In July 1964, Austin John Marshall had the unobvious idea of teaming up his wife Shirley, with the guitarist Davey Graham. Shirley had been a mainstay of the British revival since the earliest Ballads and Blues days, and had worked with Ewan MacColl, Peter Kennedy and Alan Lomax in the performance, collection and annotation of AngloAmerican folksong.
The idea stemmed only partly from Marshall's own eclectic tastes; partly also from the fact that the implosive effects of cheap travel and the instant access through electronic media were causing all the world's cultures to cross-fertilise and become, not one, but an even wider variety of hybrids. The first result of the Collins-Graham collaboration was this raga arrangement of a tune Shirley had put to traditional American words. Shirley and Davey gave a concert at the Mercury Theatre and followed it with another one at Cecil Sharp House.
One wonders what Sharp, who had also collected in Britain and America and saw the two cultures as inter-connected, would have thought of it. But it was there, in that instant, that electric folk, folk rock, call it what you will, was born From Folk Roots, New Routes (Decca LK 4652, 1964).
Bert learnt the song from Annie Briggs who got it from A. L. Lloyd who, presumably, reworked it somewhat after having got it from either Mary or Paddy Doran's recordings (husband and wife had got quite different melodies, from his mother and her sister respectively) in the BBC archives. The Dorans are Irish tinkers. This arrangement was so obviously the inspiration for Jimmy Page's Black Mountainside on an early Led Zep album that I found myself in the invidious position of being called as an expert witness (sic) to help sort it out legally. (See more detailed note on this, attached.)
It comes from the pioneer album which really established that there was a contemporary way of doing traditional material without demolishing its essence, Bert's "Jack Orion" (Transatlantic TRA 143,1966).
Though for the most part totally unaccompanied, the YT had a power that was really electric. The words of this song have been known since the antiquary John Aubrey collected them in 1686; the tune has been lost, since the early collectors were literary gents who set little store by tunes. The YT got a melody, however, from Hans Fried of Collets Record Shop (son of the distinguished German poet, Erich Fried) who got it in his turn from a Scottish lady, Peggy Richards. It is this tune which Buffy Ste Marie used on her Fire, Fleet and Candlelight album; Pentangle used it, too, merely adding some rudimentary instrumentation to the original harmonies, which recreated the sense of a deathbed ritual with chilling effect. From The Young Tradition (Transatlantic TRA 142, 1966).
Renboum studied classical guitar with Tim Walker, but he didn't really get to grips with early English music until his third solo album, with a brief performance of William Byrd's The Earle of Salisbury, transcribed from virginals for guitar and glockenspiel; though all along he'd been attracted to the music, judging by the medieval pastiche things like Lady Nothinge's Toye Puffe and One for William (Byrd, presumably?) on Another Monday. But his fourth album, The Lady and the Unicorn (Transatlantic TRA 224, 1970) marked an intensive investigation of the possibilities of doing with early music rather what Pentangle were already doing with traditional music. Bransle Gay was composed by Claude Gervaise in 1550. The word bransle, indicating a vigorous French dance in
2/2 tempo, gave the word "brawl" to the English language, so it's not quite as sedate as it sounds. Pentangle also included this tune on their live double album, Sweet Child" (TRA 178) which, paradoxically, was released before John's solo effort on the same tune.
This tune is also known as The Blacksmith (a song recorded by both the first two versions of Steeleye Span, and also by Planxty) and to hymn-singers as Monksgate, from the fact that Vaughan Williams collected it from a Mrs Verrall with these words in Monksgate near Horsham in Sussex, and set John Bunyan's words from Pilgrim's Progress to an adaptation of the same melody.
This early example of Carthy/Swarbrick, using a rather stark fiddle as sole accompanying instrument, a brilliant tour de force, is from Martin's second album, Byker Hill (1967).
The first song Cecil Sharp ever collected, from a gardener called John England (!), was a variant of this song, in which flower symbolism is used in a manner reminiscent of Ophelia's mad speeches in Hamlet. (Shakespeare probably knew the song, since it is a good deal older than Sharp; it was first noted in 1689.) This was the opening track on Pentangle's first album (Transatlantic TRA 162, 1968).
Having enticed Shirley's sister Dolly out of virtual retirement to play flute organ on two exquisite albums, Austin John Marshall conceived the idea of getting her to write a folksong suite for Shirley, accompanied by the most eminent early musicians available. Frances Line of the BBC agreed to broadcast it, but Polydor, who had released Shirley's The Power of the True Love Knot turned it down as being too expensive a project with uncertain sales potential, so it came out on Harvest, EMI's "underground" label. Despite being a long way from the acid-rock mainly to be found on Harvest at that time, it did remarkably well, charts-wise. The title of the album, Anthems in Eden, is said to be a jibe at me, for criticising the idyllic nature of Shirley's art I had said she sang as if in Eden before the Fall. The song is from the repertoire of the Coppers.
