Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  Like others involved in the Edinburgh Folk Festival sessions Anne had been offered a deal with Transatlantic by Nat Joseph. Her reaction was probably unique: ‘I turned him down,’ she says. ‘He was flashing money about, but I felt a certain loyalty to Topic and, quite honestly, although they never had any money I felt they had discretion.’ She nevertheless realised that Topic would never in a million years be interested in what Bert was doing, and so the only possible option was Transatlantic. Anne would be forthright in her championing of Jansch to both Nat Joseph and Bill Leader, who had engineered all three of her own record sessions to date, but the primary focus was on Leader: the most important thing, she felt, was to get Bert Jansch on tape.23

  Anne had been staying not at the Blass family home, where Field would certainly have found her, nor indeed at the similarly welcoming flat off Gray’s Inn Road tenanted by her friend Gill Cook from Collet’s. Wherever the hiding place, in the free and easy manner of the times Anne was soon dating Bill Leader’s recording assistant Seumus Ewans, described by Gill as ‘quite an exotic character’ with a huge Cadillac and no money, while Bert – an exotic character with neither Cadillic nor money – became involved with Gill, who had previously enjoyed a brief relationship with Owen Hand. Bert was soon acquainted with Bill Leader. The whole tangled web of connections would make the recording of Jansch by Leader a virtual inevitability, regardless of how uncommercial he sounded. But it would take a while yet.

  Between Bert’s first appearance at the Troubadour, in January 1963, and the second, in March 1964, popular music had experienced not one but two seismic shifts. The first and most celebrated revolution was in the wake of the Beatles, a foursome of ex-skifflers and rock’n’rollers from Liverpool whose transformation of American R&B muscle, rock’n’roll swagger and doo-wop harmonies into something singularly identifiable as British ‘beat’ was comparable to the transatlantic journey of jazz, folk and blues into skiffle a few years earlier. It would, however, prove to be a more durable, adaptable commodity. By way of illustration, on the very day of Bert’s Troubadour debut the Beatles were enjoying their first ever national TV broadcast on Thank Your Lucky Stars; fourteen months later, on the day of Bert’s second visit, they were picking up ‘Show Business Personalities of the Year’ awards at a Variety Club lunch and later appearing on a new TV show: Top Of The Pops. The second phenomenon, remembered less as a movement perhaps than as a clutch of momentarily successful groups and individuals, was folk.

  The ‘folk boom’ was a phrase bandied to death in the pop papers of the middle sixties. It had first appeared in the wake of harmony trio Peter, Paul & Mary’s US single successes during 1963 with two Bob Dylan songs, ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’. After appearing with Dylan and Joan Baez at Martin Luther King’s ‘March On Washington’ in August, and given the unprecedented attendance figure of 46,000 for that year’s Newport Folk Festival, this rather earnest ensemble were deemed to be blazing a trail for a new boom in folk amongst the young and reinvigorating a genre that had, in fact, been fermenting in the pop charts since 1958, with acts like the Highwaymen and the Kingston Trio. Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman had created Peter, Paul & Mary as a more campus-credible version of the Kingstons. But Dylan was a one-off. His personal reputation, as distinct from the popularity of his songs in the hands of others, was being enhanced by hobo-ing along on the coat-tails of Joan Baez, floor-spotting at her shows as Bert Jansch had been doing with Anne Briggs. Cultural commentator Griel Marcus first encountered Dylan at a Baez gig and, in terms of the characterisation, one could almost substitute Bob and Joan with Bert and Anne in his account.

  ‘It was the summer of 1963, in a field somewhere in New Jersey. I’d gone to see Joan Baez and after a bit she brought out a scruffy-looking guy with a guitar. He looked dusty. His shoulders were hunched and he acted slightly embarrassed. He sang a couple of songs. I was transfixed. I was confused. When the show was over I saw him trying to light a cigarette. “You were terrific,” I said brightly. He didn’t look up. “I was shit,” he replied.’24

  By August 1963 the scruffy guy in the field had sold 250,000 copies of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which was not even available in Britain at the time. It included two songs which owed a great debt to the repertoire of Martin Carthy: ‘Girl From The North Country’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, based on the tunes of two English traditional songs, ‘Scarborough Fair’ and ‘Lord Franklin’ respectively. It had been Carthy who had first invited Bob, during his 1962 visit as a complete unknown, to sing at an English folk club, the King & Queen.

  By the time of Bob’s first return, for one night only at the Festival Hall on 17 May 1964, the concept of a ‘folk boom’ had been well and truly bought in from the American experience by a bandwagon-happy British media. Hindsight has demonstrated that 1963 was in fact the apogee of folk music as a social and cultural force in America, although given the very different social context the timescale of its rise and fall and the level of its impact in Britain are less easily defined. But back in 1963/64, Sunday tabloids frothed at the possibility of Communism poisoning the minds of the nation’s youth, while the music papers simply made sure they were not wrong-footed by another explosion like skiffle without having predicted, examined and discussed the matter thoroughly beforehand. For Melody Maker the ‘folk boom’, the ‘hootenanny’ and ‘protest’ would be the currency of debate for the next couple of years, but nobody was putting a shape on what the breakthrough might be nor a date by which time it would happen. The MM columns attributed to ‘Steve Benbow’, and generally ghost-written by broadcaster and jazz man Ken Sykora, were quick to point out that if there was indeed a boom then it would all be down to the sterling groundwork of Ken Sykora, while sternly warning that ‘to those whose real musical love is the sound of the cash register, folk music is becoming a bandwagon for selling cigarettes, soft drinks and cosmetics’.

  This was no exaggeration: a low budget folk TV show in the States, called Hootenanny, had stormed the national ratings during 1963 while the title itself, a vague euphemism for a good-time gathering, became an all-purpose, non-copyright licence to print money. ‘Hootenanny’ candy bars appeared in New York with the added temptation to ‘send in two wrappers and a dollar and get a folk record!’. By April 1964 the MM was able to report that ‘the folk boom is beginning to pay off, with hootenanny discs flowing in thick and fast’. Streams of records were arriving from the States with that word in the title. Britain was not long in catching up: one wretched disc, Hootenanny In London, notoriously boasted a photograph of Anne Briggs in its sleeve montage yet not a trace of her on the record.25 Clearly a pretty face will shift units. By June Malcolm Nixon had shamelessly renamed his Ballads & Blues club – by now occupying Saturday nights at the Black Horse – the ‘Hootenanny, Ballads & Blues’.

  The origins of the word may be, like skiffle, obscure, but the mid-sixties currency of ‘the hootenanny’ could be traced both in Britain and America very specifically to the increasingly popular medium of television. While America was tuning in to the folk music variety show Hootenanny on the ABC network in 1963, Scotland’s STV were coincidentally running a series of ten-minute interludes with Rory & Alex McEwan called Hootenannie. In January 1964, fronted by Roy Guest and live from a jazz club in Edinburgh, the BBC nationally broadcast The Hoot’nanny Show. The hootenanny was anything one wanted it to be, so long as it was fun: the joy of the thing to the various purveyors of product was to be found in the infinite variety of its spelling. Occasional spots on national and regional magazine shows had been available to folk singers or, rather, to a handful of suitable representatives of the form, in Britain since the late fifties. Scotland had hinted at more substantial programming of the music with periodic series based around the Reivers, Steve Benbow and the McEwan brothers. But the first significant opportunity for folk music on British TV nationally came from BBC Manchester in July 1962, with a show called Barndance.

&
nbsp; The station was taken unawares by the strength of audience reaction to Barndance and the series, fronted by Liverpool group the Spinners, was extended to six programmes. Produced by John Ammonds, who would go on to produce series with Val Doonican and Morecambe & Wise, Barndance was an old-style variety programme with a slant towards folksong its distinguishing feature. The Spinners, who were still very much an amateur group with day jobs, turned up at the auditions and sang, as Ammonds requested, two English traditional songs, ‘John Peel’ and ‘The Mermaid’: ‘He said, “How many songs like that have you got?’” one of the group later recalled. ‘We looked at each other and said, ‘Don’t know – twenty, thirty, forty, whatever.” “Well how would you like to do the series?” We were knocked out.’26 The recording schedule was changed to reflect the group members’ unavailability during weekdays and the resulting series was a quietly formidable step forward for both the presentation of traditional music on television and the career of the Spinners.

  Easy targets for mocking in later years, by virtue of their Aran sweaters and ubiquity on television, the Spinners were nonetheless ground-breakers as the first public face of the British ‘folk boom’. ‘Uniform was a mortal sin,’ said Tony, the group leader. ‘But we were a weird conglomeration – a giant, two nondescripts and a black. You could say this was visually interesting but it wasn’t because we all had such totally different tastes in clothes. There was no way we could all agree to look smart together or sloppy together. A uniform was the way to do that and I stand by it.’27 In April ’63, a second series of Barndance was launched, again involving the usual trappings of variety programming – female backing vocalists, a dance troup (‘the John Peel Dancers’, if you will) – and this time featuring the Ian Campbell Folk Group as the resident band. A third series began in May ’64, this time with Steve Benbow resident. But the next significant breakthrough had already come, debuting in the autumn of 1963 and courtesy of the Birmingham-based ABC station. Its name was Hullaballoo.

  Fronted by Rory McEwan and featuring as residents Martin Carthy and the Cyril Davies All-Stars, with weekly guests such as the Clancy Brothers, Davy Graham and the Ian Campbell Folk Group – Hullaballoo was no show in hock to the values of light entertainment. It was broadcast in several of the ITV regions, with London the most notable exception, at the very start of national ‘folk boom’ fever and with a longer-term vision might well have become that music’s Ready Steady Go!. The Cyril Davies All-Stars, performing electric R&B, were Davies, Long John Baldry and a backing band poached wholesale from rock’n’roll novelty act Screaming Lord Sutch. Davies had opted to detach himself from Alexis Korner’s jazzier direction with Blues Incorporated in November ’62. Under the All Stars name he would release two influential singles, ‘Country Line Special’ and ‘Preachin’ The Blues’, before succumbing to leukaemia in January 1964. The very presence of such a hard-line Chicago blues band on a programme with an otherwise folk bias reflects the communal ‘bag’ that folk and blues were still, in some quarters, being put in.

  The first of Hullaballoo’s two series had been taped in June ’63 and broadcast in October. In between, through meeting on the programme, the Campbells had been invited to take part in McEwan’s Edinburgh Festival show during which they would take the plunge into fully professional status. Ian Campbell would not be alone in reflecting some years later that as a platform for British folk Hullaballoo had never been bettered. ‘The programme sold well and was broadcast in many countries overseas,’ he noted, ‘and as a result we were still receiving congratulatory letters three years later from as far away as Australia.’28 A concert at the Albert Hall on 21 September 1963, a week before Hullaballoo’s first transmission, featured most of the big names from televised folk and blues – the Ian Campbell Group, the Cyril Davies All Stars, Steve Benbow, Hall & Macgregor, the Spinners and others besides – and was both a sell-out and a watershed for folksong as a movement. ‘The audience spread right across the age range,’ noted a Melody Maker reviewer, ‘and there was a genuine sense of occasion to which all the artists rose.’

  The Hoot’nanny Show, transmitting from January 1964, was the BBC’s response to both Hullaballoo and the folksong explosion that was just around the next corner. Its presenter would be Roy Guest.29 Returning to Britain from his various adventures abroad Guest positioned himself wisely. From being simultaneously a brilliant entertainer, a performing artist of strictly limited consquence, a businessman of dubious repute and a promotional entrepreneur of inexplicable genius, within six months of his return he had talked his way into the Harold Davidson Agency, one of the biggest entertainment providers in the country, as the head of their new folk department.30 It was a department they had not had before Guest’s arrival. By the end of the year Roy could announce, with the gloss of humility and from the pages of a crusading new magazine called Folk Scene, that ‘I shall accept no more bookings as a folk singer until I am entitled to call myself one’. He had already by then shifted his allegiance from Harold Davidson to Cecil Sharp House and the auspices of the venerable English Folk Dance & Song Society, which he would proceed, over the next twelve months, to drag kicking and screaming into the world of commerce, festivals, hootenannies and the ever-imminent folk boom. He would have little time of his own for folk singing, entitled or otherwise.

  In April 1964, the Melody Maker announced a little over-excitedly that ‘Peter, Paul and Mary mania’ had arrived in Britain. Interviewed at the time, the trio paid tribute not only to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, but to Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, to Rory & Alex McEwan and most tantalisingly to Bob Dylan and his third album, The Times They Are A-Changing, available in America since January but not to be released in Britain till May. It gave all the talk of a folk boom a tangible set of personalities. It was also a scene-setter for the arrival in Britain the following month of the one individual who most clearly embodied the folk future: Bob Dylan.

  Before Dylan hit town, there was a package tour embodying with equal clarity the folk past. The American Folk Blues & Gospel Caravan featured many of the individual artists who had toured Britain under Chris Barber’s patronage over the previous seven or eight years: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters with Otis Spann and Willie Smith from his own band, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, along with first-timers the Reverend Gary Davis and Cousin Joe Pleasant. After the London show on 3 May, there was to be a party at the bluesmen’s hotel.31 Gill Cook had invited Owen and Bert along but as Owen recalls: ‘The party was a bit of a disaster. No one seemed to know about it but the blues men, Gill, Bert and I. I spent most of the time sharing a bottle of vodka with Otis Spann, who was telling me to come to Chicago where he would look after me. Bert spent his time with his hero Brownie. After playing a few numbers Brownie asked Bert to “play us a blues, man”. Bert picked up the guitar and started to play one of his pieces of the time, which was a blues but didn’t conform to twelve-bar type. “That ain’t the blues, man,” shouted Brownie. Bert lowered the guitar. “Listen man,” he said, “you play your fucking blues and I’ll play mine. Okay?” With that he picked up the guitar and continued.’

  Bob Dylan arrived in Britain a week later, appeared on two TV shows, gave a typically abstract interview to the MM, performed one concert at the Festival Hall on 17 May and hung out with the Beatles and with Martin and Dorothy Carthy. He also, to fill an otherwise idle night, went pub-crawling with Bert Jansch. Bert liked Bob’s first two albums and had performed ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ once or twice himself. ‘Bill Leader seemed to have got the job of taking him round London that particular night,’ says Bert. ‘I was just dragged along. I was sitting in a car waiting outside the Savoy Hotel in The Strand and Bill appeared with these three figures, all falling over. They got in the car and apart from saying hello it was all “space” – that’s what they were talking about. You couldn’t communicate with him – he was totally out of it. We were basically there to take him round the clubs, so we took him to the Black Horse and then we went to the Roundho
use in Wardour Street and Martin Winsor was onstage. He was a pretty heavy guy, a Soho face. The entourage came through the door and there was such a racket going on Martin got angry. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Shut up or I’ll throw you out …”’

  It was the second time in two years that Winsor had badmouthed Bob from the stage of the Roundhouse. ‘There were people who attacked Bob all the time,’ says Carthy, ‘people like Martin Winsor. As far as they were concerned, if a jazz musician like Charlie Parker or Coleman Hawkins smoked dope it was romantic, a really groovy thing. But all these scruffs come along from Minnesota and Edinburgh and it’s like they committed sacrilege, spoiling his dreams. So they wanted to kick Bob out of the club and tried to make his life a misery. Bob just told him to piss off.’

  Owen Hand heard all about it later on: ‘Bert came back with a typical Bertian shuffle and I asked him what Dylan was like. “He’s a drag man, a real drag,” was the reply. Dylan had been full of himself, apparently. The highlight of the night as far as I was concerned was that Dylan would only drink red wine so one of his acolytes was despatched to get a bottle. The bottle was opened by pushing the cork inside and the contents poured into a half-pint glass. Meantime, upstairs comes the landlord of the Black Horse, sees the wine bottle and asks whose it was. “Mine,” replied Dylan. “Where did you get it?” asks the landlord. “A little wine store round the corner,” says Dylan. “Drink what’s in your glass, take your bottle with you and get out. You’re barred.”’