up to sing in front of my last big installation.”

He continued to perform intermittently, though at one recent gig he had to give up after a few tunes, and Wizz Jones came up from the audience and filled in for the sick man. His most recent recordings were Playing in Traffic, released in 1993, and Broken Biscuits, with singer-songwriter Mark Pavey, released last year.

Though many of his past associates are queueing up to acknowledge how great he was, he has not always been treated with the respect he deserved.

For instance, when Shirley Collins used the title of their joint pioneering album, Folk Roots – New Routes, for her concert series at the South Bank earlier this year, he was conspicuously not invited to participate (nor was her former husband, Austin John Marshall, who produced and named the album).

Davey of all people should have been given some kind of a Lifetime Achievement Award. It’s not too late for Mike Harding and the BBC to remedy the omission, but it would have been better if they could have done it while he was still alive. -KARL DALLAS

• The picture at the head of this message was taken by JEFF SAWTELL of Davey Graham playing at his 2006 installation at the Arlington Gallery in Parkway, Camden Town.