Folk News is a blog about all things to do with folk, whether traditional or contemporary. It is run by Karl Dallas, who has been involved in the revival for over 50 years, for many of which he wrote for Melody Maker. He has also contributed to media throughout the world, including Rolling Stone, The Times of London, The Independent, the Morning Star, as well as his own magazines, notably Folk Music. Karl also runs the Jazz blog.
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Fairport Convention follow their sell-out electric tour with two new CDs this month and next,and a 28-gig acoustic tour.
Fame and Glory, (Matty Grooves Records, Cat number: MGCD049) due out on Monday, April 20, is a 15-track collection of songs and tunes by Breton composer Alan Simon from the gold disc song cycle Excalibur.
Tracks include: Castle Rock, Pilgrims, Celtic Dream (live), The Gest of Gauvain, Morgane (live), Dragon Breath, Lugh, Behind the Darkness (live), La Guerre Folle, Fame And Glory (live), Sacrifice, Danza del Crepusculo, Marie la Cordeliere, Duchess Anne, and The Soldier.
The music is performed by Fairport Convention with guest appearances by Jacqui McShee, Martin Barre, Dave Mattacks, Dan Ar Braz, John Helliwell, James Wood, and Flook among others.
Live at Cropredy '08 (Matty Grooves Records, Cat number: MGCD048) was recorded on Saturday August 9, and features the following tracks:
Ye Mariners All, Reynard The Fox, The Eynsham Poacher, 3 selections from Babbacombe Lee (Breakfast in Mayfair, Cell Song, Hanging Song), Doctor of Physick,Reynardine, Mock Morris, Suite of 5 songs honouring the memory of Sandy Denny (Fotheringay, It'll Take a Long Time, John The Gun, Who Knows Where The Time Goes?, The Battle of Evermore), John Gaudie/The Bowman's Retreat, and Best Wishes.
To mark the 30th anniversary of the death of Sandy Denny , Fairport commemorated her life and work at Cropredy with a suite of five songs, all but one of which (The Battle of Evermore, by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page) were written by Sandy.
The guest artists who sang them at Cropredy 2008 were:
Vikki Clayton (Fotheringay), Chris While (It'll Take a Long Time), Kellie While (John The Gun), Chris While and Kellie While (Who Knows Where The Time Goes?), and Robert Plant and Kristina Donahue (The Battle of Evermore).
Reviews of these two CDs will follow in due course.
Fairport 'Acoustic' Convention UK Tour 2009
May 1
Dartford
Mick Jagger Centre
01322 291100
May 2
Margate
West Coast Bar
07967 028844
May 3
Hailsham
Hailsham Pavilion
01323 841414
May 5
South Petherton
David's Hall Arts Ctre
01460 240340
May 6
Dartington
Ariel Centre
01803 847070
May 7
Southampton
Talking Heads
02380 678446
May 8
Lichfield
Arts Centre
01543 262223
May 9
Colchester
Arts Centre
01206 500900
May 10
Cromer
Folk on the Pier
01263 512495
May 11
Portsmouth
New Theatre Royal
02392 649000
May 14
Dublin
Whelan's
00353 1 4780 766
May 15
Chesterfield
Alexanders
01244 340005
May 16
Alnwick
The Playhouse
01665 510785
May 17
Boston
Blackfriars Theatre
01205 363108
May 18
Nettlebed
The Folk Club
01628 636620
May 19
Swindon
Arts Centre
01793 614837
May 20
Abergavenney
Borough Theatre
01873 850805
May 21
Bury
The Met
0161 761 2216
May 22
Hertford
The Corn Exchange
May 23
Leamington Spa
The Assembly
01926 523001
May 24
Haddenham
ArkenstallVillage Ctre
01353 740999
May 25
Shrewsbury
West Mids Showground Music Events
0845 050 8252
May 26
Leek
The Swan
01538 385260
May 27
Stirling
Stirling Folk Club
01259 218521
May 28
Bromsgrove
The Folk Club
0121 476 5938
May 29
York
The Duchess
08700 600 100
May 30
Papplewick
Village Hall
01623 794700
May 31
Didcot, Oxon
Cornerstones Arts Ctre
01235 515144
Among the guests so far booked for Fairport's Cropredy Convention (August 13-15) are Steve Winwood, the Buzzcocks, Ken Nicol & Phil Cool, 4 Square, Harlequinn, Richard Thompson, Seth Lakeman, The Dodge Brothers, John Jorgensen Band, Ade Edmondson and the Bad Shepherds, BBC Young Folk Award Winners Megan and Joe Henwood, ColvinQuarmby, Ralph McTell, Dreadzone, Feast of Fiddles, Churchfitters, and Richard Digance.
At the conclusion of today's concert for president-elect Barack Obama 89-year-old Pete Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen for a sing-along with perhaps half a million people of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land, which I dare say practically everyone in the country knows from childhood.
But sly old Pete, who actually hoboed with Woody during the Depression and Dust Bowl, had the crowd sing the song as it was actually written, as not only a celebration of this great land, but as a demand for workers' and people's rights. That is, he restored the verses that have been censored from the song over the years to make it less political:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn't say nothing; That side was made for you and me. (Actually, this verse is quite well-known. Lee Hays sang it when the Weavers were still going.-ED)
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me.
The "relief office," of course, refers to the ad hoc soup bowls and such set up during the Depression before the New Deal began to get the social security net we have all depended upon since the 1930s in place.
Seeger, like Guthrie, has been a controversial figure at times during his life, questioned by the witch hunting committees of Congress in the 1950s, black listed, and even banded from television as late as the late 1960s.
But while he hasn't got much of a voice left anymore and did not attempt to play his banjo today (not true, as you can see from the video.-ED), it was wonderful to see the gleam in his subversive eye as he did his call and response with the throngs in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Somewhere Woody - and Leadbelly, and Sonny and Cisco and the rest of the great balladeers of that bygone era - are smiling tonight.
This Land Is Your Land Words and Music by Woody Guthrie
Chorus: This land is your land, this land is my land From California, to the New York Island From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters This land was made for you and me
As I was walking a ribbon of highway I saw above me an endless skyway I saw below me a golden valley This land was made for you and me
Chorus
I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts And all around me a voice was sounding This land was made for you and me
Chorus
The sun comes shining as I was strolling The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling The fog was lifting a voice come chanting This land was made for you and me
Chorus
As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there And that sign said - no tress passin' But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin! Now that side was made for you and me!
Chorus
In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple Near the relief office - I see my people And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' If this land's still made for you and me.
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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.
