by Colin Harper
By the turn of the sixties, Davy Graham exuded an almost military bearing that contrasted perfectly his exoticism as an instrumentalist. But to a degree this was a studied cool, an affectation which he maintained and very probably grew into. It was, perhaps, a necessary part of coping with the rigours of life from an unusual background. As Duffy Power, one of Britain’s earliest rock’n’roll recording artists, recalls: ‘He lived on Westbourne Grove but he chose to go to a school south of the river, miles from where he lived. I get the feeling this might have been to keep his mixed-race background private. There were race riots around Notting Hill at that time, plus he’d damaged his eye with a pencil as a kid and he was slightly withdrawn anyway, so you don’t know what kind of trials he had in the fifties.’
Others who recall Davy Graham from his pre-performing days affirm this picture of a shy, bookish and circumspect individual. But Graham was on a mission to become the master of his instrument. During 1959, Steve Benbow, Roy Guest and co. were appearing as the Wanderers on Saturday Club. ‘We rehearsed in Old Brompton Road,’ says Benbow. ‘Davy, this kid, used to sit in the corner and watch and every so often he’d say, “Could you show me that chord?” And of course we did. We had no idea he’d become so good. It was unbelievable what happened. He went away to Morocco, came back and blew a hole through everyone.’
Andy Irvine’s experience of the formative virtuoso is similar. Andy was not alone in hanging out with ‘Rambling’ Jack Elliott in 1959 – 60: ‘I would arrive at Jack’s bedsit and sit at the end of the bed till he and his wife woke up,’ he says. ‘But then Davy would arrive, at eleven or twelve o’clock, and Jack and June and myself would go out – while Davy would stay in the flat and play Jack’s guitar. And when we came home Davy would quickly go. It was as if he could not be in the same space as the rest of us. The strings would be dead and Jack would say, “Oh, I don’t know why I let that guy play my guitar.” But he’d be there every day. He lived with his mother at the time and had a job pushing a broom somewhere and was an odd kind of guy. I thought he was very shy when I first met him, but the fact that he practised guitar six hours a day showed where his outlets lay.’
Over the next couple of years, the combination of natural shyness and dedication were apparent to anyone who cared to frequent the coffee bars and restaurants of Soho. Long John Baldry was Davy’s sparring partner at the time: ‘They had a feud going,’ says Wizz Jones, ‘but everyone used to say, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see them play together?”’cos John had such a great voice and Davy was such a brilliant player – a true innovator.’ Long John and Davy did work together once on TV (Hullaballoo, 1963) but never on record.
Unlike Baldry, whose own fame peaked towards the end of the sixties, it was during his earliest and only sparsely recorded performing years that Graham truly secured his reputation. The real beginning of Davy Graham as a guitar legend, as an astonishingly advanced technician amongst a peer group of guitar pickers still happy to master the basic licks on Broonzy and Leadbelly records, was an appearance in Ken Russell’s BBC film Hound Dogs and Bach Addicts: The Guitar Craze, first broadcast in June 1959. Budding guitarists the length and breadth of Britain watched Davy performing a complex blues and a fingerstyle arrangement of ‘Cry Me A River’ alongside contributions from Julian Bream, Bert Weedon and Lonnie Donegan. Martin Carthy was one of those whose jaw was on the floor: ‘The twelve-bar blues he played seemed to have about three parts going at the same time. Contrapuntal blues! It was outrageously brilliant.’6 Hamish Imlach had been equally impressed: ‘It was okay when there was only one of him. But then Bert came along.’7
Bert Jansch, as a performer, did not exist before some indefinable point in 1962. Prior to that, he was an amazing player, but an amazing player in the corner of a room, on somebody else’s guitar, and not readily inclined to sing. Bert would find his voice in due course. But in the meantime, Davy Graham had single-handedly introduced Britain to the concept of the folk guitar instrumental. It is often said that over in America John Fahey, in releasing a short-run private pressing of his bizarre all-instrumental blues pastiche The Transfiguration Of Blind Joe Death in 1959, invented both steel-strung guitar music and the industry to support it, but Davy Graham could hardly have known what was going on in the curious world of John Fahey. In Britain, Davy Graham can claim the mantle of inventor.
‘Davy was the first person I ever heard play more than one line of music at once on the guitar,’ says Robin Williamson. ‘He’d kind of done a Big Bill Broonzy/baroque thing because Bill used to go thump, thump, thump on the bass string with his thumb – which Martin Carthy borrowed. But Davy took the notion of making a baroque bassline, moving it slightly. The classic example of that was “Angi”. And Bert developed that considerably further. But Davy was the man really – the first man to have a go at it in Britain. For me, I was never so much into trying to do things that moved against each other. I liked melody very much and alternate tunings. I explored tunings very thoroughly at that point. Martin Carthy, who later developed a lot of his own very fine tunings, was working mainly in standard tuning at that time.’
Carthy, a regular visitor to Edinburgh by this stage, was indeed working mainly in standard guitar tuning. But he had already started to look for usable alternatives. By the end of the decade he had found, by process of elimination, the note sequence that would most easily adapt to the demands of accompanying English traditional song and consequently create the distinctive Martin Carthy ‘sound’: CGCDGA. That tuning would remain largely exclusive to Carthy’s vision. But he had almost, before Davy, stumbled upon the tuning that would become a cunning device in the hands of Bert Jansch (who has employed it only sparingly) and something integral to the subsequent careers of Archie Fisher, Jimmy Page and virtually every future accompanist of Scottish and Irish traditional music: DADGAD.
‘I met this old-timey band from Harvard University, the Charles River Holy Boys, in 1961 or ’62,’ says Carthy, ‘and I worked out this tuning that was one step away from DADGAD: DGDGAD. I was trying to accompany a particular song of theirs, and it sort of did the job but it wasn’t very adaptable. I remember showing it to Davy, and later Davy came up with DADGAD. I’m not trying to take credit. I don’t know if what I showed him had anything to do with it at all. But he was the man. When he invented DADGAD that was the moment life got interesting.’
To non-guitarists, the revolutionary new tuning can be described as having the effect of adding hitherto impossible new chord sequences to the player’s armoury, opening up new melodic possibilities (albeit within a limited range of keys) and creating a bigger, richer sound. Its invention can be dated roughly to June 1963.8 By then, it merely added to Graham’s enigma. ‘He was the excellence,’ says Archie Fisher. ‘When he played, everything was incredibly simple. The economy of his style was what impressed most guitarists. Then, of course, we suddenly realised he wasn’t playing in conventional tunings.’9
The holy grail of a truly successful alternate tuning was still on the distant horizon when ‘Angi’ appeared on record. Here was an exercise in standard tuning, but one that expanded forever the musical parameters of the folk form. ‘Some of his style was more like piano playing than guitar,’ says Archie Fisher, ‘using big, massive sevenths, elevenths, things with funny numbers after them, but picking them cleanly with his right hand, imposing a classical or jazz technique on blues and then traditional music.’10
Moving swiftly on from his early obsession with skiffle, Davy was listening to the likes of Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery, Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman. Regarding blues, Snooks Eaglin was a favourite and he would add a number of Chicago blues songs to his repertoire, but during 1962 the folk and blues scenes in London were at last going their separate ways. Davy Graham was, by default, falling on the folk side of the fence. Although involved for some months in Alexis Korner’s new band Blues Incorporated (and indeed subsequently in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers), the godfather of British blues was not ultimately con
vinced that Davy was on the right wavelength: ‘Alexis told me he didn’t think Davy had a good feel for the blues,’ says Duffy Power. For Davy, his admiration for Alexis was as much to do with his lovably rogueish tendencies as an operator: ‘He was a terrific hustler,’ says Davy, ‘but he could charm you at the same time. He once asked me to do a gig for him that he couldn’t do. I did it and got twelve pounds for it and he got the other twenty!’11
It was nevertheless Alexis who had realised the importance of getting Davy, and particularly ‘Angi’, on record, and who had arranged the session. Alexis’s patronage and influence within British blues has long been recognised, but his patronage of Davy Graham would prove no less crucial to the development of British folk. ‘Folk-baroque’, in the terminology of Karl Dallas, may not have been a universally popular phrase, but in describing a music that blended folk, baroque, blues, jazz and other exotica together on an acoustic guitar it would come as close as anything to putting a label on Davy Graham. And, later, on Bert Jansch.
Davy Graham was not the only London devotee of the new music to have connections in Edinburgh. Clive Palmer had a friend in Kent who had been to Gordonstoun, an exclusive Scottish public school. That friend was going up to Edinburgh to visit with an old school pal called Rod Harbinson: ‘So we followed him up, hitch-hiking, spending a couple of nights by the side of the road,’ says Clive. ‘A couple of days after arriving in Edinburgh I got asked to a party down the back of Princes Street and I met Bert at that party. He was very much the same then as he is now – laid back, very relaxed.’ A few days later, Clive and his banjo turned up at the Crown Bar in Museum Street. In the wake of the Howff, Archie Fisher was fronting a new Tuesday night folk club at the venue. ‘I met Robin that night,’ says Clive. ‘We started playing together and through that I really started to get to know Bert.’
The ‘three dreamers’ – Bert Jansch, Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer – became flatmates: ‘We all shared lodgings in two or three different buildings, all derelict,’ says Robin, ‘all of which would now be described as squats. There was one of them in the Grassmarket, there was one in what’s now a car park opposite Greyfriars’ Bobby [Society Buildings] and there was another one in what’s now really quite a trendy street near the university [West Nicolson Street]. At that time it was a complete slum.’
The flat in West Nicolson Street was originally tenanted by Clive’s initial Edinburgh contact, Rod Harbinson. His family owned a whisky distillery, which gave him the luxury of a private income, and an island near Oban, which provided a place to take his friends periodically for a weekend’s adventuring. ‘Rod was one of the early longhairs,’ says Robin, ‘long hair, long beard and always wearing a kilt. Quite a distinctive figure.’ Along with an unidentified cohort, Rod was immortalised obliquely in Hamish Imlach’s memoirs: ‘There were two young hairy freaks, classic ex-public schoolboys,’ declared Hamish, ‘who had “gone to the bad” as they said in those days. They lived in Society Buildings, a great name for a hovel, a horrible tenement which had been posh 150 years earlier. They rode around in a vintage convertible, wearing kilts, their sporrans stuffed with one-pound deals of hash. I went to call on them in the middle of winter. They had one room, the size of a tennis court, with a ceiling twenty foot high. They couldn’t afford to heat such a room, so they had erected a tent, indoors, and huddled inside wrapped in blankets and heated by a paraffin heater. Their big hobby was poaching sheep for the pot. One time they shot a prize ram. There were wanted notices everywhere featuring this ram, which had already been stewed and eaten, and was apparently very tough. You ate what you could. Archie was subsisting on oatmeal. I remember he once tried currying it.’12
Money was short but the lifestyle pleasurable: ‘You got up when you got up,’ says Clive. ‘Rod put us up and bought the food when we didn’t have any money. But there were a lot of parties, and the Crown Bar was just around the corner. So many things happening. To me, Edinburgh was really going at that time. So many talented people around. I remember Bert spending a lot of time on his own. There was a period when he was staying with a guy called Adam Parker-Rhodes. I think he was connected to the Cecil Rhodes people. I remember him staying there ’cos he was carving this chess set. He was very clever with things like that.’
By this stage, 1962, Dolina MacLennan was back from her teaching sojourn in Fife and had reclaimed the flat at 19 Bristo Place. Being situated across the road from the Crown Bar, it became a free hotel for travelling folk singers. It was also just around the corner from Bert, Clive and Robin: ‘Robin wasn’t as spiritual as he is now, he was just into music,’ says Dolina. ‘He was more effervescent than Bert. Clive was more like Bert. He had this very bad limp and was more into himself.’ The common bond was the love of music and the emphatic rejection of a conventional lifestyle.
‘It was a funny sort of time,’ says Robin. ‘I think most of us saw ourselves as some sort of bohemian. The Jack Kerouac era hadn’t quite petered out and the hippy era hadn’t quite petered in, so it was somewhere in between. There was a coined term at the time, “folknik”, but that didn’t really cover it. The notion was that there was an intellectual approach to a sort of “Zen life”. Somehow it got around to bumming it with no money in a very stoned manner, and that somehow linked into the traditional music scene. A very curious mixture. But we seemed to spend an awful lot of time sitting around playing tunes, just fooling around with music – hours and hours and hours of it. There was so little money and there was very little time to do anything other than rolling up dog-ends and having a go at this or that tuning. I was interested in singing, Bert was interested in guitar riffs. He went through a brief period of carving wood. He tried to make a chess set, which became gradually more and more arcane. He did sing a bit, but mainly all I remember about Bert really is Bert playing the guitar.’
Robin was becoming particularly interested in traditional music, especially as performed by the older singers, many of them from ‘the travelling folk’ and now becoming revered regulars in the folk clubs: Jimmy MacBeath, who claimed descent from Macbeth, King of Scotland and namesake of the play that is not named; ‘Old’ Davy Stewart; Belle Stewart; Jeannie Robertson and their peers. In one of his earliest interviews, for Melody Maker in July 1966, Bert recalled that he’d ‘done so many gigs with Jimmy MacBeath that we are quite old friends. I’ve worked with Belle Stewart and Davy Stewart too – a mad idiot but quite a guy.’ Clive’s passion was still music hall, but he was interested in the tradition and could read music: ‘Clive used to sit there and sing all these old music-hall songs and I was absolutely amazed by it all,’ says Bert. ‘An absolute genius. From Clive I learned that real folk music is music that’s around. It’s not just traditional songs; it can be Vera Lynn.’13
Bert was soaking up whatever was around, including whatever music Robin and Clive were coming up with. Clive in particular would prove to be a major influence in his songwriting. Modern jazz was becoming a part of the picture too. ‘There were certain favourite records,’ says Robin. ‘We never owned any of them or had any kind of record player, or any kind of possessions at all really. But there were records around in those days, and they were very influential because there wasn’t a lot of them.’ Mingus Ah-Um by Charlie Mingus and The Night Time Is The Right Time by Ray Charles and the Raylettes are recalled with particular fondness.
A new experience, in the form of dope from North Africa via Glasgow, was becoming widely available in Edinburgh at this time. Bert once recalled that ‘in my circle of acquaintances we were getting through pounds of the stuff as early as 1961,’14 but if so it was not common knowledge. ‘It was only when Clive Palmer came on the scene that I began to be aware of it,’ says Maggie Cruickshank.
‘Drugs were very influential,’ remembers Robin. ‘Absolutely essential to the whole lifestyle then. It divided very clearly into those that smoked and those that drank. I recall pot being a major influence not only on how I thought about writing songs but possibly I would never have tho
ught about writing songs had it not been for smoking. It was nothing to do with inhibitions, just opening up various corners of the mind. And anyway, growing up in Scotland after the war was such a crock of terrible times. I suppose it must have been the same in any other part of Britain. It was a bit grim. So there was a tremendous changeover when this blast of sunlight came in which, at that time, had a lot to do with drugs. It was another view on the world, almost like a fresh start. People were just trying to cheer up, basically. The songs people were writing were imitative and political and all of a sudden after drugs filtered in they were anything but imitative and not at all political – they were playful, discursive, quirky, elusive and involved the interchanging of modes and ideas. I’m not saying that drugs are a good idea. I’m just saying that that’s the way it was then.’
‘There was a wee bit of a quandary with Robin,’ says Ray Fisher, ‘because when people were writing songs, which was unusual at that time anyway, there was always a reason to write – like we needed a song to sing at the American sailors or something like that. I suppose his songs were just for fun. Him and Clive, they were a wee bit outrageous. People thought they were odd.’15
Along with Liz Cruickshank, Licorice McKechnie was one of a handful of girls Bert courted during his Edinburgh years. Licorice would eventually become, alongside Robin, a member of the Incredible String Band.16 Bert’s reputation as someone apparently instantly attractive to significant numbers of women, in spite of or because of his withdrawn personality, is an enduring quality. It was one element that contributed to making him the most charismatic performer on the London folk scene in the mid-sixties and, before that, in the clubs of Glasgow and Edinburgh. ‘He had this “little boy lost” appearance,’ says Dolina MacLennan. ‘I was never affected by it myself.’ ‘To hazard an opinion,’ says Robin, ‘I think perhaps he brought out the maternal in women because he seemed to be always about to snuff out like a candle flame. He was like a kind of Scottish James Dean.’ Comedian Billy Connolly, then an aspiring banjo player in Glasgow, puts it all into perspective: ‘Women loved him,’ he said. ‘They were crazy about him. It was just extraordinary. They all wanted to be his mother – they all thought he was lonely and all that. He sounded so distressed and alone. So I would write songs like that: “I’m lonely …!” And nobody would come near me! “God, leave him alone, it’s that lonely guy again!”’17
