Dazzling Stranger

by Colin Harper

  28. ‘Wizz Jones At 50’, interview probably from The Cornishman, 1989.

  29. As note 3.

  30. ‘The singer and the audience’, Ewan MacColl, Folk Music, 11/63.

  31. From its embryonic beginnings in 1951, Hamish Henderson was a founder and guiding light of the School of Scottish Studies and as a field-recordist and folksong collector, the Scottish equivalent and peer of the Lomaxes in America, Seamus Ennis for Radio Telefis Eirean in Ireland, Peter Kennedy for the English Folk Dance & Song Society and the BBC and Bert Lloyd for Topic and the BBC in England. In his foreword to Ailee Munro’s The Democratic Muse: Folk Music Revival In Scotland (Scottish Cultural Press, 2nd Edition, 1996), Henderson cites Lomax’s first visit to Britain as ‘the inception of the present “folk revival” – as far as Scotland is concerned’. In 1951, Henderson toured Scotland as a guide for Lomax, recording ‘source singers’ for Columbia Records’ World Albums of Folk and Primitive Music series and, on the side, for the new and bare shelves of the School of Scottish Studies – at that stage residing in a dusty corner of the Phonetics Department at Edinburgh University. Henderson specifically recalls Ewan MacColl, whom he knew through the ‘fringe’ folksong events around the early Edinburgh Festivals, as his introduction to Lomax. MacColl, in his autobiography, implies 1954 was the date of his first encounter with Lomax. I view Henderson’s account as the most plausible. To digress slightly, Lomax – a tireless, inspirational and ebullient fellow by all accounts – was the instigator of the first meeting between Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd, circa 1954. Both men knew each other by reputation – and let us remember that the folk scene of the early fifties did not offer succour to those wishing to lose themselves in a crowd – but only in Britain, felt Lomax, would neither consider the prospect of introducing themselves.

  32. Folk News, No.16 1978. Letter from Dominic Behan to the editor. Karl Dallas now notes that ‘Dom is being a bit (typically) malicious here. Ewan’s Theatre Royal concerts (at which I and my then wife Betty sang) were ‘benefits’ for Theatre Workshop so, far from getting a loan from TW the boot was on the other foot.’

  33. Winter fell out permanently with MacColl in 1961, after publishing a damning critique of his Singers Club in Sing, but Dallas maintained something of an off/on relationship: ‘Because I was close to Ewan, though often quarrelled with him,’ he says, ‘people seemed to think I necessarily adopted all his various “lines” – which changed as often as a Communist Party line, I always felt – and that I was therefore guilty by association.’ MacColl’s prestige and formidable persona gave him an ability to grant or deny people status and to some extent this made him a natural fall-guy for those wishing to explain away their lack of success. In those days Steve Benbow was rarely off the airwaves but rarely in the papers. He certainly fostered the suspicion that one effect of MacColl’s perceived influence was an implicit disdain of his activities. ‘My impression,’ notes Dallas, ‘was that Steve disdained a lot of us.’

  34. Dallas wrote for the MM from 1957 to 1981, predating Eric Winter at the paper – with a piece on the folk roots of skiffle in July 1957 – although Winter was a more regular contributor during the earlier years. Dallas also wrote on the subject of folk music for numerous other publications – from specialist titles including Folk Music, a mid-sixties journal which he edited, and broadsheet newspapers including The Times and the Daily Worker/Morning Star. Two people wrote the Melody Maker’s Focus On Folk column between Winter’s departure in October 1963 and Dallas’s arrival in mid-’65. One was Jeff Smith and, with some irony given his MM-vs-Benbow conspiracy theories, the other was Steve Benbow. Between 1977 and 1979 Dallas edited and published Folk News, a substantial folk music monthly broadsheet which allowed plenty of space for exhaustive career retrospectives on long-standing figures like Martin Carthy and Alex Campbell. With the demise of Folk News, he reverted to A4 glossy format with the short-lived Acoustic Music in 1980 following which, and aside from a biography of Pink Floyd, he has written largely on Information Technology. His vast and always illuminating knowledge on folk music and its performers still crops up in occasional sleeve notes, obituaries for The Independent and articles on the internet. In 1984, after fifty years of atheism, he converted to Christianity. ‘I still think of myself as a communist, though I joined the Labour Party after the Communist Party of Great Britain was destroyed.’ He maintains with some vigour that the infamous ‘Skiffle Won’t Die’ headline of that debut piece for the MM was not his idea.

  35. Six of the Radio Ballads appeared on Decca between 1965 and 1972, in similar form to the original broadcasts. All eight became available on Topic in 1999.

  36. Mike Dewe refers to a sell-out ‘Ballads & Blues’ concert at the Royal Festival Hall in July 1954. The concert ranged across folk, jazz and an early form of skiffle courtesy of Ken Colyer’s group. Other artists included Bert Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, Isla Cameron and various traditional Irish musicians. As a diarist in Jazz Journal noted: ‘A more unlikely collection of participants never graced the Festival Hall.’

  37. As note 30. Specifically, MacColl’s justification here refers to his second and more notorious platform, the Singers Club, inaugurated in June 1961.

  38. ‘I wasn’t really true to any particular kind of music in those days,’ Moore continues. ‘I was just happy to go to a town, go to the folk club, sing whatever was needed, get a few bob, party through the night and head to the next town. It was a brilliant lifestyle.’

  39. The timescale of the Nixon/MacColl divergence is complex, but summer 1959 seems likeliest. There may have been a period when MacColl continued operating as the Ballads & Blues at the Horseshoe Hotel in Tottenham Court Road (ironically perhaps, the very place where Bert Jansch would host his own club in 1967). Overlapping the Nixon/MacColl situation, and further complicating the lineage, the MacColl disciple Bruce Dunnet started his own club Folksong Unlimited with a group of regulars drawn from MacColl’s circle: Dominic Behan, Stan Kelly, Shirley Collins, Isobel Sutherland and others. There is a suggestion that this club also had its premises for a time at the Princess Louise.

  40. ‘Celtic person makes SR cover – shock, horror!’, Southern Rag No.16, April-June 1983. Shortly afterwards, Andy purchased a copy of Harry Smith’s legendary Anthology Of American Folk Music which provided the enlightening bridge between dustbowl balladry and traditional music.

  41. As note 40. Irvine also recorded performances by both Jack Elliott and Derroll Adams at the Ballads & Blues on a borrowed tape machine during September 1959.

  42. ‘Like many extroverts,’ notes Karl Dallas, ‘Ewan was actually quite shy and never spoke to anyone he didn’t know, unless someone else introduced him or spoke to him of them. He couldn’t make small talk.’

  43. Noel Harrison has two claims to fame: being the son of actor Rex Harrison and scoring a sole hit in 1969 with ‘Windmills Of Your Mind’ from The Thomas Crown Affair. One of those classic examples of a memorable song whose singer nobody quite recalls. Long John Baldry fared, arguably, rather better with his contemporaneous bid for MOR mythology ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’. Baldry’s problem was not so much the name-recognition thing as the fact that he had three further hits that nobody recalls. On the subject of Ewan’s non-folk repertoire, Karl Dallas notes that he ‘had a fine stock of music-hall and thirties pop songs which he never sang in public. I remember turning up for a demo wearing a particularly fine Herbert Johnson (of Bond Street) velour wide-brimmed trilby, and Ewan launched into a full-scale version of Harry Champion’s “Where Did You Get That ’At” in a strange amalgam of the Cockney original and his own Scots-Salford dialect. Then he always was a fine mimic.’

  44. While Irvine is certain of seeing Peggy there while Baldry performed his English blues, his memory is less certain in placing MacColl at precisely the same place and time. Nevertheless, Peggy herself explained on BBC Radio 2’s As I Roved Out: A Century Of Folk Music in 1999, that it was through ‘discussing’ material with Baldry at the B&B that led to MacC
oll’s subsequent policy of performers singing only the songs of their own tradition.

  45. Part of this quote from ‘The Carthy Tapes’, Karl Dallas, Folk News, July 1978; part from an interview with the author. ‘The Witches Cauldron’ was the most fondly recalled Hampstead coffee-bar, but it didn’t open to music until September 1961. Opening acts: Martin Carthy and Redd Sullivan. By the mid-sixties the Three Horseshoes, in Hampstead, was one of the more significant London folk clubs outside of the centre.

  46. Robin Hall Remembered, BBC Scotland 31/12/98. Subsequent Macgregor quotes are also from this broadcast.

  47. ‘Carthy’s Commitment’, Southern Rag No.24, April-June 1985.

  48. ‘The Carthy Era’, Sarah Coxson, Folk Roots, November 1987.

  49. ‘The Carthy Tapes’, Karl Dallas, Folk News, July 1978.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. ‘Reflections by Roy Guest’, Folk Scene, November 1964.

  2. Sleeve notes to Love Songs & Lullabies (1964) by Roy Guest and Kate Lucy.

  3. ‘Guest Nights’, Karl Dallas, MM 28/10/72.

  4. As note 1.

  5. As note 1.

  6. As note 1.

  7. Journeyman: An Autobiography, Ewan MacColl (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990). Unless otherwise credited, all further MacColl quotes in this chapter are from this source.

  8. Perambulatory names were clearly in vogue. During 1956 Alan Lomax had persuaded Granada TV in Manchester to commission a series of programmes of international folk singing called The Ramblers, featuring an especially assembled group of the same name. The group needed a five-string banjo player for Appalachian repertoire and Lomax brought over Peggy Seeger, then in Denmark, for the purpose. It would be Ewan and Peggy’s first encounter. In Glasgow, from 1959, Ray & Archie Fisher performed with fiddler Bobby Campbell as the Wayfarers. Dave & Toni Arthur, latterday stalwarts of English traditional song and children’s television, would begin their career in 1962 on Thank Your Lucky Stars as the Strollers – Britain’s answer to Nina & Frederick. Britain, unfortunately, had not asked that particular question.

  9. As note 3. The Scots Dictionary, more politely, defines a howff as ‘a place of resort or concourse; haunt; a much frequented tavern; an abode, residence; a shelter’.

  10. Dirty Linen, 10/90. Bert left Leith Academy early in 1960. His gardening sojourn lasted at least until August 1960. It was during this gardening period that he discovered guitar lessons at the Howff.

  11. ‘Liver Archie’, Ewan McVicar, Folk Roots 8/87.

  12. Part of this quote from Folk Roots 8/87, part from the outtakes of BBC Scotland’s Acoustic Routes, 25/1/93. MacColl and cohorts performed two or three such ‘Ballads & Blues’ evenings in Glasgow during the late fifties, at the Iona Community Centre in Clyde Street.

  13. Zigzag, 9/74.

  14. Cod Liver Oil And The Orange Juice: Reminiscences Of A Fat Folk Singer, Hamish Imlach & Ewan McVicar (Mainstream Publishing, 1992). Unless otherwise credited, and bar one or two from an interview with the author, all further Imlach quotes in this chapter are from this source.

  15. ‘Talking Army Blues’, a satire on British national service, was written by another ‘Broomhill Bum’ Ewan McVicar. As McVicar notes in his memoir One Singer One Song (Glasgow City Libraries, 1990), released on Top Rank it was a national hit single in every chart of the day bar the one used by the trade publication Record Retailer. This chart, from March 1960, is the one favoured by the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles. ‘Messin’ About On The River’, from the pen of TV themes supremo Tony Hatch, has been similarly excised from chart posterity. The Reivers were brought together by Norman Buchan as residents for Jigtime, performing exclusively Scottish traditional songs. McVicar notes that the group ‘had much success in the late fifties, making recordings, appearing in concerts, performing for the intervals at barn dances and even touring dance halls in Scotland. Younger singers in Glasgow were busy performing wherever they could corral an audience – social clubs, talent competitions, bingo halls and especially clubs for the elderly.’

  16. The Broomhill Bums were chuffed to discover, from Cisco Houston, that Woody Guthrie had spent time in Glasgow during his days in the US Navy. The American influence was an enduring inspiration in Scotland. Ailee Munro quotes the late Josh MacRae from an interview in 1976 suggesting quite profoundly that ‘there’s more in common between a Celt and a cowboy than between a Celt and an Englishman’.

  17. Outtakes from Acoustic Routes, BBC Scotland 25/1/93.

  18. As note 17. Unless otherwise credited, all further Fisher quotes this chapter are from this source.

  19. As note 17.

  20. Acoustic Routes, BBC Scotland 25/1/93.

  21. As note 17. It seems that Sonny & Brownie toured Britain in 1959 between 11 September and 14 October. The tour included two English concerts with the Weavers and Jack Elliott but the Glasgow show with Barber must have been a one-off – there were no other shows with Barber mentioned in MM, although the duo did record with his band during this trip. As the Barber group left for America around 24 September, that leaves a two-week period for both the Glasgow concert and recordings to have taken place. I am indebted to Richard Johnson for this information.

  22. One Singer One Song, Ewan McVicar (Glasgow City Libraries, 1990).

  23. As note 20. Putting a date on Sonny & Brownie’s visit to Edinburgh in 1960 has proved extraordinarily difficult. The Melody Maker mentioned in some form, either before or after, many of their dates during previous visits in 1958 and 1959. But there is only one tantalising MM reference during the entirety of 1960: a report in April about a British tour scheduled for October. There are no further mentions. It is known that the duo were in New York on October 26. I am indebted to both Richard Johnson and Pete Frame – and blues experts including Trevor Hodgett, Chris Smith, Val Wilmer and Spencer Leigh – for their efforts in trying to pin this thing down. Nevertheless, the weight of circumstantial evidence is overwhelming and I am personally in no doubt that Sonny & Brownie did appear at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh during the latter part of 1960, and subsequently at the Howff – probably between August and October. An October date is tempting as Maggie Cruickshank, a Howff devotee, remembers her sister and brother (but not herself) seeing them there. Maggie sat her finals in October 1960. Remarkably, Len Partridge actually recorded the session, which is splendid, but neglected to record the date. His memory favours early 1961: ‘We recorded that night in its entirety with their permission. Well, that’s not entirely true. They discovered it halfway through and said, “What’s this mic doing here?” You can’t hide a bloody Ferrograph! But it was fine.’ Unfortunately, Sonny & Brownie did not tour Britain in 1961 until September-October.

  24. Ptolomaic Terrascope, 7/97.

  25. The Story Of The Blues, Paul Oliver (revised edition, Pimlico, 1997).

  26. As note 20.

  27. ‘Uncle Wattie was a sweetheart,’ says Maggie. ‘He did a night in the Crown for a while, and also ran a club down Victoria Street called the Place. Liz and I were home from Canada on holiday [c. 1966] and we had this party. And among the people Barbara Dickson arrived. My father came through saying, “Come and hear this guy, he’s the most wonderful player” – and this is Wattie. Somehow Barbara was left in the living room listening to Wattie with my mother and father and we’d all retreated to the other room with the big boys. No wonder Barbara doesn’t speak to us now.’

  28. Sounds, 9/1/71. Intriguingly, Owen Hand retains the original writing of an otherwise unknown Bert Jansch song called ‘John Keith’ from this period: ‘I reminded Bert of the song once and he became a bit huffed, thinking I was putting him down,’ says Owen. ‘This was not my intention as it’s not as bad a song as Bert remembers but I think it was the first song he ever wrote and it embarrasses him.’

  29. The shop in question may or may not have been a greengrocer’s.

  30. I am indebted to Geoff Harden for access to his extraordinary collection of live recordings from the St Andrews club. Check out the
1966 Davy Graham concert from this source, on Rollercoaster Records.

  31. The writing credits for ‘Hey Joe’ are a complex issue. Currently claimed in terms of arrangement by Tim Rose, it was nevertheless recognisable to Len Partridge in its 1966 Jimi Hendrix version as the song he had helped write with Bill Roberts in Edinburgh ten years earlier. There was a coffee bar in Old Fishmarket Close called Bunjies, named after the London premises of the same name. Around 1956, shortly after Len had acquired his twelve-string guitar, a friend of Len’s discovered the place and reported the presence of an American playing there, also with a twelve-string. ‘So there was this guy, dressed in black from, I think, Knoxville, Tennessee,’ says Len, ‘and we ended up, of course, two like minds with two twelve-strings, at a time when there are only two others you know of in the world! We played quite a lot together but only at Bunjies or the odd party, because there was nowhere else to play. And one of the things which came out of that period was “Hey Joe”. I can’t claim credit for it – that really does have to go to Bill Roberts. Don’t even ask me now what bits were added by me because I can’t tell you, it just evolved, it was one of those things you chucked around. This is the thing: if somebody asked me how many songs I’d written I’d find it very difficult to come up with more than two or three titles and yet there must have been lots that just happened and were soon discarded. You never thought about it. We weren’t professional – or we certainly didn’t have any bloody foresight. Luckily, when Bill Roberts went back to the States he at some point must have copyrighted it. Bill wasn’t credited on the original Hendrix release but his name did appear later. It’s one of those things which some people have said, “Do you not feel a bit miffed about that?” But I don’t think I’ve anything to feel miffed about.’